Persian," “Islamic," And

Instabilities in the Identity of an Artistic Tradition as "Persian," “Islamic," and

“Iranian” in the Shadow of Orientalism

A Dissertation Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in

the Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Trent University

Peterborough, Canada

Cultural Studies Ph.D. Graduate Program

May 2019

Abstract

Instabilities in the Identity of an Artistic Tradition as "Persian," “Islamic," and

“Iranian” in the Shadow of Orientalism

Nooshin Aghayan

This dissertation is a critical review of the discursive formation of Islamic art in the twentieth century and the continuing problems that the early categorization of this discipline carries. It deals with the impact of these problems on the conceptualization of another category, Persian art. The subject is expounded by three propositions. First, the category of Islamic art was initially a product of Orientalism formulated regardless of the indigenous/Islamic knowledge of art. Second, during the early period when art historians examined different theoretical dimensions for constructing an aesthetic of

Islamic art in the West, they imposed a temporal framework on Islamic art in which excluded the non-traditional and contemporary art of Islamic countries. Third, after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iranian scholars eventually imposed academic authority over the discipline of Persian/Islamic art, they adopted the same inadequate methodologies that were initially used in some of the early studies on the art of the

Muslims. These propositions are elaborated by examples from twentieth-century

Iranian movements in painting, The Coffeehouse Painting and The School of

Saqqakhaneh, and the incident of swapping Willem de Kooning‟s painting Woman III with the dismembered manuscript of the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp in 1994. The conceptualization of Islamic art as a discipline is also discussed in relation to the twentieth-century cultural context of Iran. The argument is divided into three chapters in relation to three important historical moments in the history of contemporary Iran:

The Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), the modernization of Iran (1925-1975),

and the Islamic Revolution (1979-onward). The formation of the discourse of Islamic art is the fruit of nineteenth-century Orientalism. Out of this discourse, Persian art as a modern discourse addressing the visual culture of Pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran came into being. I claim that after the Islamic Revolution, Iranian academics demonstrate a theoretical loyalty to the early theorizations of Islamic/Persian art. By this token, visual signs are given a meta-signified in the narrative of Islamic art. The ontological definition of this meta-signified is subjected to the dominant ideology, which determines how different centers of meaning should come into being and disappear. In the post-Revolution academia, the center is construed as the transcendental signified.

Such inherence resulted in a fallacy in the reading of the Persian side of Islamic art, to which I refer as the “signification fallacy.” The dissertation draws on the consequences of this fallacy in the critique of Islamic art.

Keywords: Persian art, Islamic art, Iranian art; Persian classical literature, Narrative.

Image, Representation, Aniconism, Abstraction, Modernity, Tradition, Orientalism,

The Constitutional Revolution, Modernization, The Islamic Revolution. Shahnama of

Shah Tahmasp, The Coffeehouse Painting, The School of Saqqakhaneh; Modernism:

Woman III.

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To My Wounded Soul

Acknowledgements

I shall consider the completion of this work as the outcome of a continuous academic interaction between me and a large community of intellectuals, otherwise this research would be no more than a plain proposal. The members of this community were outstanding university professors and enthusiastic PhD students. I gleaned words and sentences, thoughts and ideas, theories and lessons from the dynamic field of Cultural

Studies in Trent University. The help and support of these wonderful people made it possible for me to gather my own share of intellectual harvest. This makes me thankful of each and every one who listened to my stories, read my drafts, and challenged my arguments.

I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor and mentor, Professor Jonathan

Bordo. With no doubt, I have been influenced and inspired by his deep knowledge of philosophy, history, literature, and art. From the first time that he knew about my research, he accurately predicted the trajectory of its completion and to my surprise I ended up exactly where he foresaw. Those years that I was guided by him will be always remembered by me as an unrepeatable academic experience. When I entered into Cultural Studies program, I felt no more than an imposter, incapable of communicating with the rest, and far behind anybody else, but Professor Bordo never stopped believing in me and my research. More importantly, he has taught me how to feel included, love Canada, appreciate its wilderness, and enjoy being in the multicultural fabric of its society. And yet it is not just my work since my husband and

I are also indebted to the hospitality, kindness, and generosity that we received from

Professor Bordo and his lovely family Doreen, Daniel and Rosamunde.

I would like also to thank Professor Emeritus Andrew Wernick whose rich experience and knowledge in the field of religion and history were instrumental to my research.

He could see what I was trying to say even though my first drafts always showcased all the insecurities that a writer in her second language represents. Each comment that he gave me was constructive. And more importantly, his kindness and goodwill helped me to leave behind obstacles and proceed forward. The completion of this work is also indebted to Professor Ihor Junyk whose careful reading of my work was immensely helpful. I had the honour of working with Professor Junyk as a teaching assistant for different courses. I did not miss even a single lecture conducted by him because I knew I would leave the lecture hall with new ideas for writing. He is my role model and I hope one day I can teach art and literature courses like the way he masterfully orchestrates his lectures.

I was honoured to have Professor Mohammad Tavakoli Targhi and Professor Dilyana

Mincheva as my external readers in the very last step. They challenged me to see other aspects of Iranian history and Islam by their careful reading of my dissertation. They helped me to have a better vision of the future of these fields of studies in Canadian academia. Moreover, it was absolutely heart-warming to have Professor Tavakoli-

Targhi, the distinguished scholar of Iranian history, and Professor Mincheva, one of the successful Trent alumni, in my defense committee.

