Nadine,
Also thank you. Your much more advanced insights tell us about the complexity of the topic. I appreciate that.

Thanks everybody (again) for all the ongoing feedback.

Just a few extra notes:

Kufi (also written Koufi, Kufic) encompasses a range of many different styles such as the Early Kufi, Bent Kufi, Eastern Kufi, and Maghribi, to name a few. The first is written with a reed, the 2 middle are quite geometric, and the last is written with a round brush. Unfortunately, many scholars use this term indiscriminately and it is usually best to use the terms: squarish styles (for everything referred to as Kufi) and the round styles for Naskh, Thuluth, Diwani etc… Or to specify which Kufi one is referring to.

> Today the main styles have been categorized into six types.

The Arab calligraphers in the 10th century (Ibn Muqla followed by Yaqut Al-Mustasimi and later the Ottomans) formulated what is referred to as Al-Aqlam Assitta (the 6 hands) and those are: Naskh, Thuluth, Muhaqqaq, Rayhani, Tawqi’, and Riqa’.

I only wanted to add this as the article shows 6 styles but they are not the usual 6. Actually, Arabic calligraphy has a quite large number of different styles and it makes for a very fascinating topic to dive into.
There’s an interesting article here:

http://memory.loc.gov/intldl/apochtml/apocfragments.html

It’s great to see so much interest in Arabic!

Julia, good luck for Reading. I’m sure you’ll have a great time :)

This was a fascinating article. I’m no designer, but I’ve been studying Arabic for two years, and I absolutely love its calligraphy. I was wondering what you meant when you said Riq’a and Diwani don’t use dots. I took that to mean that they don’t use the dots that differentiate the letters that have the same body shape, like ‘bā’, ‘nun’, and ‘yā’ or ‘qāf’ and ‘fā’. In the Riq’a picture, the first word is ‘hunā’, which I can read because it has the vowel lines and the dot above the ‘nun’. Without the dot, it could be ‘huba’ ‘huta’ and so on. I’m not good at reading Diwani script, but the letters clearly have their dots, too. Thank you, I absolutely loved this article!