Srinagar, Aug 18(KNS): On a summer morning in Kilshey, a small refugee village tucked deep in the Gurez valley of Bandipora district, a man sits at a long wooden desk, bent over a stretch of creamy art-grade paper that seems to unroll endlessly across the room. His fingers are smudged with black ink, his eyes narrowed with focus, his body hunched but steady despite hours of stillness.
This is Mustafa ibni Jameel, a self-taught calligrapher who has spent much of his young life in quiet devotion to an ancient craft. And in front of him lies what he claims is the world’s longest handwritten Hadith manuscript: a scroll that stretches 1.3 kilometres when unfurled in its entirety.
For now, only 108 meters of this mammoth work have been laminated and prepared for display. The rest—still fragile, carefully rolled and stored—awaits the preservation that Mustafa insists is essential before it can be shown. “The full 1.3 km series is complete, but not laminated yet,” he says softly, almost as though speaking to himself. “Once it is all laminated and archived, it will be presented in its complete form.”
The scroll is no ordinary manuscript. Written on 135 GSM art-grade paper, measuring 14.5 inches in width, the document bears thousands of lines of hadith from Al-Muwa??a?, one of the earliest compilations of Prophetic traditions. Mustafa chose the transmission of Ibn-e-Qasim for its structure and historical importance, and has handwritten it with painstaking precision, in flowing Arabic calligraphy.
It took him six months of writing, eighteen hours a day, to finish just the laminated 108-meter portion. He wrote without interruption, no physical joins or cuts in the scroll, just one continuous stretch of ink and paper—an act of sheer discipline that few can even imagine. The paper itself was sourced from Delhi, a massive roll that weighed over three quintals and stretched to nearly eight kilometres.
“It began as an attempt to improve my handwriting,” Mustafa recalls with a smile. “But slowly, it became a mission. I never had a teacher, no YouTube tutorials, no formal courses. I trained myself from books and manuscripts. I dissected every letter, its form, its weight, its proportion. Calligraphy became my way of preserving knowledge.”
To understand the scale of Mustafa’s achievement, one must first understand where he comes from. Kilshey is not a place that usually finds itself in headlines. Perched close to the Line of Control, cut off by heavy snowfall for months in winter, and known mostly as a refugee settlement for families displaced during border conflicts, it remains one of the most overlooked corners of Kashmir.
Electricity is erratic, connectivity fragile, opportunities scarce. That such a monumental work of Islamic scholarship and art should emerge from here seems almost improbable. But perhaps it is precisely the remoteness—the silence, the solitude—that allowed Mustafa to nurture his craft with such obsessive focus.
His small home doubles up as a workspace, its walls lined with books on Islamic sciences, old calligraphy samples, and rolls of paper stacked carefully to avoid moisture damage. When he writes, the world outside—politics, conflict, even livelihood struggles—seems suspended. “This is not for fame or exhibition,” he insists. “It is a service, a responsibility, to preserve and present our heritage.”
Mustafa’s devotion to this path is not sudden. Before embarking on the Hadith scroll, he had already completed a 500-meter handwritten Quran, a project that earned him recognition in the Lincoln Book of Records. That experience—procuring rare paper, writing for hours, laminating and preserving the fragile sheets—prepared him for the even more ambitious task of transcribing Hadith at monumental scale.
The Hadith compilation is structured as part of a fifteen-part series that he plans to complete over the coming years. The Al-Muwa??a? scroll is only the beginning. Next, he is working on the As-Sunan series: Sunan Abu Dawood, Sunan al-Nasa’i, Sunan Ibn Majah, and Sunan al-Tirmidhi. Some of these, he estimates, will reach lengths of up to 500 meters each.
“It is not just about writing,” Mustafa says. “It is about creating an archive that will last. These texts are part of our heritage. If written and preserved properly, they can survive centuries. For me, that is the real reward.Click Here To Follow Our WhatsApp Channel”
His work has already been formally approved by the Lincoln Board, after he submitted the required documentation—video evidence, witness verification, photographs. But official certificates mean little to him. What drives him is the knowledge that he is contributing, in his own solitary way, to the continuity of Islamic scholarship.
To write for 18 hours a day, for months at a stretch, requires more than just patience—it requires a kind of asceticism. Mustafa wakes up before dawn, prays, and then settles at his desk. Except for brief pauses to eat or rest his wrist, he remains there until late into the night, filling meter after meter with the flowing script.
The ink is specially prepared to withstand time. The pens—qalam made of reed—are sharpened and polished by hand. Every few hours, he adjusts his posture, massages his eyes, and continues. “There are days when the hand aches, when the eyes blur,” he says. “But the thought of the next line, the next page, keeps me going. It is like worship.”
The scroll is written without interruption, which means a single error could ruin meters of work. Mustafa learned to control his hand with extraordinary steadiness. Mistakes are rare, but when they occur, he develops techniques to correct them without breaking the flow.
Such discipline has not been easy. Financially too, the project has been a burden. He has spent nearly ?1 lakh on the 108-meter scroll alone, covering costs of paper, ink, lamination, and material handling. There are no sponsors, no institutional support. It is all self-funded, from whatever modest resources he can manage. “If you believe in something deeply, you find a way,” he says simply.
For Muslims across the world, Al-Muwa??a? holds a special place. Compiled by Imam Malik ibn Anas in the 8th century, it is considered one of the earliest and most authentic collections of Hadith. By choosing the transmission of Ibn-e-Qasim, Mustafa anchored his project in a tradition of scholarship that is both respected and historically significant.
In Kashmir, calligraphy has long been an art form woven into religious and cultural life. From the inscriptions on shrines to the illuminated Qurans of earlier centuries, the valley has nurtured a lineage of scribes and artists. But in the modern era, with digital printing and mass-produced texts, the art of writing sacred texts by hand has almost vanished.
Mustafa’s work, then, is not merely an individual feat. It is a continuation of a heritage, a reminder that in an age of speed and technology, the act of writing by hand can still carry spiritual and cultural weight.
Recognition has come, though slowly. His 500-meter Quran was noted in record books, and his Hadith scroll has now been formally approved by the Lincoln Board. Scholars, too, have begun to take interest. Some have urged him to consider exhibitions; others have suggested collaborations with Islamic universities.
But Mustafa remains cautious. “Exhibitions are temporary,” he says. “My aim is permanence. I want these scrolls to be preserved in archives, in libraries, where they can be studied for generations.”
The scale of his ambition is vast. Beyond the Sunan series, he dreams of writing the Sahih collections, perhaps even creating a complete Hadith archive in scroll form. Each will require years of work, thousands of hours of writing, lakhs of rupees in funding. Yet he speaks of it calmly, as though the enormity of the task is secondary to the certainty of its completion.
In the end, what lingers is not just the image of a man writing endlessly in a remote valley, but the sense of a quiet legacy being built against the odds. In a time when news from Kashmir often revolves around conflict, Mustafa’s story is a reminder of another reality: of individuals who, in silence and obscurity, are safeguarding traditions that might otherwise be lost.
His scrolls may or may not one day be housed in great libraries, studied by scholars, or displayed in international exhibitions. But even if they remain in his modest home in Kilshey, they already stand as a testament to human perseverance, devotion, and the power of the written word.
“This is not about me,” Mustafa says finally. “It is about what will remain after me. The ink may fade, the paper may weaken, but if preserved, these words will outlive us all. That is what I am working for.”(KNS).