MUHAMMAD ASLAM SIDDIQUI

Imam of Mochi Gate and master calligrapher who taught Lahore to write with patience

Ustad Aslam used to say that a good line begins in the breath: you exhale, and the pen follows. Born in 1943 in Jalandhar, he was four years old when his family joined the long road to Lahore in 1947, carrying a Qur'an wrapped in green cloth, a copper pot and his father's reed pens. They settled in a two-room house near Mochi Gate in the old city, where he would live for the rest of his life.

At twelve he was apprenticed to a katib, a hand-calligrapher, in the lanes behind Anarkali, and spent years copying alphabets until his wrist ached. By his early twenties he was writing the headlines of an Urdu daily by hand in flowing Nastaliq, thirty lines every night before the presses rolled. When computer typesetting arrived in the nineties and the katibs lost their trade, he turned to teaching, giving evening classes in his own front room to boys and later girls, and visiting classes at the National College of Arts. He also copied three Qur'ans by hand, each taking two years, and for thirty-nine years he led the five daily prayers as imam of a small mosque in his lane, where he was also asked to settle marriages, quarrels and spelling disputes.

He drank sweet doodh patti from a steel glass, bought lassi for the neighbourhood children, and was strict about handwriting but gentle about everything else. He mourned the end of the katib's craft but never complained; he said ink had only changed its clothes. He died peacefully on 17 September 2026, aged eighty-three. He is survived by his wife, Razia Begum, his sons Tariq and Imran, his daughter Ayesha and eleven grandchildren, several of whom already hold their pens the way he taught them.

“Do not press the pen. Let it travel; you only keep it company.”