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April 14, 2002
Depicting beauty
Suhail Zaheer Lari contends that the art of representation in whatever form or manner it is practised cannot be described as Islamic art. What we have is art produced by Muslims under the patronage of Muslim rulers
DURING the Umayyad caliphate (40-133 AH/661-750 AD), the Islamic element in the discussions was supplied by the Holy Quran alone as canonical compilation of the Hadis came two hundred years later. Therefore they forbade images in houses of worship as idolatry was forbidden by the Holy Book, but they decorated their palaces with sculpture and painting by their Syrian and Greek subjects. And, Caliph Abd al-Malik (685-705 AD) minted coins with his picture. One such coin is in the National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi.
The Abbasid caliphs (750-1258 AD) did the same in their extant palaces at their temporary capital at Samarra. They adorned their palaces and living quarters with paintings by their Iraqi and Turkish subjects. And after paper came into common use, the caliphs and sultans and their courtiers enjoyed looking at paintings illustrating the pages of beautifully calligraphed manuscripts.
Nurtured by the Ahl al-Hadis or Traditionist movement, in time the opposite trend gained strength among the masses who were inspired by the culture of the sahra-nashin (nomads of the desert), the original Muslims. Whenever a dynasty collapsed or the powerful fell from favour in an outpouring of popular fervour, knife and fire were used to efface the wall paintings and destroy the beautifully illustrated manuscripts. The depiction of human forms brought up ideas of image or idol worship, therefore such representations were completely rejected without making any differentiation between images which were for worship and those that were not meant for worship.
The result is that almost all the wall paintings have perished. Today the only remnants of wall paintings we can see are those that were hidden away in the palaces that the Umayyad built in the desert. And the only evidence of wall paintings of the Abbasid period is found in the palaces that they built near Samarra between 833 and 892, sixty miles away from Baghdad.
In 923 AD, sackloads of illuminated manuscripts were burned and molten gold and silver from them ran down the sewers of Baghdad. One of the most unfortunate events was the destruction (c. 1171) of the palace library set up by the Fatimids with 18,000 works of ‘foreign sciences’ and of Dar al-Ilm (the House of Learning) or Dar al-Hikma, founded by al-Hakim at Cairo in the fourth century. These were considered by a contemporary historian to be ‘one of the wonders of the world’. Today we have only torn fragments of illustrated manuscripts of that period left in the museums.
Another tragedy was the devastation in 1336 of Rashidiyya near Tabriz, built under the II-khanids, which had a library of some sixty thousand books of science, history and literature. It produced every year two illustrated copies of Jami al-Tawarikh, a universal history of mankind, one in Arabic and another in Persian. Today we have no trace of that library, nor do we have a single complete copy of the illustrated universal history which was compiled there with the help of learned men from China to Byzantine.
Sometimes patrons of the art themselves repented under public pressure. For example in 1556 AD, Safawid Shah Tahmasp who was a practitioner of the art of book, having suffered repeated defeats from the Ottomans, came under pressure to give up his depraved ways, and issued an edict of ‘sincere repentance’ that ended the patronage of illustrated books at his court.
When in 1576 AD, Ibrahim Mirza, a great patron of the art, was killed along with other possible claimants to the throne, his wife Gauhar Sultan, who was the sister of the new king and a daughter of Shah Tahmasp, destroyed the contents of her husband’s library by having manuscripts thrown into water, beginning with a beautiful album of calligraphy and painting including works by Behzad, which he had given to her as a wedding present, which she herself washed with water.
Therefore, pictures were often confined to books in private libraries and walls of private apartments in palaces of the rich and powerful. Secondly, pictorial representations of animal and human figures were combined with other ornamental designs, to stress their ornamental nature. Thirdly, the design was kept two-dimensional with no corporeal representation of figures, or use of perspective in landscape, to stress their unreal nature.
Fourthly, painting was closely associated with books which were respected, and the same books were repeatedly copied and illustrated. Fifthly, protection and patronage, especially by the ruler, became essential for the art to develop and flourish because even those who say that the Holy Quran and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) do not forbid representation, cannot say that the Holy Quran and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), ever ordained, prescribed or encouraged representation in any form or manner.
Hence the art of representation in whatever form or manner it is practised, cannot be described as Islamic art. What we have is Muslim art produced by Muslims, or produced under Muslim patronage in Muslim lands.
Western writers tend to describe miniature painting produced in the Muslim countries as Persian or influenced by Persian miniature painting. The title of a recent book published by the British Library, is, Persian miniature painting, and the book goes on to discuss the miniature painting produced in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Central Asia, Afghanistan and India.
This use of the word ‘Persian’ dates back to the time when the Ancient Greeks came in contact with the Achaemenians, who ruled over a great part of Asia from modern Turkey in the west to Pakistan in the east, and from Turkmenistan in the north to Egypt in the south. The Achaemenians came from Anshan in a small province in the south of Iran called Parsa or Persua, Greek Persis, the modern Fars. Therefore the Greeks called the area over which Achaemenians ruled Persia and this practice continued in the West.
They have failed to realize that after the defeat of the Sassanian Empire and its occupation by the Muslim Arabs, the Persian Empire ceased to exist and that Persia (Fars) is now the name of a small province in southern Iran, and the word Persian denotes the common language of various Aryan tribes from Central Asia who had settled in Iran about 1500 BC.
