Preface

Berlekamp, Persis

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Preface

Persis Berlekamp

Wonder, Image, and Cosmos in Medieval Islam

It is widely believed that Islamic art consists exclusively of ornament and calligraphy, and has never included representational imagery...

Author

Persis Berlekamp

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-21561

Preface

It is widely believed that Islamic art consists exclusively of ornament and calligraphy, and has never included representational imagery. Yet a quick stroll through almost any exhibition of Islamic art definitively shows that this is not the case. In response to this evident contradiction, historians of Islamic art generally offer the explanation that, while representational images did exist in secular contexts, they did not appear in religious settings and were not used for religious purposes. However, this explanation sits uncomfortably with some of the most widely disseminated images of the medieval Islamic world: images from manuscripts on the wonders of creation. These were made for the explicitly stated purpose of inducing wonder at God’s creation, and included images representing wonders ranging from majestic and humiliated angels, to date palm trees and human-snatching birds. From the thirteenth century until the early nineteenth century, they were produced at all patronage levels, in all major Islamic languages, and in all regions of the Islamic world. This book, focusing on examples from the formative period of the genre, examines how different kinds of images in these manuscripts furthered the genre’s explicitly stated purpose of inducing wonder at creation. From the middle of the thirteenth to the end of the fourteenth century, the kinds of images emphasized in the manuscripts, the ways in which they induced wonder, and even what wonder meant, changed. These changes go hand in hand with the changing social profile of the audiences of Islamic manuscript painting during that period, and the different kinds of educations these audiences had. Tracing these changes therefore entails grappling with the degree to which the histories of art, thought, and society are interconnected.

The formative milieu for the genre of illustrated Islamic wonders-of-creation manuscripts was the century and a half following the brutal Mongol Conquest of the Islamic east, in Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia during the mid-thirteenth century. In this period, the region was full of unexpected juxtapositions. For centuries, Baghdad had been understood in the Islamic lands as the center of world civilization. Yet when it fell in 1258, it was suddenly subsumed into a Mongol world Empire stretching from Anatolia to China (see fig. 1). Not only was the conquest violent, but it toppled a political order that had been understood as divinely sanctioned according to Islamic theories of governance. Despite the shock it induced, the new political geography fostered a degree of artistic and religious eclecticism, which led to great cultural dynamism. The early modern Islamic empires – the Safavids, Ottomans, and Mughals – would all later look back on this as a foundational period of their cultural heritage.

Artists working in this period traveled widely and experimented with newly available visual forms, making this the formative age of Persian manuscript painting. Scholars and chroniclers of all stripes tended to describe the Mongol Conquest as an apocalyptic event. But whether they considered it a divine punishment for a Muslim community that had strayed from true religion, or whether they found that the Mongols’ preference for a syncretic approach to religion fostered an unexpectedly congenial environment for their work, depended very much on how they positioned themselves within the medieval Islamic culture wars. These had started long before the Mongols arrived. For example, within the context of those culture wars, philosophy had been banned from the curriculum of medieval Islamic legal colleges in the eleventh century. Although this ban was theoretically still in place in the thirteenth, the history of wonders-of-creation manuscripts shows how lines between law and philosophy could blur in practice. The scholar who authored the most widely disseminated illustrated wonders-of-creation text was no aficionado of court painting, but rather a professor of Islamic law who had the equivalent of graduate-level training in philosophy in the tradition of Avicenna, known in the Islamic world as Ibn Sina.

Illustrated Islamic wonders-of-creation manuscripts survive today in numerous collections; in fact, so many survive that it is not possible to provide an accurate count. Although general readers may not previously have heard of these manuscripts, specialists of Islamic cultural history and the educated elite of the Islamic world generally have. However, twists of fate have made some aspects of these manuscripts’ histories disproportionately available to scholars and interested researchers, while obfuscating others. The uneven and sometimes misleading selection of information available has led many to think of these books as wild collections of entertaining fantasy, lacking any serious purpose. The Introduction of this book unearths aspects of these manuscripts’ histories that have been difficult to access. This makes it possible to see how the entertaining material in these manuscripts served the more serious purpose of inducing wonder at creation, and how their images mediated relationships between viewers and the divinely ordered cosmos. This is true not only of the earliest medieval manuscripts, which emphasized the divinely structured overarching order of the cosmos, but also of the later medieval and early modern ones, which emphasized the possibilities of human agency within that cosmic order.

Each of the central chapters of this book explores a different kind of image or vision featured in the wonders-of-creation manuscripts, and characterizes the experiences of wonder (ʿajab) at creation thereby induced. Arranged roughly chronologically, these chapters cumulatively show how the manuscripts, their images, and the experiences of wonder they induced changed during the formative period of the genre. The Epilogue sketches the later history of the genre, suggests how the wonders-of-creation manuscripts fit into a broader history of wonder in medieval Eurasia, and reflects on how the roles of images in wonders-of-creation manuscripts relate to roles of images in Islamic arts of the book more broadly.

This book suggests a three-part approach: first, though the wonders-of-creation manuscripts may appear to us as wacky, even irreverent objects, they should be approached in terms of their stated purpose: to induce wonder (ʿajab) at God’s creation; second, what it meant to wonder at God’s creation changed over time, in keeping with the differing world views of the different social groups who read these manuscripts; third, our modern educations significantly interfere with our abilities to recognize either of the first two points above. In order to understand how the wonders-of-creation images functioned, or the range of experiences of wonder they induced, we must put aside assumptions we rarely question: assumptions concerning logic, vision, and truth. We must reconstruct more appropriate ways of looking at these manuscripts by examining the experiences of leading figures in the history of the manuscripts, and by engaging with the philosophical traditions that informed the genre. This approach may be fruitfully juxtaposed with paradigms for understanding the concept of wonder established in European history, thereby addressing an extreme imbalance in the scholarship on the European and Islamic traditions of wonder. Ultimately, approaching the Islamic manuscripts in this way reveals a significant shift in their emphasis – from cosmic frame to human agency. This shift occurred in the late fourteenth century, in accordance with the changing social profiles of readers and the changing roles of the images within the manuscripts. All these factors set the stage for the genre’s continued popularity in the late medieval and early modern periods.

NOTE TO THE READER

Many of the people, objects, titles, and terms in this book moved back and forth between Arabic and Persian milieus. I have therefore transliterated words from both these languages according to a single system, based on the International Journal of Middle East Studies system for Arabic, with exceptions for Persian consonants that do not exist in Arabic, and “v” rather than “w” for Persian. I have not used diacritics for proper names of places, educational institutions, or dynasties. For transliterated personal names from languages not written in the Roman alphabet, I have not used diacritics in the main text of this book, but have included them when appropriate in the notes and index. This does not apply to the names of persons from the milieu of Ottoman Turkey, which are given in the romanized spellings of modern Turkish. Titles of Ottoman works are given as they appear in the Turkish reference encyclopedia of Islamic studies, Islam Ansiklopedisi. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. For quotations and citations from the Qurʾan, the reader may consult The Koran Interpreted by Arthur J. Arberry (New York: Macmillan, 1955).

ABBREVIATIONS

EI The Encyclopaedia of Islam: a Dictionary of the Geography, Ethnography and Biography of the Muhammadan Peoples (Leiden: Brill, 1913–38)

EI2 The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2005)

EI3 The Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (Leiden: Brill, 2007–)

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