Lot Essay
Mustafa Dada was born in AH 900/1495 AD and died in AH 945/1538 AD. He spent all his life in Üsküdar, apart from performing the Hajj and spending a a short time in Egypt. He was the son and most prominent student of Sheikh Hamdullah, who named him after his own father. His grandfather (Sheikh Mustafa Dada) was a member of the Suhrawardi Sufi order and emigrated from Bukhara to Amasya in Anatolia where Sheikh Hamdullah was born in around 1429. He was the calligraphy master at the Ottoman palace under Sultan Bayezid II and he was able to elaborate a style of his own. He became known as the calligrapher's lodestar (Derman M.U., Letters in Gold, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1998. pp.46-49 and Nabil Safwat, The Art of the Pen, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. V, Oxford, 1996, pp. 13 and 115). For a calligraphic composition by Mustafa Dada's famous father, please see lot 210.