A very special thanks goes to Professor Michael Morse. Michael‟s honesty in criticism was essential to my progress. He showed me how to be straightforward, careful and concise in prose writing. His friendship is invaluable. I am likewise grateful to my dear friend Dr. Sara Jane Affleck. Jane saved my dissertation by editing and proofreading it in a masterful manner. Her magical touch conjured up the essence of

my argument in a way that I could not imagine. I am also fortunate to have the friendship of many other wonderful young scholars in Trent University. My dear friends Anhiti Patniak, Moritz Ingwersen, Katie Green, Jessica Becking, Mir Hossein

Mahdavi, Gozde Kilic, Laura Greenwood, Laura Thursby, and D. Laurence Dunne changed my world and left me in awe. They re-defined the concept of friendship and I am thankful of the time, attention, friendship and love that they bestowed on me whenever I asked for company, support and friendship. And last but not the least; I want to express my gratitude to the kindest couple that I know in Peterborough: Ernest and Tina Dyck. They were my first landlords in Peterborough. Ernest and Tina have showed me an authentic love for human beings, animals, and nature that before meeting them I had forgotten all about it.

It is only obvious to me that without the support and love of my husband, Dr. Kamran

Mobini and my mother, Parvin Mazaheri, the golden experience of studying in Canada would be impossible. My mum encouraged me to pursue my dreams and embark on a new journey in the fields of humanities when others thought that I must be crazy to quit my money making job as a professional chemist. Kamran was always ready to pay all the expenses that such a radical move required and he even put his profession in danger in order to stay with me in Canada. My mum patiently accepted all the discomfort that my absence brought to her. They know that they are somehow present in each page of this work. This will stay as a secret between us.

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Table of Contents

//Abstract ------ii

//Acknowledgements------v

//List of Figures------x

//Introduction: How a Personal Quest Became a Dissertation ------xi

//The Great Division, The Cultural History of Iranian Modernization------1

- The “Orientalist” Discourse of Despotism Revisited - Modernity Retrieved: Remapping One‟s Own Imaginary Geography - Restoring History and Language

//Persian or Islamic: The Duality in the Discursive Formation of Art------44

- The Discipline of Islamic Art - Oriental Objects on Exhibition - The “Birth” of Persian Art - Arthur Upham Pope - The End Point

//In the Beginning, There Were Miniatures------87

- Persia vs. Iran - The Dilemma of Temporality - Aesthetic Division: Decorative or Representational - One the Margins of Their Fascination - Coffeehouse Painting - The School of Saqqakhaneh - The End Point

//The Signification Fallacy: Meaning as a Mirage ------159

- Retrieving the Past, Dismissing the Present - The Shahnama and its Multifunctional Literary Form - The Court of Kayumars: Its Zenith and Nadir - What Do These Miniatures Mean? - Signification Fallacy: A Template for Academic Research - Present and Absent - The End Point

//Works Cited------235

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Mirza Baba, Fath' Ali Shah (1798-1799), In Peerless images: Persian Painting and Its Sources by Eleanor Sims; with Boris I. Marshak and Ernst Grube. Yale University Press, 2002……………………………………………………..…16

Figure 2: Kamal Al Molk (Mohammad Gaffari), Mirror Hall (1895-1896). Golestan media/File:Mirror_Hall.jpg/#تاالر_آینه/Palace, Tehran. fa.wikipedia.org/wiki Accessed14 August 2017…………………………………………………………..16

Figure 3: Mohammad of the Black Pen, Demons (1360-1375). Topkapi Saray Library, Istanbul. June 29, 2018, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/siah-qalam. Accessed 15 April 2018……………………………………………………………………....109

Figure 4: Mohammad Gollar Aghasi. The White Dive Slain by Rustam,(1915), Reza Abbasi Museum Tehran. In Naqqashi Ghahve-Khane, Hadi Saif, Reza Abbasi Museum Publications, 1990………………………………………………………..134

Figure 5: Unknown Artist, Rostam Slays the White Dive, (mid-to late sixteenth century). Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum. www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk Accessed 04 November 2018………………………………………………………134

Figure 6: Mohammad Moddaber, The Tragedy of Karbala (1907). Reza Abbasi Museum, Theran. In Naqqashi Ghahve-Khane, Hadi Saif, Reza Abbasi Musuem Publications, 1990………………………………………………………………….142

Figure 7: Ayne Saqqakhaneh (The Mirror Saqqakhaneh) in Tehran, May 18 2018. (Photograph by the author)……………………………………………………..….146

Figure 8: Mansooreh Hosseini, Ali, circa 1959, Artist's Collection, Tehran, Encyclopeadia Iranica. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/Hosseini-Mansoureh Accessed 31 October 2018………………………………………………………... 150

Figure 9: Hussein Zenderoudi, The Hand (Panje), 1959, New York University collection Grey Art Gallery, June 29, 2018, www.zenderoudi.com/english/THE%20HAND.html...... 156

Figure 10: Niloufar Ghaderi-nezhad conducting murlas in Tehran streets 1979 https://nooriato.com/ Accessed 06 November 2018………………………………. .164

Figure 11: Farah Diba and Andy Warhol, 1977. http://www.collectortribune.com/2012/12/29/ farah-diba-pahlavi-on-assembling- tehrans-art-collection Accessed 16 August 2016…………………………………....171

Figure 12: Henry Moore, Two Piece Reclining Figure, Arched Leg Bronze (1969- 1970) Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran…………………………...... 172

Figure 13: Sultan Muhammad, The Court of the Kayumars (1522). Agha Khan Museum, Toronto. https://www.agakhanmuseum.org/collection/artifact/court- gayumars-folio-shahnameh-book-kings-shah-tahmasp Accessed 11 October 2016…………………………………………………………………………………191

Figure 14: Mohammad Yusef Hussein Khani, Young Man in Blue (late 17th century). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. November 27, 2016. http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/young-man-standing-in-blue-gown-13917. Accessed 10 October 2016. ………………………………………………………...208

