Art, Allegory and the Rise of Shi'ism in Iran 1487-1565 by Chad Kia (review)

Gone are the days when poetry was a public performance. Since pre-Islamic times in the Muslim world poets functioned in the public domain as historians, soothsayers and propagandists. Ranging from the Griots of West Africa to Middle Eastern popular poetry praising one tribe (qitʿah) and denigrating an opposing one (hija'), the spoken word was very much live audience orientated. The period of scrutiny in Kia's book considers the poetry of Sufi masters like Jāmī, Rūmī, Ibn-'Arabī and the allusions one master made about another. Indeed, as Kia elucidates it by imitating a verse that the poet would acknowledge his debt to his predecessor; in so doing, however, he would attempt to 'outdo' the other, thus promoting his own status—poetic battles, in other words.¹

Dr Chad Kia received his interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Islamic art, literature and intellectual history from Columbia University. He has been a Smithsonian Fellow at the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art in Washington and has taught Islamic Art and Arabic and Persian literature at Harvard and Brown Universities. It is precisely this cross-disciplinary ease that permeates Kia's volume and enriches both the reading of the text and the often 'beguiling' content of the illustrations. Not least the one entitled "Depraved Man Commits Act of Bestiality" in the illustrated Haft Awrang (Seven Thrones inspired by Niẓamī) by the 15th century Persian poet Mawlānā Nūr ad-Dīn Jāmī. Without a context, such a title, let alone the pictorial representation would send shockwaves down any morally-leaning person's spine: Kia's ability lies in unravelling the layers of the manuscript's text (the poetry) and the accompanying images to which it is inextricably linked, opening our eyes to a contemporary reading and visual appreciation of the text.

Without the historical literary, and cultural context behind the production of the 1556-65 Haft Awrang manuscript under the patronage of Prince Ibrāhim Mirzā, such an illustration would only serve the purpose to shock. The fact that this is not Egon Schiele painting explicit figures at the dawn of the First World War—his paintings were still deemed 'pornographic' in the mid-1960s and none of his work appears in a single British public gallery²—but as Kia investigates, the Freer Gallery copy of Jāmī's Haft Awrang was produced against a backdrop of the Safavids' "bloody takeover of Iran and the accompanying forced conversion of the population to Imami Shi'ism" (p.135). While Shāh Tahmāsp staunchly advocated the suppression of immoral acts and intoxicants, including music, his nephew Ibrāhim Mirzā actively enjoyed and enjoined in the arts. By commissioning illustrated manuscripts the likes of the Haft Awrang, it is clear that the iconographic language was not one calculated to shock, rather, by means of allegory and allusion, the painters were able to transmit Sufi messages in alignment with the accompanying poetry.

Divided into five chapters, the volume traverses the 'poetics' of the picture, the didactic element in Sufism and Timurid manuscript production, the fixed-figure prototypes in the paintings returning to the theme of the 'Depraved Man' in the concluding chapter. Using what can only be described as microscopically analytic powers, Kia unpicks the series of figures in the various planes of the painting variously engaging, with few exceptions, in seemingly practical or mundane activities. These emblematic figures constitute common tropes in Sufi poetry: the spinning woman inside the tent in Nizāmī's Laylā and Majnūn, for instance, is echoed in the man spinning wool in Jāmī's 'Depraved Man' "allude to stock images, metaphors and parables from Persian Sufi poetry going back to the twelfth century" (p.9). Indeed, much is made of the figurative aspect of the paintings and to a lesser extent the landscape that supports the lively scenes. While symbols abound—the...