In an artistic and religious achievement that reflects the depth of Islamic heritage, the Iraqi calligrapher Ali Zaman, 54 years old, completed writing the largest handwritten Holy Qur’an in the world, after spending six full years in this difficult and inspiring work.
The Qur’an, which is considered a masterpiece of the art of Arabic calligraphy, exceeds its size previously recorded in records, and shows Zaman’s commitment to reviving Islamic heritage in a country that values Islamic arts more than its motherland.
Ali Zaman was born in 1971 in the Rania area in the city of Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq, where he discovered his passion for Arabic-Islamic calligraphy from a young age.
He began his career as a jeweler, but in 2013, he gave up his profession to devote himself entirely to calligraphy. In May 2017, he immigrated with his family to Istanbul, specifically the historic Fatih neighborhood, in search of a better environment to develop his talent, as his son Rakkar Zaman said, “Turkey values calligraphy and Islamic arts more than Iraq.”
Zaman began his massive project in 2019, using a traditional feather pen and Thuluth script – one of the most prominent styles of Islamic Arabic calligraphy – to write the Qur’an on giant pages each measuring 4 meters long and 1.5 meters wide.
The Qur’an consists of hundreds of pages, entirely handwritten, and is larger than the previous Afghan Qur’an, which was 2.28 meters long and 1.55 meters wide, completed in 2012.
