Awad al-Rajoub - Hebron

The tughra can be described as a seal, signature, or letterhead of the sultans of the Ottoman Empire from six hundred years to a century ago, with improvements made to it throughout this period.

And the tughra - or Tora - is a writing placed on the top of books and letters, which includes the attributes of the ruler and his surnames, and their origin is "Torgay", which is a word Tatar origin.

Not all the Ottoman successors of the state were calligraphers, but the most skilled calligraphers were chosen to draw the Tughra and then minted it, so the seal was in the most beautiful picture and the most beautiful line reflecting the greatness, prestige, strength and power of that country and its extension in the globe.

Because of its difficulty, few calligraphers managed to draw the tughra block known as its semi-vertical shape, and some of them adored it and sought to add to it as did the Palestinian calligrapher Bilal Bahr from the city of Hebron, who invented the “tughra line”, that is, writing on the line.

hard mission
Bahr says that the composition of the tughra - despite the difficulty of reading it by non-specialists - is the most beautiful composition in Arabic script when compared to other configurations (pictures and general forms), which were inspired by calligraphers from their surroundings, such as birds, lion, ship, and others.

Al-Tughra is used mostly - and all of it is truffles - a third line, and she used to write the names and attributes of the caliphs, minting coins or decorating letters and writing Qur’anic verses and hadiths on them.

Bahr says that he had never dreamed of writing Al-Tughra because of its difficulty, but the urging of a colleague from Iraq who asked him to write his name in it prompted him to respond and try, so he set for himself a plan to master this line until the end of this year.

Indeed, Bahr Al-Muawila started on the last day of last year, so I enjoyed this color of writing influenced by the tughra Ismail Hakki, a Turkish calligrapher who lived in Sultan Abdul Hamid, and he wrote the tughra of Sultan Muhammad Wahid al-Din (the brother of Sultan Abdul Hamid who died in 1926) and described it as the strongest and most beautiful tughra.

And the tughra does not stop and not form, and if the punctuation is used in exceptional and limited cases, but what is new for the Palestinian calligrapher is the "tughra line", where he was recently able to prepare a complete booklet with this color of the line.

Given the complexities of this drawing, the traditional letters were not suitable for the line, so he used the sea of ​​the various Arabic lines to write tughra, which made it a special flavor.

The calligrapher Zuhair Al-Zaraei praised the line of Al-Tughra, and wrote on his Facebook page that the calligrapher was a sea of ​​innovation. "He was able to employ all kinds of fonts to be their letters in the service of this line. Beautiful and innovative lines ... and made the Tughra line letters that have rules and scales. "

Bilal Bahr created the line of tughra, which gave this art a distinct flavor (Al-Jazeera).

Renew and encourage
Bahr found wide encouragement and welcome from his fellow calligraphers locally and Arably, when he started publishing his paintings on his Facebook account, but some were not encouraged to change the existing classic situation and saw in the addition a modernity that does not fit the font.

Iraqi calligrapher Talib Al-Azzawi sees that Bahr was able to draw the tughra with various lines with complete mastery, and he was able to devise a line for the tughra shape, as he is creative and renewed, and this renewal must be attributed to him in the tughra.

As for the Palestinian calligrapher Adel, he described the line of tughra as an original, modern touch that no one had touched before as an idea and implementation.

He added, commenting on the line at the request of Al-Jazeera Net correspondent: "I was very pleased with the idea and the implementation, considering that the calligrapher Bahr opened this idea with prospects for those who wanted to learn from the science of writing the tughra."

Bilal Bahr participated in his traditional paintings of the tughra on occasions outside Palestine, most recently in Jordan weeks ago, and hopes to register a patent in the tughra line soon.