By the Pen: The Sacred Rituals of Ottoman Calligraphers

There is a particular kind of obsession that develops between a craftsman and his tools. Carpenters name their planes. Chefs sharpen their knives with a near-religious regularity. Musicians talk about their instruments as if they have personalities. But for Ottoman calligraphers, the relationship with the pen went considerably further than professional attachment. It entered the domain of theology, ritual, and — on at least one recorded occasion — mortal consequence.

This is a story about that relationship. It comes primarily from a remarkable academic study by Bilal Badat, published in 2020, which excavates the pen-related rituals of Ottoman calligraphy from a collection of treatises, biographical dictionaries, and historical accounts that span roughly four centuries. What emerges is a portrait of a community of artists whose dedication to their craft was, by any measure, extraordinary — and whose understanding of the pen as a sacred object shaped everything from how they prepared their tools to what they requested be done with them after they died.

A Tool With a Creation Story

Before we get to the rituals, it helps to understand why Ottoman calligraphers treated the pen the way they did. The answer begins, as so many things in Islamic intellectual history do, with the Quran.

"By the pen and what they inscribe" (68:1). "Who taught by the pen" (96:4). These are not passing references. They are divine attestations — the pen named alongside God's act of teaching, sworn by alongside what it inscribes. Ottoman calligraphic treatises took these verses seriously, opening with extended passages describing the cosmic origins of the pen: before God created the heavens, he created the pen, ordered it to write on the Preserved Tablet, and the pen inscribed — in Hâfızzâde's 16th-century account — "a nokta created of pure light." The rhombic dot. The foundational unit of Arabic calligraphic proportion. As origin stories go, it is difficult to beat.

Within this framework, the calligrapher's pen was not merely a tool. It was a reflection of the Divine Pen — and the act of calligraphy was, by analogy, a reflection of cosmic creation. Mustafa Âli, writing in 1587, concluded that "penmen are the most virtuous of people." He was not being modest on their behalf. He meant it.

The Art of Cutting the Pen

None of this spiritual elevation relieved calligraphers of the responsibility to actually prepare their tools properly. Ottoman treatises are notably precise on this point. Müstakimzâde's Tuhfe-i Hattatîn — a biographical dictionary of calligraphers compiled across four decades — describes the knowledge of how to cut the pen as "a quarter of all calligraphy." One quarter. Not an afterthought.

The preparation involved a specialist vocabulary that reflected its complexity: the kalemtıraş (the cutting blade), the dil or tongue of the pen, the şakk (a hairline split introduced into the nib to regulate ink flow), and the makta — a small cutting board of ivory, bone, or horn on which the final angled cut was made. Three separate knives were recommended for the different stages. A small file, the mibred, was used to polish the nib after cutting. A ball of silk, the lîka, protected it in the inkpot. After writing, the nib was cleaned with wool or silk to prevent ink from drying in the slit.

Nefeszâde İbrahim, writing in the 17th century, cited a remark attributed to ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib that captures the stakes concisely: "Nourish your pen, and your calligraphy shall flourish. Neglect the pen, and your calligraphy shall suffer. Calligraphy is contingent on the pen." A later hadith pushed the point further: write the besmele beautifully — cut the pen finely, use the lîka, make the bāʿ upright, the teeth of the sīn distinct — and, said the Prophet Muhammad, "Whoever writes the noble besmele beautifully will enter heaven." Penmanship as soteriological act. The stakes were not merely aesthetic.

The Pen Shavings: Handle With Care

And then there is the matter of what to do with the shavings.

When a calligrapher cut or re-cut the nib, the thin slivers of reed that fell away — the bürâde-i kalem — were not to be discarded carelessly. Certainly not dropped where they might be trampled underfoot. Nefeszâde was unambiguous about the consequences of such negligence: poverty, sickness, misery, and distress. To illustrate the point, he cited a narration from ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, who listed sitting on pen shavings among a small catalogue of inauspicious acts — alongside dividing the community of believers and putting on trousers while standing — that generate sorrow. Müstakimzâde, in his own treatise, added that calligraphers should never use an existing pen as a cutting board when preparing a new one. Even this was considered a source of tribulation.