Figure 15: Muhammad Zaman, King Turktazi‟s visit to the magical garden of Turktaz, Queen of the Faeries, 1675, British Library, London, https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts November 27, 2016...... 214

Introduction:

How a Personal Quest Became a Dissertation

Farsi, the official language of Iranians, is a very witty language full of proverbs. People appropriate verses and sentences from classical literature to flavour their day-to-day conversations with a variety of allusions. Among the numerous proverbs that people use, one comes to mind: “True art is with Iranians and only them.” In classical Persian literature, the origin of art is deciphered as transcendental, and any entity or concept adorned with this art is more precious than treasure. This proverb is taken from the Shahnama, the epic book of Iranian kings and heroes from the late tenth century. Ferdowsi, the great Iranian poet and the composer of the

Shahnama, in one instance and in the midst of telling a story, uses the word “art” to describe the true grit of Bahram-e Gur (Bahram the Zebra-Hunter), the legendary king of Iran. According to Ferdowsi, when it comes to hunting wild beasts and fighting mighty foes, Bahram is the most artful king of all.

As it seems, the classical implication of art in the Shahnama differs from what is commonly apprehended. Nowadays Iranians, by alluding to this verse, assume the common notion of art. Although it would be quite irrational to take a popular proverb into account for accentuating the cultural merits of a nation, I came across a literal interpretation of this proverb within the academic (read: official) publications about

Persian/Islamic arts when, between 2007 and 2010, I was studying at the Tehran

University of Art.

When I was a graduate student in Tehran, my previous background in chemistry was always a matter of question. To my cohort and professors, it seemed that my autodidacticism in Art Studies without having any actual experience in practicing art was less valued. In return, since I saw no contradiction in reading art

history through the glasses of a chemist, I viewed the unproductive atmosphere of

Islamic Art Studies in Iranian academia as being a questionable issue that a curious outsider perhaps might be better equipped to discern.

In our program, Pajoohesh-e Honar, which can be loosely translated as

“Studies and Research in Art,” most of the graduate students who wanted to master the intricacy of art criticism had been trained to be painters, photographers, sculptors, and filmmakers. In the first year of any undergraduate art program, art students must take a series of mandatory courses titled “Introduction to Islamic Art.” The general syllabus of these courses is designed and updated regularly under the supervision of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. This council has always been responsible for regulating the content of the academic courses since the formation of the movement to Islamize universities and cleanse them from the influence of non-

Islamic and foreign cultures. This means that the ideology of the Iranian cultural revolution targets the apparatuses that determine the centrality of Islamic doctrine for almost any cultural entity in society. To a large extent, this academic purification has been specifically applied to academic disciplines that are more vulnerable to the influence of Western culture, such as the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and art studies.

In my first academic encounter with the visual art of Islam, my “untrained” taste in perceiving this tradition did not let me comprehend those instances in the same way as others. For instance, in regard to Persian miniature painting, the crown jewel of Islamic visual arts, what other students were trained to see as masterpieces of visual art were, to my eyes, mediocre illustrations. Usually in our seminars, I would keep asking them to enlighten me about the aesthetics of Islamic art and all I was given was poetical elaborations adorned with allegories and similes regarding the transcendental

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content of Persian painting. These eulogies were focused on the content of a work of art as if, in the dichotomy of content and form, the latter is nothing more than a vessel for the former.

Trying to figure out what made my experience of Persian/Islamic art studies different, I realized that in contrast to many Iranian art students whose very first lessons were about the magnitude of the Persian side of Islamic art, I was neither trained to be infatuated by the aura of religiosity in art, nor to construe for myself any attributed content capable of justifying the mediocre form. This probably had to do with my self-taught understanding of art forms, based on a Eurocentric discourse of aesthetics. Unable to deny the significance of the non-Western arts, I was conscious of my academic illiteracy in the sphere of Islamic art studies. However, when I took this subject into more consideration, I relied on my unfamiliarity with the official discourse of art as an impetus for delving into a counterstudy of Persian/Islamic art; a type of study that let the reader decentralize/desacralize concepts such as authenticity, signification, and identity that conventionally safeguard the art of a nation from scrutiny and critique.

Having compared the quality and quantity of the studies on Islamic art conducted by Iranian scholars with that of Western academics, I came to a series of conclusions. I noticed that by the late 1990s, almost a century after the first publications on Islamic art in Europe, there was a surge in the number of inquiries on

Persian/Islamic art in Iranian academic publications. This phenomenon indicated the emergence of a new mentality among academics after the Islamic Revolution. Yet, the belated contribution of scholars to enriching the discourse of Islamic art brought scarcely any new viewpoint into the already formulated body of this discipline.

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These inquiries can be considered as a nationalistic translation of early Islamic

Art Studies, reiterating the same argument that European and American scholars of the early twentieth century employed in their studies of the Orient. By reflecting solely on the early studies of this subject, scholars unknowingly manifested some sort of self-Orientalizing tendencies in their analysis of Islamic art. Quite interestingly, the emergence of this phenomenon in Iran coincided with the development of post- colonial studies about Islamic art in the West. Within my observations of this parallel,

I developed a strong sense of skepticism towards the academic value of these self-

Orientalizing inquires. Nevertheless, at that point I could not pinpoint where the issue might lie.

I kept track of articles and papers published in three active academic journals of the time: Honarha-ye Ziba (Journal of Fine Arts since 1998), Negare (Theory since

2006), and Motaleaate Honare Islami (Islamic Art Studies since 2006). Among these articles, those that pertained to the analysis of Persian miniature painting shared a unilateral argument which clung to a religious interpretation. These journal papers present an out-dated perspective on Islamic art, which was originally expounded by a group of traditionalist thinkers in the early twentieth century and then enriched by

European and American Orientalists.

