HISTORY: FROM LALE TO TULIP
Here comes Easter, and with it, tulips. The tulip is so embedded in this rite of spring that it would surprise many Christians that its origins actually lie with the followers of Islam from Turkey and Iran. It has been a dominant and recurring image on prayer rugs, tiles and fabrics crafted in these regions since the beginning years of Islam.
The tulip is said to have been introduced to the West by Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq while he was ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire at the Ottoman Court of Suleiman the Magnificent. In a letter dated September 1, 1555, he wrote that while passing through a district on his way from Adrianople towards Constantinople, he saw a flower called tulipam. In naming it as such, he likened it to a tulband, the Persian and Ottoman-Turkish word referring to the turbans worn by men in Ottoman Turkey.
In fact, the name of the flower was ‘lale’, which comes from the word lal, meaning red, in Persian. Renaming it might not have been an obvious part of Busbecq’s agenda, for surely an ambassador has more on his mind than flowers, but it coincided with the passion of the time: possession. Busbecq began to transport lale’s bulbs as rare novelties for Ferdinand I’s (the Holy Roman Emperor at that time) gardens in Vienna and Prague, popularising this new name, and with it erasing the flower’s local legends and Islamic past.
The tulip flower, intrinsic now to Dutch identity and associated with Christian Easter, was in fact appropriated from early Islamic civilisation
The lale (most likely tulipa armena) noticed by Busbecq on that day is a flower with vivid scarlet, five or six lance-shaped petals, pointing upwards, their uneven edges overlapping one another, and a startling blotch of black — its corolla. The lale spreads itself widely and wildly out of Persian Khorasan, up through the Pamir-Alai Mountain ranges in Central Asia, across Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan, and along the eastern Anatolian region of Turkey.