Tertiary Records in Post-Manichaean Arabic, Persian, and Chagatai Texts (11Th–17Th Centuries)

Chapter 4 Tertiary Records in Post-Manichaean Arabic, Persian, and Chagatai Texts (11th–17th Centuries)

The historical sources turn silent about the Manichaean communities of West and Central Asia after the early eleventh century. The followers of Mani had been persecuted to extinction from Byzantine and Islamicate West Asia, including the regions of Iran and West Central Asia by the late tenth century.1 Ibn al-Nadim’s elusive reference to Mani’s (Book of ) Pictures (Ar. Al-ṣuwar) in his Kitāb al-Fihrist (987 CE) is a fitting last memento to the vanished world of the Manichaeans and their didactic art. In East Central Asia, the Uygur rul- ing elite had also abandoned the Manichaean Church by the early eleventh century, the events of which are vividly lamented in the memoir of Käd Ogul (after 983 CE) including the confiscation and the Buddhist rededication of art from the manistan of Kocho.2 In the post-Manichaean world of West and Central Asia, the literary memory of Mani’s paintings has persisted. Authors, who had never seen Manichaean art and in most cases never read any Manichaean texts on art, rely on ear- lier literature on this subject to create their own tertiary accounts written not only in Islamic, but also secular and, in one case, Zoroastrian settings. The survey below ends with the seventeenth century and includes all major cur- rently known references made by learned authors of the Seljuk, Ghaznavid, Ilkhanid, Timurid, Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman Empires. They discuss Mani’s collection of didactic paintings in succinct lexicographical entries on the term Aržang3 and compose historicizing tales on Mani as a legendary pre-Islamic prophet and painter, who used pictorial art for proselytizing and painted images in a book titled the Aržang. Their stories on Mani’s false prophethood are embellished with motifs of classical literature, such as the “cave of a sage,” “skill of a painter,” and “heavenly book of a prophet.” The survey below considers fourteen tertiary texts on Manichaean didactic art from post-Manichaean Central Asian, Iranian, Indian, and Ottoman Turkish literature (Table 4/1). They were selected based on the fact that they

1 Lieu 1994, 216. 2 See Chapter 3, above. 3 The texts quoted below from various modern editions and translations employ different ways of transliterating Persian script into Latin script, producing such variants as Arzang, Arjang, and Erzgheng. I have regularized their rendering as Aržang based on the Encyclopædia Iranica Online, s. v. “ARŽANG,” accessed June 05, 2013 (http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ Aržang-mid). However, there are some further variants found in other original Persian texts, where -ž- is replaced by -th- or -t-. These cases have been preserved.

Table 4/1 Tertiary textual sources on Manichaean didactic painting in Arabic, Persian, and Chagatai languages (14 texts)

Tertiary Texts in Arabic Dictionaries (3 texts) Tertiary Texts in Persian (6 texts) (1) Marwazī, Kitāb ṭabā’i al-hayawān (1120 CE) (1) Abu al-Ma‘ālī, Bayanu ‘l-Adyan (1092 CE) (2) Sam‘ānī, Kitāb al-ānsāb (before 1166 CE) (2) ‘Awfī, Jawāme’ al-ḥekāyāt (before 1232 CE) (3) Katip Çelebi, Kashf al-ẓunūn’an (1657 CE) (3) Mīrkhwānd, Rawdat al-safā (1498 CE) (4) Khwandamir, Habîib al-siyar (1524 CE) Tertiary Texts in Persian Dictionaries (4 texts) (5) Dūst Muhammad’s Account (1544 CE) (1) Asadī Ṭūsī, Lughat-i Furs (ca. 1060 CE) (6) Dasātīr (before 1624 CE) (2) Faḵr-e Qawwās, Farhang-e Qawwās (1315 CE) (3) Shams-i Munshī, Ṣiḥāḥu’l-Furs (1328 CE) Tertiary Text in Chagatai (1 texts) (4) Jamal al-Din, Farhang-i Jahāngīrī (1608 CE) (1) Chagatai story about false prophets (no date)

go beyond merely mentioning the Aržang. They discuss it as a work of art, note not only its title and attribution, but at least one other of its characteristics: date, appearance, content, or function. Three such discussions are in Arabic, which became the literary language of Iranian intellectuals during the first three centuries following the Arabic conquest (650–950 CE). Ten of them are in Persian (Fārsī), which replaced Middle Persian as the literary language of Iran starting from the tenth century and was also used in the imperial court of Mughal India. One text is in Chagatai, the Turkic language that was the literary language of the Chagatai Khanate (1226–1687 CE) in Central Asia, so named after Chagatai, the second son of Jinghiz Khan.

Survey and Analysis: Asadī Ṭūsī (1060 Ce), Abu Al-Maʿālī (1092 Ce), Marwazī (Bef. 1125 Ce), Anonymous Chagatai Author (No Date), Samʿānī (1166 Ce), ʿAwfī (Bef. 1232 Ce), Faḵr-E Qawwās (1315 Ce), Shams-I Munshī (1328 Ce), Mīrkhwānd (1498 Ce), Khwandamir (1524 Ce), Dūst Muhammad (1544 Ce), Jamal Al-Din (1608 Ce), Āẕar Kayvān (Bef. 1624 Ce), and Katip Çelebi (1657 Ce)

The fourteen passages surveyed below divide evenly into two genres. Seven of them are entries in dictionaries or encyclopedias written to explain the archaic foreign term (Ar./Pr./Chag.) Aržang (< Parth. Ārdhang) as ‘the title of Mani’s collection of images.’ The other seven are from polemical tales. They center on Mani’s prophethood, which Mani proved to his followers by his collection of paintings. Despite their distinct genres, the subjects of these passages are uniform in two regards: they take their readers back to the mid-third century and focus on Mani’s own Book of Pictures and its canonical images. Although none of the authors had access to Manichaean art, let alone an actual copy of the Manichaeans’ canonical volume of paintings, three of