In the earlier articles, several names are recurring. Traditionalist scholars such as Titus Burckhardt, René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Seyyed Hussein

Nasr were directly or indirectly cited. Within their eulogistic articulations about the inherent relationship between spirituality and Islamic art, these scholars supported an anti-modern discourse of aesthetics by which a work of art is valued on the basis of its inherent and “perennial” beauty. In their aestheticization of the art of Muslims, traditionalists are interested in conceiving a methodology that can encompass the

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diversity of form in Islamic artefacts. In this matter, the aesthetically diverse and different nature of Islamic visual culture is the main impediment in the formation of a scholarship for Islamic art. The traditionalists‟ solution then was to consider one source of meaning, an all-encompassing signification, for all the signs, one that is present and transcendent.

The main Islamic sources for elaborating on this signification are the Quran and Hadith (quotations attributed to the holy saints of Islam). For instance, based on one verse from “The Surah of Noor” in the Quran, the aesthetics of light in Islamic painting can be construed. This understanding of beauty in the shadowless and always bright world of miniature paintings is theorized on the assumption that God has a ubiquitous presence within and beyond the material world. Thus, in his presence, nothing remains unseen. As stated in the Quran: “God is the light of heavens and earth.”

Among a few of the quotations brought into the religious aestheticization of

Islamic art, one directly situates the status of beauty within the heavenly position that only God holds. Attributed to Hussein, the second grandson of the Prophet, the quote states that “God is beautiful and he loves beauty.” Accordingly, the visual signs of any religion share the same transcendental meaning and address an emanating source of beauty and signification. Following what is said in the Quran, “We belong to God and to him we shall return,” traditionalists advance theology as the main premise for the aesthetics of Islamic art. The source, they believe, simultaneously emanates beauty and summons up beautiful entities from where they initially came. Within the converging and diverging flow of this spiritual aesthetics, entities and concepts gain and lose differentiation, but at the end, divine beauty merges them together and eliminates those that are not sacred. Therefore, no matter how differentiations come to

problematize the definition of beauty, every beautiful entity eventually passes the boundaries of differentiation and finds its way to the source through unifying with others. This way of conducting a theological method for interpreting the visual culture of Muslims is in need of a strong literary device such as allegory to sound theoretically compelling. The deep reliance of the traditionalists on the allegorical interpretation of Islamic art indicates their rejection of the modern understanding of signs and semiology. In other words, in Islamic art, the relationship between visual signs and their supposed meaning is consistent and reasoned, not arbitrary.

Following the anti-modern tendencies of the traditionalists, scholars in Iran developed a methodological preference by which their arguments were oriented towards justifying a transcendental center for the examples of Islamic art produced within the cultural borders of Iran. In his study of the different methodologies in

Islamic art studies, S. Razi Moosavi Gilani, a contemporary Iranian scholar of the post-Revolution academia, considers the Husserlian descriptive phenomenology as an applicable method for studying Islamic visual culture. Moosavi Gilani believes that

Islamic art researchers by „bracketing‟ every outward statement about the reality of a phenomenon, for instance a work of Islamic art, can reach to the essence of Islamic art. Accordingly, the essence of Islamic art is tied to the Quranic doctrine of divine beauty. The bracketing method safeguards a timeless concept such as the divine beauty, which religious works of art are supposed to carry within, from the deteriorative impact of temporal variables. Therefore, “instead of historical, social, economic or other outward circumstances of phenomena, in phenomenology, one should target the essence of a phenomenon.” (195)

This reductionist method of phenomenology, in excluding unnecessary presuppositions such as history, science, and literature, suited allegorical

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interpretations the most. However, by borrowing bits and parts from the Husserlian descriptive phenomenology, this method in the context of Islamic art studies functions as a pseudo-phenomenological method rather than a philosophical inquiry of the aesthetics of Islamic art. Although even the application of this pseudo-phenomenology by itself is not necessarily right or wrong, the conspicuous absence of other methodologies in the academic fields of Iran after the Islamic Revolution raises many questions.

In these journal articles, scholars usually follow a formula in argumentation.

They usually start asking rhetorical questions about the content of Islamic art or the symbolism of the signs and then enter into the main argument by squeezing the object of research – more often than not, a miniature painting – for the last drop of signification. Therefore, the sacred signs gain significance and then contribute to the formation of a meta-narrative of Islamic art. By this token, the essence of Islamic art is ahistorical, universal, and unchangeable. With the help of this methodology, scholars are able to reinforce their arguments with a series of binary oppositions.

Relying on the certitude of the ruling dichotomies, scholars are able to define how visual signs in Islamic art signify meaning. Gradually, the analysis of Islamic art goes beyond its scholarship and the object of research becomes only a medium for practicing theology.

I also noted that Iranian scholars like to accentuate the constructive influence of Persian art in the formation of Islamic visual culture. This is usually done with the help of an acclamatory tone in the arguments. The subject is usually reinforced by underestimating the influence of other neighbouring civilizations, such as Greco-

Roman, Indian, and Chinese cultures, on Islamic art. Therefore, in favour of boosting nationalistic sentiments, scholars usually consider different examples of Persian art as

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the highlights of artistic splendour and those who created such art as spectacular artists. Therefore, in the absence of any other contributing nations, it seemed as if “the true art is with Iranians and only them.”

