The Soul Searcher

On Mohamed Zakariya’s drafting table, small brown bottles of solutions are lined up near round jars filled with colorful inks. A dozen sleek bamboo calligrapher’s pens are crammed into faded cans. Delicate sheets of paper treated with tea and egg whites are aging in drawers behind the table.

Zakariya, 62, is a hard man to pigeonhole. It’s not just because he has a broad gray beard, nor is it because he’s an Islamic calligrapher, a profession few people have heard of. It’s because he’s white. You don’t expect a man who looks like he does to answer to the name of Mohamed. Yet he has since he was 19, when he started down the path that would lead him all the way from Southern California to the mosques of Morocco, the art museums and calligraphy schools of London and Turkey, and, ultimately, to his cluttered drafting table in Arlington, Virginia.