TEHRAN -- A newly published muraqqa of works by Emad al-Kottab brings together the hand of one of modern Iran’s most accomplished calligraphers while opening a wider view of an artist whose ambitions extended from the page to education, printing and public life.
The album, held by the National Library and Archives of Iran and published with the cooperation of Bank Melli Iran’s Printing and Publishing Company, contains eight calligraphic pieces. Its works include nasta’liq, shekasteh-nasta’liq, naskh and thuluth.
Emad al-Kottab—Muhammad-Husayn Sayfi Qazvini—was born in Qazvin in 1866 and died in Tehran in 1936. He became particularly renowned for his mastery of nasta’liq, following the tradition of Reza Kalhor, while also writing in virtually all of the principal Persian scripts. His surviving work encompasses manuscripts, monumental inscriptions, painting and poetry.
His importance, however, rests not simply on the refinement of his hand. Emad al-Kottab helped reshape how calligraphy was taught. His instructional writings sought to make the complex discipline of penmanship more systematic and accessible, while his engagement with printing connected the traditions of the manuscript page with the technologies of modern reproduction.
This movement between old and new is central to his work. He belonged to a generation that witnessed the Constitutional Revolution, the expansion of print and the emergence of new forms of education and communication. His calligraphy remained rooted in inherited conventions even as its circulation increasingly extended beyond the court and elite patronage.
His biography also carries a darker political dimension. During the Constitutional era he became the scribe of the clandestine Committee of Punishment and was imprisoned in 1917. His association with the group has long formed part of the complicated history surrounding his life, while his surviving prison works reveal an artist whose creativity continued under confinement.
Among his major commissions was the Amir Bahador Shahnameh, while his monumental inscriptions included those at Ferdowsi’s tomb and the Sepahsalar Madrasa. He also produced watercolor and siyah-qalam paintings and composed poetry in Persian and Arabic.
The new muraqqa thus represents more than a collection of exemplary calligraphy. It offers a concentrated portrait of an artist negotiating tradition and change: preserving the disciplined vocabulary of Persian calligraphy while finding new ways for that vocabulary to be taught, reproduced and encountered. The significance of Emad al-Kottab lies precisely in that expansion of the art’s possibilities—from the courtly page into the broader cultural life of modern Iran.