This acclamatory tone in the literature of Art Studies in general is pleasing to many Iranian readers. The two sides of their dual identity, Persian and Muslim, receive prestige and grandeur equally, but to someone who can draw a line between a descriptive analysis loaded with nationalistic (read: ideological) sentiments and an impartial argument, these analyses appear as nothing more than non-academic articulations. Removing these applauding statements would logically make it easier to discern the flaws and imperfection of Persian/Islamic art. Now the question is: How resilient is the transcendental signified in the face of aesthetic renditions that emphasize imperfection and non-spiritual meaninglessness in Persian/Islamic art?

In general, the dominant discourse of Islamic art in Iran is in disharmony with many recent readings conducted by non-Iranian scholars. A century after the formation of the scholarship of Islamic art study in the West, the study of this category has become the subject of radical revisions in the Western academia. The contemporary Islamic art scholars have mostly aimed to decanonize the dominance of early studies on the art of Muslims. The early methodologies in the categorization of

Islamic art have become the subject of post-colonial studies in art history. Thus, when international scholars question the initial theorization of Islamic art, the exclusive and self-praising quality of the domestic analysis of Persian/Islamic art makes the collected body of research in Iran isolated in time and geography.

When doing my counterstudy, I was quite disappointed to see that within the dominant reading of Islamic art, researchers were relatively reluctant to deal with its ideological issues. The scholars have constructed a fortress around the subject that

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rarely permits any new hypothesis to question its center. I think of the fabric of this fortress as words that build up a discourse and draw a halo around it via semi-religious statements in order to protect the center of meaning. Critics and scholars, by devaluating the significance of the form in reading art, take refuge in this fortress from the scrutiny of other disciplines and radical standpoints. The problem is that in the absence of the form, the brick walls of the fortress with no mortar joints would be susceptible to collapse. Only a fallacy in argumentation can hold these walls together.

My counterstudy is thus focused on finding controversies in the allegorical readings of the content of Persian/Islamic art with the help of the formal characteristics of Islamic architecture and painting. Between painting and architecture,

I chose the former in order to better observe the dominant discourse of Islamic art. I had two reasons for excluding Islamic architecture from my investigation: Islamic architecture, due to its dominant presence in the public sphere and its religious functionality, shows a stronger adherence to the attributed definitions of Islamic art.

But Islamic painting, by disturbing the so-called principals of Islamic aniconism in the private sphere of royal libraries, has controversy inscribed in its very title. In other words, the rhetorical justifications that scholars need to employ in the analyses of

Islamic painting are more prone to scrutiny than those of Islamic architecture.

In reviewing Islamic painting, Persian miniature painting stands as the main branch of this category. Persian painting retains its prominence within Islamic art through the genre of miniature painting. Miniature paintings are small illustrations in classical illuminated manuscripts. With the help of these illustrations, Persian literature was accompanied by visual art and preserved like a piece of jewellery in royal libraries. In other words, the pre-modern visual culture of Iran was constructed on the basis of a reciprocal relationship between visual and textual signs. Literature

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provided a proper content for painting, and painting, by accessorizing literature, helped it to go beyond its textual form and become an important part of Islamic visual culture.

Painting in Persian classical manuscripts, by offering a visual rendition of the stories, remains completely loyal to literature. Illustrators were also loyal to a series of conventions in visual representation for almost three centuries. They imported the techniques of miniature painting from different cultures. The influence of Chinese watercolour painting is quite discernable in Persian miniatures, as is the Christian tradition of illuminated manuscripts. The employment of the technique of tessellation from Islamic architecture in the two-dimensional plane of representation in painting is one of the authentic elements that layers the beauty of miniature painting with the symmetrical repetition of simple geometrical forms. Therefore, among the western conventions of the traditional techniques of beautification, this medium contains different visual signs in its multilayered context. If the reader takes the reciprocity of the textual and visual signs in a miniature painting as the main starting point for

“decoding the content,” there is possibly no need to prioritize any symbolic or allegorical meanings with respect to the intertextual relationship of the signs. Simply put, it would be a flawed argument to consider only one center of meaning for Islamic art regardless of the impact of any other variable.

This standpoint can be reckoned as a rather new approach in reading the content of Islamic painting. In the concluding decades of the twentieth century, many

Islamic art scholars started to detach from the halo of religiosity and consider miniatures as what they are: the artefacts of the visual culture of the pre-modern

Islamic world. In contrast to the center-oriented logic of phenomenological readings of Islamic art, this alternative standpoint can easily contain non-conventional

instances of Islamic art, those that are mediocre and even controversial subjects.

Therefore, every instance of Islamic art can be included in an academic reading, not just its ostensible shining examples.

I had questions about the traditional techniques of visual representation in

Persian miniature painting. Among them were questions about the naivety of the representation of the human figure; the unrealistic representations of light and depth of field, or the lack thereof; and the ambiguous representation of gender. These questions could not be easily raised in any academic analyses of Persian art. According to the dominant discourse of Islamic art studies, none of those formal traits have been considered as weakness; quite the contrary, they have always been regarded as the original, unique, and symbolic signs of Islamic art. In this regard, Seyyed Hossein

Nasr, in his book Islamic Art and Spirituality, has heavily invested in offering a different aesthetic for Persian miniature. In his theorization of the formal characteristics of miniature painting, Nasr sees the form as being in the service of the content, resisting the tyranny of the illusion of reality in the material world.

