Learn Thuluth from zero.

Why this course exists

If you want to learn thuluth in English, you have two options right now.You can enrol at an institution, where you will be one of many and your teacher will change from term to term. Or you can teach yourself from videos, which is how most people start and how most people stop.What is missing in both is the thing that actually teaches the hand: someone looking at your page every week and telling you what is wrong with it.That correction is the whole tradition. It is what a teacher is for. Everything else is commentary.I trained that way in Istanbul, in a room, with a teacher marking my pages in red. This course is the same method, on a screen, in English.

How this art is actually learned

It is taught by copying. A teacher writes a line by hand, for you, at the level you are actually at. You take it away and fill pages with it. You bring it back, and it is corrected. Then you receive the next line, or the same one again.The Arabic word for this is mashq (مشق), and it names both halves of it at once: the model written by the hand of the teacher, and the labour of copying it until your hand yields.

The correction is the part that cannot be replaced. You can usually see that your letter is wrong. You cannot see why, and you almost never see it early enough. A teacher looks at the page and knows within a second which of the fifteen things you did is the one that matters.Without that, you can spend a year making the same mistake beautifully.

This is why the tradition is a chain and not a library. Every calligrapher writing today learned from someone who learned from someone, and what was handed down was never information. It was a corrected hand, and a standard the eye had been trained against. That is what the licence to sign your work, the ijazah (إجازة), certifies: not a course completed, but a hand judged ready by the hand that trained it.You cannot download that, and you cannot reach it alone, because the thing you are missing is precisely the thing you cannot yet see.

What the year looks like

◆ 32 live sessions, ninety minutes each, on Zoom◆ Every session recorded and yours to keep◆ Your own work every week, corrected by hand◆ A written curriculum, worked from a meşk murakka by Mehmed Şevki Efendi◆ October 2026 to June 2027, with a four week break for Ramadan in February◆ Saturdays, 19:00 Istanbul time◆ A small group. You will not be a number in a hall

How the lessons actually work

Each session has two halves.The first is for everyone. We take one letter and go through it properly: its structure, its measure in nuqta, how it changes when it meets other letters. This part moves in a fixed order through the year, so you always know what is coming.The second half is yours alone. I look at what you wrote that week and correct it, and I decide what you write next. One student may stay on one letter for three weeks. Another may pass three letters in two. Nobody is moved forward before they are ready, and nobody is held back to keep the group tidy.This is not the course being vague about the syllabus. It is the syllabus. Meşk has never been a class where everyone writes the same page on the same night, and I am not going to pretend otherwise so the brochure looks neater.

Where the year takes you

Autumn. The reed pen, the ink, the paper, The dot, and the system of measure built on it. Your first letters.Winter. The alphabet begins, letter by letter, in the order the tradition teaches it. Some lines take a week. Some take a month.Spring. The letters that are left, and the first combinations. Two letters meeting properly.Early summer. Joined letters, and your first words sitting on a line.How far you actually get by June depends on your hand and your hours. Some of you will finish the alphabet and be well into the combinations. Some will still be working on the harder letters in May, and that is normal. It is not a sign that anything has gone wrong.What I can promise is narrower than what you may have been offered elsewhere. Nine months of weekly correction, and a foundation laid the way it has been laid for five hundred years. Not a finished composition, and not a licence. Composition is years away, and anyone selling it to you in a first year is selling you something else.

Your instructor

Yasin Giray Demir is a professional calligrapher trained in the classical Ottoman tradition, holding an MA degree in Traditional Islamic Arts. With over 8 years of specialized practice in the Thuluth script under master calligraphers, his work deeply explores the craft, history, and rigorous discipline behind the letters. For the past three years, he has been sharing these insights with enthusiasts worldwide through his blog, Notes on Paper.As an educator with a decade of experience in English language teaching, Yasin bridges the gap between traditional Eastern lineage and modern Western pedagogy. Over the last 5 years, he has brought Islamic calligraphy to the digital space, virtually mentoring more than 100 students globally.This art is rarely taught in English from within its own lineage. That is the gap this course is meant to fill.