UAE | General

Calligrapher refused entry into Guiness Book of Records

Golshani creates miniature stamp and hopes for Guinness book entry.

  • By Emmanuelle Landais, Staff Reporter
  • Published: 23:10 March 13, 2009
  • Gulf News

  • Amir Hussain Golshani with the stamp. He says calligraphy is a dying art with few young people getting involved or showing any interest at all.
  • Image Credit: Arshad Ali/Gulf News

Dubai: Invisible to the naked eye, some words come slowly into focus through the magnifying loupe. On a surface smaller than a millimetre, Amir Hussain Golshani, a calligrapher, has engraved words in Arabic calligraphy.

The words are on the tip of a stamp Golshani has had specially created so that when pressed into paper, the words appear, albeit microscopically.

The feat is a first and Golshani wants to reopen negotiations with the Guinness World Records to have his effort recorded after he was initially refused entry in the book last year.

If a record cannot be broken, it cannot be entered, reads an email from the organisation. Golshani is now thinking up new ways to have the art on which he spent more 1,500 hours on, recognised.

Options include entering the stamp for the most Arabic calligraphy letters on the head of pin. The tip of the stamp is 0.87 per cent of a millimetre.

The words Mohammad Bin Rashid in Arabic calligraphy in an ode to His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, are displayed.

Golshani, 34, from Kerman in Iran has been interested in calligraphy since he was 8 years old.

"The stamp is a combination of three arts: jewellery, calligraphy and engraving and is the result of 25 years experience in the three fields," he told Gulf News. His shop Golden Pen opened last year in Khan Murjan at Wafi Mall.

"The stamp is made of brass and silver and took me 6 months to make. In old times kings and queens, rulers, used them to certify letters - I made it so small for it to be unique," he said.

Golshani attempted the engraving 160 times before he finished one that was perfect. "What makes it so different is that I'm engraving back to front. Arabic is usually read right to left and I'm engraving a mirror image of the words. There are also a lot of rules on shape and structure of the letters that I have to follow," said Golshani.

The surface is so small Golshani was working 'blind' engraving the letters without seeing what he was doing.

"The method is primitive but also quite sophisticated. I had to keep the drill very vertical or risked breaking it." The drill is his secret weapon and was also custom made.

He is teaching his own two young daughters aged 8 and 10 and so far, they seem to be developing their father's talent.

Smallest stamp in the world is too small for record to be broken

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