An Arena of ‘Aql (Reason): Acts of Knowing, Thinking, and Making in the Nasta’liq Calligrapher’s Practice (Mashq) Sheet

Developing upon extant scholarship on the practice of calligraphy in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Persephone world, this chapter reimagines the calligrapher’s practice or mashq sheet as a site for embodied, epistemic inquiry, re-constructing the modes of knowing, making, and thinking structuring the practices of nasta’liq calligraphers in the Perso-Timurid and Mughal world through an analysis of theoretical ideas about cognition among this elite group of artisans. Arguing that mastery began not just with the perfection of the moral self, but the scribe’s practiced control over his mind, the chapter re-stages the calligraphed page as a tool for invention and re-invention based on the calligrapher’s practiced perfection of his ‘aql or his ‘mind’.