Uthman Taha

Biography

One day Uthman Taha finished a page of the Quran, went to perform his ablutions and the midday prayer, and on his return found a blank sheet on his desk: the text had vanished. At first he thought a jinn must have been involved. The explanation came the next morning on his way to prayer: on the advice of the old calligraphers he had added a little honey to the ink, and while the writing was still wet, flies had licked it off. He told the story himself, and it is hard to check.

He was born in 1934 in the countryside around the town of al-Bab, in Aleppo Governorate; the village of Sandi is also named as his birthplace. His father, Abduh ibn Husayn Taha, was the imam and preacher of the village mosque and ran the school attached to it. From him the boy received his first lessons in writing: his father wrote the ruq’ah script well.

Taha went through primary, middle and secondary school in Aleppo, at the Khusrawiyya Sharia College. There he also studied calligraphy with local masters: Muhammad Ali al-Mawlawi, Muhammad al-Khatib, Husayn Husni al-Turki, Abdullah Jawad al-Khattat and, last of all, Ibrahim al-Rifa’i, the recognised calligrapher of Aleppo. Studies in Damascus followed. In 1964 he took a bachelor’s degree in Islamic law there, and in 1965 a general diploma from the Faculty of Education of the University of Damascus. Later, by some accounts, he also defended a master’s thesis on the aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy. His main training ran alongside the university. From 1960 to 1967 in Damascus he studied with Muhammad Badawi al-Derani, a calligrapher from the Levant, working on the Persian scripts and thuluth. When the Iraqi Hashim Muhammad al-Baghdadi came to the city, Taha met him and took from him exercises and comments on thuluth and naskh. In 1973 he received an ijaza, a certificate of mastery, from Hamid al-Amidi, who was called the sheikh of calligraphers of the Islamic world. Sami Burhan and Naim Ismail taught him drawing and ornament.

He wrote his first complete Quran in 1970 for the Syrian Ministry of Awqaf, that is, of religious endowments. The King Fahd Complex in Medina, by his own account in an interview, first examined the manuscript he had made in Syria, approved the script after review and revisions, and only then invited him to work for it. In 1988 Taha came to Saudi Arabia and was appointed calligrapher of the Complex, writing the Medina editions of the Quran. In the same year he was named to the jury of the international Arabic calligraphy award, held in Istanbul every three years.

He studied naskh in a scholarly way and then reworked the classical form of the script for the Quran. He gave up some of the complex ligatures that interfered with correct vocalisation, and letter forms that were confused with similar letters. He spaced the words in a line so that it ended as evenly as it began. Scholarly committees that reviewed the manuscripts supplied corrections and comments on the readings. In the Medina edition every page ends with the end of a verse.

Writing one mushaf takes more than three years, and about a year more goes on proofreading. In all, Taha has copied the Quran more than thirteen times in the Ottoman orthography; the number of versions varies from one account to another, and they include the Syrian, Medina and Bahraini ones. For the King Fahd Complex he wrote four mushafs, which were printed in more than 200 million copies. A commercial edition based on the same hand has also been issued, known as the Mushaf al-Tajweed.

In December 2021 Saudi Arabia granted him citizenship.