Through making comparisons between the Renaissance conventions of perspective and the way in which in miniature painting the depth of field is rendered,

Nasr takes the former convention as “Perspectiva Artificialis,” or a deceiving lie, which does not let the beholder see true reality. In Nasr‟s words:

The Persian miniature succeeded in transforming the plane surface of the miniature to a canvas depicting grades of reality, and was able to guide man from the horizon of material existence, and also profane and mundane consciousness, to higher states of being and consciousness, to an intermediate world with its own space, time, movement, colours and forms where events occur in a real but not necessarily physical manner. (Islamic Art and Spirituality 179)

Other deductions are made through the prism of traditionalism in order to explain the crude techniques of shading and hatching, or the lack thereof. The non-realistic

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representation of the human figure is considered as a compromised solution, for having the ban of representation bent in favour of figurative painting or vice versa.

Finally, there is no answer to the question of the ambiguous gender of some of the characters in these paintings.

I believe that to the eyes of an impartial observer, someone who does not know about the supposedly transcendental signification of Persian painting, or someone who is simply unfamiliar with the visual conventions of miniature painting, these works are more or less beautiful illustrations, and not necessarily masterpieces. They simply depict the secular subjects of Persian classical literature. There is no sign of religious spirituality in the representation of pagan myths, pre-Islamic history, or romantic poems. Even when the subject of miniature painting deals with explicitly religious themes, the same conventions are evoked. The loyalty of artists to the conventions of representation can be considered as a function of their knowledge of painting.

The history of Iranian art shows that whenever artists acquired a new understanding of representational techniques, they did not hesitate to appropriate it in their works. Perspective and shading techniques found their way easily into miniature painting as soon as Iranian artists encountered European art. When the small arena of miniature painting could not contain the complexity of the rules of linear perspective, artists even started to emigrate from the transcription industry to other arenas. In order to understand the fluctuation of aesthetics in miniature painting, one needs to supplement investigations with other disciplines such as Persian literature and history; yet, within a phenomenological reading of miniature painting, these sources are more or less dealt with as easily ignored presuppositions.

A counterstudy of Persian literature, the main source of content for miniature painting, might also result in the same skepticism that an alternative study of Persian

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painting generates, especially when Persian classical poetry is imbued with the representation of forbidden deeds in Islam, such as lust and inebriation. Thus, in order to deal with the manifest content of the literary texts, the same methodology in reading miniature painting is applied. Some of my university professors at the Tehran

University of Art unknowingly escalated my skepticism to a new level, and I think of their persistence in adhering to these allegorical readings of Islamic/Persian art even as an academic conspiracy. Once, in an advanced course on Persian literature, one of the lecturers had a really hard time convincing us that in Persian poetry, words and sentences are in fact condensed and displaced signs through which the poet discusses something beyond the manifest content; therefore, in order to “interpret” the dream that Persian poets composed and then find the “golden road” to the realm of the transcendental unknown, one needs to go beyond the banality of their manifest content. This sounded quite contradictory and negligent of the quality of the form in

Persian art and literature. If Persian poetry only needs a meticulous deciphering of its symbolic signs in order to be correctly comprehended, why is it that the visual representation of it in miniature painting is a literal depiction of its manifest content?

The literal reading of Persian poetry in many instances gives the reader an elaborated and almost detailed description of a Dionysian lifestyle prevailing in pre- modern Iranian society. Poetry eulogistically describes the merits of drinking wine and making love with beautiful youth. Omar Khayyam, in the Rubáiyát, effortlessly defies any symbolic interpretation of his poetry and encourages his readers to live the best of their lives as if there were no future. The sonnets of Hafez, in their literal interpretation, are beautifully sonorous verses in which Hafez, disdaining the hypocritical clerics of his time, overtly claims that drinking wine with a beautiful lover in private is much better than faking piety in public. When the notion of love is

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taken into consideration, the manifest content of Persian poetry insidiously addresses one of the most controversial subjects in Persian literature: same-sex love between a male adult and an adolescent.

In Persian poetry, with the exception of the stories of famous lovers in which the beloved is emphatically identified as a girl, the object of the speaker‟s love has an ambiguous gender. The reader may have no clue about the gender of the beloved, unless he or she knows about the existence of a third gender in pre-modern society of

Iran. In the language of poetry, there is a keyword for this non-binary gender:

“Shahed.” The significance of this key term in Persian culture has already been argued especially by diasporic researchers. In her influential book Women with Moustache,

Men without Beards (2005), Afsaneh Najmabadi has followed the impact of modernity on the representation of gender in Qajar painting, when artists for almost the first time deliberately tried to break with tradition and represent gender in its conventional binary forms. Willem Floor, in A Social History of Sexual Relations in

Iran (2008), recounts the history of homosexual relationships in Iran as a “common affair.” In the collective body of this type of research, Persian literature is the most reliable document.

In the majority of instances, the form of Persian poetry does not help the reader to unravel the gender ambiguity that the notion of the beloved implies; quite the contrary, Persian language, with its gender-neutral structure, enhances this poetical uncertainty. Therefore, Shahed is a gender-undifferentiated figure. S/he is described and represented as the beautiful, effeminate, young, and obedient companion of poets or kings. If in Persian poetry Shahed is merely accounted for as an ambiguous notion of a beloved, in miniature painting Shahed is almost everywhere. Miniature painting without Shahed loses more than half of its characters. Shahed is the androgynous

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figure usually represented as a cupbearer or a musical instrument player, or sometimes as a beautiful chevalier in the middle of a battle dressed up in armour but not really taking part in a fight. Shahed is the one who has not grown a beard but whose face is adorned with a pair of curly sideburns. Therefore, he is neither a man nor a woman, since only those who have a full bearded face can join the club of first-class masculine figures. Shahed as an individual never shares the same social status as men. Standing on the inferior side of the line drawn by a “real” man to designate his societal role,

Shahed, along with women, receives all the blame that religious rules put on the shoulders of disobedient sinners, including sodomites. Eventually Shahed is the one whose identity as a passive partner in a homosexual relationship experiences reproach and exclusion on the verge of modernity in Iran. Despite its ubiquitous presence, the

Shahed figure is an anomaly and prone to exclusion whenever its identity threatens the clean and perfect picture of Iranian culture.

