Khaberni - The Iraqi calligrapher Ali Zaman successfully completed the largest handwritten Quran in the world, after six years of continuous work, depending on traditional tools and authentic Thuluth script, achieving an unprecedented artistic achievement in the world of Arabic calligraphy.
Ali Zaman was born in 1971 in the city of Rania, Sulaymaniyah province, in the Kurdistan region, and started his professional life in the field of goldsmithing, before devoting himself to the art of Arabic calligraphy since 2013, a passion that has been with him since childhood. In 2017, he moved to Istanbul and made it his home to launch his biggest project, according to the Anadolu Agency.
The real preparation for the Quran began in 2020 after a full year of setup, study, and selecting the necessary materials, and he then presented his idea to his teacher, the calligrapher Bijar Erbili, who encouraged him to start.
Since then, he has devoted his life to this work, working daily after dawn prayer inside a small room in the courtyard of Mehremah Sultan Mosque in the Fatih district of Istanbul, leaving only for prayer or to eat.
The huge Quran consists of 30 pages, each page containing a complete part of the Holy Quran, with unprecedented dimensions of 4 meters in length and 1.5 meters in width. Zaman wrote the Quran manually using the traditional reed and only classical calligraphy tools, without any assistance from modern technologies, making it the first Quran of its kind in the world in this style and size.
The project faced significant challenges during the preparation period, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, as the process of importing special paper for the Quran was disrupted, and it was not available inside Turkey. Despite this, Zaman was able to continue working, overcoming the technical and logistical difficulties, and the artist bore the entire cost of the project from his own funds without any financing or sponsorship.
