Haji Noor Deen Mi Guang Jiang is a renowned master of Arabic calligraphy. He was born in Yucheng, in the Shandong Province of China in 1963. In 1997, he became the first individual from China to be awarded the Certificate of Arabic Calligrapher in Egypt, after having studied the calligraphic arts there for over ten years. In 2017, after a period of study in Istanbul with Ottoman calligraphic master Hasan Celebi, Haji Noor Deen was honored with an Ijaza (Certificate of Mastery) in the Ottoman Arabic Thuluth and Nasikh scripts, again becoming the first ever Chinese person to do so. The focus of his work is in writing Arabic using a combination of traditional Chinese calligraphic tools and techniques to uniquely fuse the Chinese and Arabic visual arts. Haji Noor Deen is also responsible for the formal codification of the ancient Arabic writing system in the Chinese tradition. In 2019 for the first time in China, he honored 30 students with an Ijaza of Arabic Calligraphy in the Chinese style. His work has been displayed in galleries and museums around the world, including the British Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the National Museum of Scotland, and the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS) at Harvard University. He was also awarded the Dubai Islamic Economy Development Center 2016 Islamic Economy Award in the category of Islamic Arts.