Although classical Persian poetry and painting have survived the potential threat of exclusion through the help of allegorical interpretations, this solution has a serious problem. Allegorical interpretations give a fixed center of meaning to visual and textual signs, and reduce the diverse narratives of a text into one meta-narrative. It offers a series of binary oppositions to guarantee the fixity of meaning and does not allow other narratives to challenge the centrality of meaning. If the purpose of creating a work of art is to serve the grand narrative of religion, its form must address only the center. Within the aesthetic confinement that the obedience of form to religious content generates, there is no opportunity for artists to examine other capacities of the form of art. Not only does this mean that the practice of other types of art would receive fewer acknowledgements, especially if they don‟t fit in the category of Islamic or religious, but Islamic art would stay limited to the coordinates of a single definition.

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The confinement of Islamic art studies to a single narrative has had a strong impact on the students‟ engagement with Islamic art studies. As a result, the deployment of other interdisciplinary studies in reading Islamic art is rather difficult because the pseudo- phenomenological reading of Islamic art functions almost as an ideological state apparatus capable of reproducing and maintaining a desired ideology by excluding ambiguous signs and anomalies.

The dominance of ideological readings of Islamic art has recently yielded to the scrutiny of other skeptical readers in Iran, other researchers with whom I share the same concerns about the discourse of Islamic Art. Out of the exclusive circle of research, Madjid Akhgar, a distinguished freelance critic, published his critical reading of Islamic art in 2011. Akhgar, in Fani and Baghi (Mortal and Immortal: An

Introduction to the Study of Persian Art), embarks on questioning the symbolic signification of Persian painting. He offers a very complicated argument in this book in order to admit the crucial role of Iranian cultural history in reading Persian painting.

Akhgar even draws attention to the necessity of employing a radical iconography in order to theoretically discredit the prevalence of religious readings in Islamic art. His critical investigation of the traditionalist readings is a new chapter in Islamic art studies; however, in examining an alternative reading of miniature painting, Akhqar also gets trapped in the vicious circle of finding a meta-signified for Persian painting.

He prioritizes the significance of the faculty of the imagination over the visual conventions and perhaps unknowingly premises a new transcendental signified for

Persian miniature painting. Therefore, instead of decanonizing the centrality of the center altogether, he swaps the significance of religion with the ingenuity of Persian artists in creating an imaginative world in painting, which does not even succumb to the confining presuppositions of the transcribing industry.

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In a broader view, Akhgar, by challenging the dominant method of reading

Persian/Islamic art, aims to diagnose the problem of art in contemporary Iran. This problem shows itself when the same methodology of analyzing Islamic/Persian art cannot be employed in reading Iranian art. Simply put, the same reductionist, overgeneralizing, and acclamatory tone present in the pseudo-phenomenological reading of Islamic art is not easily applicable to post-miniature paintings, including those emerging in Iranian modernism. This theoretical incompatibility would address an aesthetic gap between Persian and Iranian art. It also indicates the inadequacies of the theories that support the category of Iranian art, or even the lack thereof.

At this point, it may be inevitable for a reader to ask the most controversial question: What has the theorization of Persian/Islamic art bequeathed to the study of

Iranian art? This question has not been clearly addressed by Iranian critics yet. Not surprisingly, the reason for this academic inattention has to do with insufficiencies that the meta-narrative of Persian/Islamic art has left behind for the next generation of researchers to deal with.

There are mixed opinions regarding Iranian contemporary art and its unclear prospect. Nowadays, Iranian art shares the same destiny with that of other developing countries in the Middle East. To a large extent, the instrumental factors that affect the achievement of success in artistic fields are political not aesthetic in this region.

Among thousands of artists waiting for validation, Iranians need something more than the aesthetic reputation of their classical history in order to develop a global artistic identity. One of the important achievements of Iranian artists is the celebrated presence of cinematographers, such as the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami

(1940-2016), whose work became known to a wider audience during the 1990s at many international film festivals. Kiarostami‟s mastery in portraying modernism in its

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cinematic form remains without comparison. Yet, his unique success underlines the fact that other Iranian artists, in practicing the aesthetics of modernism, can hardly compete with others on an international scale.

In the 1980s, due to the emigration of many artists after the Islamic

Revolution, the encompassing cultural borders that used to accommodate Iranian art found wider dimensions. Not only does the fluidity of the defining borders of Iranian art render any sort of categorization impossible, but it rejects the implications of former categories. In postulating the aesthetics, genealogy, and scholarship of

Persian/Islamic art, post-colonial critics have serious doubts about the value of many of the early studies in this field. To the ears of other postmodern readers of non- western art history, speaking of a unifying term, with its inclinations towards generating a meta-narrative of art, sounds quite out-dated and, even more so, reactionary and counter-productive. These statements would lead the reader to see that, in contrast to Persian art, Iranian art resists adhering to any center-oriented categorizations.

The issue of Iranian modern art is the main question of many scholars. Iranian diasporic scholars and active freelance researchers in Iran share the same concerns about the condition of contemporary art and the not-yet-shaped discipline of Iranian art. The most promising news for Iranian art studies is that within the last decade, the collective body of research on the cultural history of Iranian contemporary art has effectively increased. Among the Iranian freelance scholars in Iran, Siamak

Delzendeh, with Tahavolat-e Tasviri Iran, Barresi- e Enteqadi (The Visual Evolution of form in Iranian Art: A Critical Review), and Hamid Keshmirshekan, with Kankashi bar Honare Moaser-e Iran (A Dialogue on the Contemporary Art of Iran) published in 2015 and 2017 respectively, have strongly contributed to a comprehensive reading

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of Iranian art. Through revisiting the history of Iranian art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Delzendeh employs a critique of Orientalism in order to bridge post-colonial and Iranian art studies. Keshmirshekan takes the study of Iranian art onto a new level by redefining the concept of neo-traditionalism in relation to Iranian modernism in the 1960s.

