Nastaliq (; , ; ), also romanized as Nastaʿlīq or Nastaleeq is one of the main calligraphic hands used to write the Perso-Arabic script in the Persian and Urdu languages, often used also for Ottoman Turkish poetry, rarely for Arabic. Nastaliq developed in Iran from naskh beginning in the 13th century and remains very widely used in Iran, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan and other countries for written poetry and as a form of art. History The name nastaliq "is a contraction of the Persian , meaning a hanging or suspended naskh". Virtually all Safavid authors (like Dust Muhammad or Qadi Ahmad) attributed the invention of to Mir Ali Tabrizi, who lived at the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century. That tradition was questioned by Elaine Wright, who traced evolution of nastaliq in 14th century Iran and showed how it developed gradually among scribes in Shiraz. Moreover, according to her studies nastaliq has its origin not in combining naskh and taliq, as was commonly thought, but from naskh alone. In addition to study of the practice of calligraphy Elaine Wright also found a document written by Jafar Tabrizi c. 1430, according to whom: Thus "our earliest written source also credits Shirazi scribes with the development of nastaʿliq and Mir ʿAli Tabrizi with its canonization". The picture of origin of nastaliq presented by Elaine Wright was further complicated by studies of Francis Richard, who on the basis of some manuscripts from Tabriz argued that its early evolution wasn't confined to Shiraz. Finally, many authors point out that development of nastaʿliq was a process which takes few centuries. For example, Gholam-Hosayn Yusofi, Ali Alparslan and Sheila Blair recognize gradual shift towards nastaliq in some 13th century manuscripts. Hamid Reza Afsari traces first elements of the style in 11th-century copies of Persian translations of the Qur'an. Persian differs from Arabic in its proportion of straight and curved letters. It also lacks the definite article al-, whose upright alif and lam are responsible for distinct verticality and rhythm of the text written in Arabic. Hanging scripts like taliq and nastaliq were particularly suitable for writing Persian - when taliq was used for court documents, nastaliq was developed for Persian poetry, "whose hemistiches encourage the pile-up of letters against the intercolumnar ruling. Only later was it adopted for prose". The first master of nastaliq was aforementioned Mir Ali Tabrizi, who passed