The Muslim Arab conquerors had decreed that registers of administration all over the conquered territory be kept in Arabic and that official correspondence conducted in that language. To keep their posts, the functionaries all over the Muslim world had to learn the Arabic language. It led to the extinction of the written languages of the conquered peoples. Arabic was also the language of every Muslim for reading, reciting and memorizing the Holy Quran. It was the language of diplomacy, philosophy, science and correspondence till the destruction of the Abbasid caliphate by the Mongols in 1258 AD.
The Persian language that emerged after the end of direct Arab rule was inundated with Arabic words, firstly with the technical terms of theology and jurisprudence, secondly with the terminology of philosophy and the sciences, and thirdly by a mass of ordinary words which have almost always entirely displaced the native equivalent. It is Persian with about fifty per cent of Arabic words, and an Arabic script in which the educated Muslim elite from Chinese Turkistan to Constantinople, regardless of their ethnicity, communicated on a learned level.
According to Aufi and Shams-i Qays, Persian poetry was entirely a product of Muslim culture. The Zoroastrian clergy opposed poetry because they regarded all forms of poetic speech as being based on falsehoods, and a dangerous tool in the hands of heretics. For the same reason they hated paintings, as they associated it with Manichaism, and no example of written manuscript or painting is extant in Iran prior to the Muslim Seljuk rule.
Persian literature first flowered under the Samanids (819-1005) who came from Saman a district near Samarkand in modern Uzbekistan. It was called by the Arabs mawara al-Nahr, and in Greek, Transoxiana. The Samanids ruled over Transoxiana and Khurasan with the capital at Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan. The father of Persian poetry, the blind bard Abu Abd Allah Jafar Rudaki (d. 330/940), was born in a village near Samarkand in modern Uzbekistan. His most famous poem is in praise of the River Oxus (Amu Darya) and the capital, Bukhara. The army of Samanid Amir Nasr II bin Ahmad II (301-31 AH/914-42 AD) was away from home for four years. It persuaded Rudaki to induce the Amir to go back home, so Rudaki recited before the Amir the following verses.
The Ju-yi-Mulliyan we call to mind,
We long for those dear friends long left behind,
The sands of Oxus, toilsome thought they be,
Beneath my feet were soft as silk to me,
Glad at the friends return, the Oxus deep
Up to our girths in laughing waves shall leap,
Long live Bukhara! Be thou of good cheer!
Joyous towards thee hasteth our Amir!
The moon’s the prince, Bukhara the sky;
O sky, the moon shall light thee by and by!
Bukhara is the Mead, the cypress he;
Receive at last, O Mead, thy cypress-tree!
(Brown, Vol. II, 16)
On hearing these lines, the Samanid Amir Nasr II descended from the throne, mounted the horse of the sentinel on duty, and started off for Bukhara, without even waiting for his riding boots. Bukhara under the Samanid was the first great centre of Persian literature and intellectual life. The first Persian prose work, Kalila wa Dimna, was written under Amir Nasr II, and was put into verse by Rudaki. Amir Nasr II had it illustrated by Chinese artists.
Ghazna, also known as Ghazni or Ghaznin, in modern Afghanistan and the main city of Zabulistan, homeland of the heroes of Firdawsi’s Shahnama, was the next great centre of Persian literature and intellectual life under its Turkish rulers (961-1186 AD). The most famous of them was Sultan Yamin al-Dawla, Nizam al-Din, Abu al-Qasim, Mahmud, the Conqueror (997-1030 AD).... Sultan Mahmud had four hundred poets in his court, including five of the most famous poets of Persian of the era, namely, Unsuri, Asadi, Farrukhi, Firdawsi and Minuchehr...
Shahnama (The Book of Kings) is now given the status of a Persian national epic. It was first written in the fourth century AH/10th century AD in and around Khurasan (the land of the Greek kingdom of Bactria) which comprised north-western Afghanistan, north-eastern Iran and Turkmenistan. The oldest Shahnama in prose is by Abul Muayyad from Balkh (Bactra, the capital of Greek kingdom of Bactria) in modern Afghanistan.
There is another Shahnama by Abu Ali Mahmud bin Ahmad who was also from Balkh; it was praised by al-Biruni. The third attempt was made under the patronage of Abu Mansur Muhammad bin Abd al-Razzak, the governor of Tus in Khurasan about 335 AH/946 AD. He gathered men who knew history and ancient legends, and ordered them to compose a Shahnama under the supervision of his vizier, Abu Mansur Muhammad al-Mamari. The fourth was authored by Abu Mansur Muhammad Daqiqi, who was asked by the Samanid Amir of Bukhara, Nuh II bin Mansur I (366-87 AH/976-97 AD), to compose the Shahnama in verse.
Daqiqi had composed a thousand verses of Shahnama when he was murdered by his slave. Abul Qasim Firdawsi incorporated the verses by Daqiqi and resumed the composition of Shahnama in about 370 AH/980 AD. Firdawsi was born at Baz, a village near Tus in Khurasan. He completed Shahnama in sixty thousand couplets in 400 AH/1010 AD, at the court of the Turk Sultan Mahmud, at Ghazna in modern Afghanistan. Shahnama was first illustrated with miniature paintings at the court of the Mongol rulers, the II-Khans, and since then has been reproduced in every century, in every style of miniature painting for every patron who was proud of this library.
Excerpts from
Neither Islamic nor Persian: a history of Muslim paintings
By Suhail Zaheer Lari
Heritage Foundation Pakistan, E-6, 4th Gizri Street, Defence Housing Authority 4, Karachi-75500
Email: heritage@pakistansearcher.com
ISBN 969-8655 148pp. Rs600
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