BAGHDAD, Iraq – In what was left of Baghdad’s art community, the murder felt like a priceless parchment ripped apart. Khalil al-Zahawi, the Iraqi artist who was one of the Arab world’s most prominent calligraphers, had been shot to death on the steps of his home.

Among Iraqis, Sunday’s news of Al-Zahawi’s death last week was another crushing benchmark of loss. The grandfatherly calligrapher had influenced a generation of Middle Eastern artists from Egypt to Pakistan. His dedication to beauty had been an elegant counterpoint to the devastation of war.

“It is a big sadness,” said a quiet Haidar Rabia, professor of Arabic calligraphy at the Fine Arts Academy at the University of Baghdad. “Just as a father in a house brings blessings and takes care of his children, we calligraphers lost our father.”

Al-Zahawi’s most famous calligraphy was in the Ta’liq method, the formal Arabic script of Iran, Pakistan and India and a form of art elsewhere. Iraq’s calligraphers say it was a style Al-Zahawi mastered and perhaps surpassed.

The word ta’liq means “hanging,” and in the style, letters seem to float above the page, anchored by their beginnings and endings. It is one of the most devilishly difficult modes in Arabic lettering. Because it is also one of the most flexible, it can reveal a pupil’s clumsiness or a master’s personality.

The method is hundreds of years old, but after mastering it, Al-Zahawi sought to alter the classic style. He lengthened the script until the letters seemed like words. He filled in backgrounds with more writing, creating landscapes of flowing script. Other contemporary artists seized on the notion, and the ancient writing took a quantum leap into the realm of painting.

Al-Zahawi was a prodigy almost since he graduated from the Fine Arts Institute in Baghdad. He worked for the State Directorate of the Plastic Arts in the 1980s, but was famous for his gallery on Sadoun Street that became a virtual college for budding calligraphers – a place teeming with students, admirers and his own growing body of artwork. He was a regular in competitions and art shows around the Middle East.

His work included several books, from collections of his art to a textbook on the procedures of Ta’liq calligraphy that is still studied in Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and Iraq.

Members of Baghdad’s arts community recalled an intellectually generous colleague. When Baghdad art critic Jawad al-Zaidi was working on his master’s degree in the arts, Al-Zahawi lent him his entire portfolio to study, an incalculable gift. Calligraphers who expressed delight at works in his house left carrying them. Al-Zahawi was so in love with the letters he drew that al-Zaidi said talking with him had become like talking to the art itself.

“Khalil Al-Zahawi is a special phenomenon,” al-Zaidi said. “When you point to him, you remember the sad story of how he was lost.”

Al-Zahawi lived in the Na’eriyah neighborhood of eastern Baghdad, now a Shiite enclave. A native of Diyala province who had Kurdish roots, Al-Zahawi had been warned to leave, said his friend Qasim Sebti, the sculptor and owner of Haywar Gallery in Baghdad.

The calligrapher intended to do just that. A month ago, he packed his artwork off to a gallery in Erbil, Sebti said. He had only returned home for the rest of his belongings recently.

He was shot to death Friday as he left his house, said Rabia. Al-Zahawi’s family, horrified, took flight.

“Losing this great man in this criminal, this brutal way, it is one clear image of this war, another picture you can add to the thousands of pictures we live through every day,” said Rabia.

“This man didn’t hurt anybody,” Rabia said. “We’re all lining up, and we don’t know when it will be our turn.”