To unravel one’s calling in life is the first step towards the making of an evangelist. For Muqtar Ahmad, one of India’s most renowned Arabic calligraphers, that moment of reckoning came at an early age when teachers in his village school at Ranjhol, near Hyderabad, praised him for his beautiful handwriting which looked like calligraphy. Ahmad’s journey into the world of this intense form of art initially began under the tutelage of Zakir Al Hashmi and Gazi Tahiruddin Qaisar, two prominent calligraphers practising and teaching their art in Hyderabad’s Chatta Bazaar, renowned for printing invitation cards in Urdu calligraphy. After learning his first steps, the young Ahmad left for Bengaluru in the late 1980s and started working for the Urdu newspaper Salar.

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