The pen shavings, in other words, partook of the sanctity of the pen itself. And since the pen partook of the sanctity of what it had written — and if it had written the Quran, that was sanctity of a very high order indeed — the shavings were objects to be kept, honoured, and eventually put to a very specific final use.

In Mahmud Kemal İnal's Son Hattatlar, a biographical dictionary of late Ottoman calligraphers, he records that the calligrapher Ömer Vasfî, who copied a Quran for Sultan Mehmed V in the late 19th century, gathered every shaving produced during that project and left instructions that they be used to heat the water for his funeral washing. The scholar and calligrapher Abd al-Raḥmān Abū'l Faraj ibn al-Jawzī had done the same, according to a 13th-century account: by his death, the shavings he had accumulated from writing traditions of the Prophet "formed a large heap" — more than enough for the purpose. A third case records that the body of the 17th-century master Derviş Ali was washed with water poured over his pen-cutter, the kalemtıraş — a tool so saturated with the blessings of his calligraphic work that it could transmit those blessings back to him one final time.

These were not superstitions operating at the margins of the tradition. They were documented practices, cited approvingly in the most respected reference works of the Ottoman calligraphic world.

Pen Burial: Seeking the Master's Blessing

The most extraordinary practice documented in the literature, however, is pen burial — and it requires us to spend a moment with the most celebrated name in Ottoman calligraphy: Şeyh Hamdullah.

Born in 1429, Hamdullah founded the Ottoman school of calligraphy at the encouragement of Sultan Beyazit II, developed a unique style that became the gold standard for generations, was a member of multiple Sufi orders, and — according to Müstakimzâde's account — received his distinctive approach to the script from the Prophet Khidr, an immortal divine messenger who initiates the worthy into sacred knowledge. In his own lifetime he was treated as a saint. After his death, calligraphers sought burial in his vicinity, hoping to share in his blessings in the afterlife. By the late 17th century, over 150 years after his death, his grave was still drawing such a volume of visitors that people were paying their respects at the wrong location.

It was in this context that the practice of pen burial emerged. Müstakimzâde's instructions are precise: cut a new pen to the correct angle for thuluth script, and another for naskh. Wrap them in paper. With prayer and blessings, bury them two fingers deep, near Hamdullah's grave, on a Friday night. Leave them for a week. Dig them up. Write only the first line of your work with that pen — just the first line, "for the purpose of acquiring the blessing of the master." Then set it aside and continue with another pen. The blessing, once seeded, suffuses the whole.

Müstakimzâde noted that he himself had seen evidence of the efficacy of this practice. He was not the only one.

The Gravestone That Was Already Written

There is a coda to this story that is too good to omit. Hamdullah had requested that his grave remain plain and unmarked. A century and a half later, the celebrated calligrapher Hafız Osmân wanted to write an inscription on the gravestone — partly to help the many visitors who were struggling to find it. He was hesitant, out of respect for the dead master's wishes, so he consulted his own spiritual teacher, Şaʿbān Dede. Şaʿbān Dede had a dream. In it, he saw Hamdullah's gravestone already inscribed — the name written in green celestial light, by a divine pen. There was nothing to add.

One of Osmân's contemporaries, a calligrapher named Şâhîn Ağa, was less deferential. Paying no attention to the dream, he wrote the inscription himself. It is still there. Şâhîn Ağa died one week later.

What It All Adds Up To

It would be easy to read all of this as colourful folklore — the ritual habits of another age, distant from modern practice. I read it differently. What these accounts document, beneath their theological language, is a community of practitioners who understood their art as something that demanded everything. Not merely technical proficiency, not merely years of practice, but a total orientation of the self toward the work. The pen was not sacred because calligraphers were superstitious. It was sacred because they understood — at a level that most contemporary discourse about art struggles to articulate — that the quality of what you produce is inseparable from how you hold what produces it.

The tradition they built, and the discipline they committed to, left us centuries of extraordinary work. That is not coincidence.

Primary source: Bilal Badat, "By the Pen and what they inscribe: A Study of Pen-Related Rituals in Ottoman Calligraphy," in Bethany J. Walker & Abdelkader Al Ghouz (eds.), Mamluk Studies, Volume 23 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), pp. 535–572.