In an event that recurs every twenty years … Professor Uğur Derman in Egypt …
Very soon in Alexandria: Uğur Derman, born in Bandırma in 1935. He graduated from the Faculty of Pharmacy at Istanbul University in 1960; after practicing that profession freely from 1963 until 1978, he became head of the Turkish Petroleum Foundation in 1977, and an art consultant at the Research Center for Islamic History, Art, and Culture (IRCICA) of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul in 1981, where he remains. He learned calligraphy at the hands of Necmeddin Okyay (1898–1964), professor of Arabic calligraphy at the Faculty of Fine Arts, and obtained the ijaza in calligraphy in 1960; he also benefited from other masters. From 1961 he worked to teach the arts of calligraphic writing and to make them known, and was granted the certificate of professorship in art from Mimar Sinan University in 1997, where he has taught ever since. He was sent by the Turkish Ministry of Culture to introduce the art of Arabic calligraphy to Cairo in 1976 and Jeddah in 1980, and by the Research Center for History and Arts to Baghdad in 1988, Kuwait in 1992, Islamabad in 1994, Cairo in 1997, and Tunis in 1997.
He has more than 247 published studies, among them independent works such as: Marbling (Ebru) in the Turkish Arts, Rarities of the Turkish Calligraphic Arts, The Art of Calligraphy in Islamic Culture, and most recently the book The School of Calligraphers, and others … Translations of some of them have been published in English, French, Arabic, and Japanese.
