Ahmed Moustafa

Born Alexandria, Egypt, 1943

In 1966 Moustafa was awarded the highest national distinction as an accomplished figurative artist in the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Alexandria. He later taught there and, in 1974, was awarded a scholarship to the United Kingdom. He joined the printmaking department of the Central School of Art and Design, London, where he developed his interest in the science of Arabic penmanship and the role of its letter shapes in the structural morphology of Islam. His investigation was inspired by the theory of ‘The Proportioned Script’ by the celebrated Abbasid wazir Ibn Muqla (886–940), who was acclaimed as the original founder of the art and science of the pen and penmanship. In 1978, after graduating, he received a grant from the British Council to pursue his research on the scientific foundation of Arabic letter shapes, and in 1989 he was awarded a PhD by the Council for National Academic Awards. Since 1974 Moustafa has lived in London where, in 1983, he set up the Fe-Noon Ahmed Moustafa Research Centre for Arab Art and Design. His work includes lectures and workshops worldwide as well as numerous commissions, among them a composition presented by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II to Pakistan on the occasion of that country’s fiftieth anniversary, 1997. In 1998 he was invited by the Vatican to exhibit at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome. That exhibition, entitled Where Two Oceans Meet, was heralded in the world media as the first achievement of its kind in the history of Muslim–Christian relations. In celebration of his contribution to art and culture, Muslim Power 100 awarded him its highest honour in 2007 as one of the hundred most influential Muslims in Britain.