Musthafa Mohamed

Musthafa Mohamed is a Maldivian calligrapher who designed Faruma, the font most official documents in the Maldives are written in. His father, Muhammad Adam of Kaashidhoo, taught him to write Thaana as a child. In 1979 he joined the government's class in Arabic and Thaana calligraphy, where he was taught by Muhammad Saadiq, and he studied alongside Abdulla Waheed.

He joined the President's Office in 1980, at 18. He wrote the President's foreword to Dhivehiraajjeyge Qaanooni Hayaath, published in 1981 for the 50th anniversary of the People's Majlis, and for many years wrote the President's annual addresses by hand. He also taught calligraphy to colleagues at the office.

In 2002, while working in the President's protocol section, he took on a new font for the office's documents to replace the MLS font, which had problems on Windows XP. The head of IT, Ahmed Asif, assigned Ibrahim Yasir to build it, and Musthafa directed the letterforms, sitting beside him at his workstation in the IT unit. A first version, A_Reethi, was usable within about three months. He named the refined version Faruma, from ‘designed’ or ‘shaped’, because its letters were shaped by design rather than copied from his own handwriting. He kept them close to handwriting, with the slight pen tick at the end of each stroke, at the size of ordinary writing at 12 points.

Faruma came into use in the office's typing pool and spread to government offices, the public and printers. He wrote his own account of making it in May 2023.