Persian differs from Arabic in its proportion of straight and curved letters.

Hamid Reza Afsari traces first elements of the style in 11th-century copies of Persian translations of the Qur'an.

For example, Gholam-Hosayn Yusofi, Ali Alparslan and Sheila Blair recognize gradual shift towards nastaliq in some 13th century manuscripts. Finally, many authors point out that development of nastaʿliq was a process which takes few centuries. The picture of origin of nastaliq presented by Elaine Wright was further complicated by studies of Francis Richard, who on the basis of some manuscripts from Tabriz argued that its early evolution wasn't confined to Shiraz. Thus 'our earliest written source also credits Shirazi scribes with the development of nastaʿliq and Mir ʿAli Tabrizi with its canonization'. After a while Tabrizi modified what Shirazi had created by gradually rendering it thinner and defining its canons, until the time when Khwaja Mir ʿAli Tabrizi brought this script to perfection. So a new script was created, to be named nastaʿliq. From other scripts they then brought in a curved sin and stretched forms and introduced variations in the thickness of the line. Some Shirazi modified it by taking out the flattened kaf and straight bottom part of sin, lam, and nun. It must be known that nastaʿliq is derived from naskh. In addition to study of the practice of calligraphy Elaine Wright also found a document written by Jafar Tabrizi c. Moreover, according to her studies nastaliq has its origin not in combining naskh and taliq, as was commonly thought, but from naskh alone. That tradition was questioned by Elaine Wright, who traced evolution of nastaliq in 14th century Iran and showed how it developed gradually among scribes in Shiraz. Virtually all Safavid authors (like Dust Muhammad or Qadi Ahmad) attributed the invention of nastaliq to Mir Ali Tabrizi, who lived at the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th century.

The name nastaliq 'is a contraction of the Persian naskh-i ta'liq, meaning a hanging or suspended naskh'. Nastaliq developed in Iran from naskh beginning in the 13th century and remains very widely used in Iran, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan and other countries for written poetry and as a form of art. Nastaliq ( / ˌ n æ s t ə ˈ l iː k, ˈ n æ s t ə l iː k/ نَسْتَعْلِیق, Persian: Urdu: ), also romanized as Nastaʿlīq or Nastaleeq is one of the main calligraphic hands used to write the Perso-Arabic script in the Persian and Urdu languages, often used also for Ottoman Turkish poetry, rarely for Arabic. The dotted form ڛ‎ is used in place of س‎ in the word نڛتعلیق‎ Nastaliq.

Decorative arabic fonts