Mouneer Al Shaarani

Mouneer Al Shaarani was born in 1952 in Salamiyah, Syria. He is a calligrapher, graphic designer and writer whose calligraphic works treat Arabic script as composition in its own right, and he has designed Arabic typefaces for book covers and printed matter.

He began studying calligraphy as a boy under the Syrian calligrapher Badawi Al Dirany and graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University in 1977. He lived and worked in Cairo from 1985 to 2007. His practice takes the classical scripts he trained in and reworks their proportions and layouts, often around a single quotation from poets, philosophers or Sufi writers. He has also written articles and educational texts on Arabic calligraphy and Arab Islamic art, and served as a consultant to the International Arab Encyclopedia.

His work was shown at the Museum Rietberg, Zurich, in 1998, at the British Museum, London, in 2006 and at Sharjah Biennial 11 in 2013. Art on 56th in Beirut held solo exhibitions of his calligraphy in 2013 and 2014. He is discussed in A History of Arab Graphic Design (2020) and is the subject of the monograph Against the Grain (2023).