In one of the latest efforts to characterize Iranian contemporary art, Talinn

Grigor has put “the history of ideologies, institutions and individuals” in the arrangement of “three interdependent parts: the street, the studio and the exile”

(Contemporary Iranian Art 12.) “Street” and “studio” in the cultural context of the contemporary Iran stand for two different spheres of activity. The “street” refers to a group of works accepted officially as art in the public sphere, whereas the “studio” addresses anti-establishment works produced in the private sphere. Outside of the cultural borders of Iran, Iranian artists in exile have their own language of art in a diasporic context where their identity as the minority stands before their art.

Grigor, by showing the impact of different social spheres on the identity of

Iranian art, underlines the fact that in communicating with the audience, a concrete definition of nationality cannot efficiently address the full scope of Iranian art, even though ultimately the contemporary art of Iran consists of parts from each sphere.

Through the gradual emergence of many alternative standpoints in the study of

Islamic and Iranian art within the last decade, the official reading of Islamic art in Iran has become more vulnerable to critical readings than at any other time.

At one point in my research in December of 2017, I had the chance to have a conversation with Dr. Iraj Dadashi, one of my former professors at the Tehran

University of Art. Based on his publications and lectures, I always presumed that he would be one of the strongest advocates of traditionalism in Iranian academia. Prior to

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this meeting and based on this presumption, I had completed the third chapter of this manuscript, aided by studying his approach toward the study of Islamic art. Having spent years on researching and supervising graduate students, Dadashi has developed his own methodology in analyzing instances of Islamic art. I referred to his methodology, rather sarcastically, as a “template for academic research” that, if followed, would guarantee the publication of any paper in the field. Seven years after I had last sat in his class as a student, I found Dadashi completely open to my critique of his methodology and at the same time in agreement with some of the challenging opinions I proposed regarding the problematic nature of Islamic art studies in Iran.

After two hours of conversation, he modestly admitted that Western scholars have recently appeared more successful in mending the academic lacuna generated by the hasty evaluations of the visual culture of the Orient in the first half of the twentieth century, whereas Iranian scholars are still greatly inclined to appropriate the same old problematic arguments. Even when I asked him about the quality of the recent academic research, Dadashi was a serious judge of Iranian academia. Quite interestingly, there was an overt reproach in his comment when he referred to the collective body of graduate theses and dissertations as “mediocre and inconsequential works, incapable of holding ideas consistently, like a weak mortar that cannot even hold two bricks together in a wall.”1 We came to the conclusion that it may appear promising that Iranian scholars have become more aware of the scholarly deficiencies that a meta-narrative impels and tried to take an active part in rejuvenating the study, but it is undeniable that they have a lot of work to do in order to counterbalance the prevailing academic lag in Iranian academia.

1 Iraj Dadashi, Assistant Professor at Tehran University of Art, in discussion with the author, December 9, 2017, the Campus of Bagh-e Melli, Tehran.

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Meanwhile, the existing lag in academic studies is not the primary issue, mainly because Iranian contemporary art is not identified solely by its Islamic dimensions. It is not clear how deeply Iranian contemporary artists can relate themselves to an exclusive methodology that claims to have a timeless and universal argumentation for the discourse of Iranian art. If the possible incompatibilities between the ideological framework and a work of art intertwine in an argument, the lack of appreciation for any other artistic identities will be understandable. That is why the problem of contemporary Iranian art is a problem of identity.

While these arguments are more or less addressed in this manuscript, the scope of this research could not contain all the issues I have raised in this introduction. Thus, in this dissertation, I have tried to make a contribution to the revision of the discipline of Islamic art. In my initial proposal in 2014, I had the great ambition to work on the representation of gender and the characterization of the Shahed figure in Persian miniature painting. I wanted to show that the methodological preference of Iranian scholars in analyzing Persian painting is actually an act of censorship in the disguise of research aimed at concealing some controversial facts and rendering incontrovertible the domestic academic approach towards the visual culture of pre- modern Iran. While this hypothesis deserves a thorough and critical investigation, I have eventually come to the conclusion that before delving into such an immense and challenging project, I need to explore the impediments that the study of

Persian/Islamic art is still raising.

Readers of this manuscript will observe that there are some recurring key concepts in this argument. Frequently, I talk about gaps, academic belatedness, and the temporal and conceptual incompatibilities that lie between the foreign and the native conceptualizations of art in Iran. I argue that the problems that a reader may

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encounter in the study of the visual culture of Iran originate in a confusion that the threefold characteristics of “Persian,” “Iranian,” and “Islamic” generate. In order to show that these problems do not stem solely from one certain scholarship, this study explores the conceptual gaps in the discourse of art generated by a spectrum of academic speculations, from early studies done by the European Orientalists, to the formation of an ideologically charged definition for Islamic art in post-Revolutionary

Iran. The existence of these gaps indicates the dominance of the logic of binarism over the discursive understanding of the threefold identity of art. One way of exploring, questioning, and perhaps subverting these binaries is through revisiting the contemporary history of Iran and pinpointing the moments that various bifurcations came into being and began to affect Iranian culture.

Thus, the succession of chapters in this manuscript follows a chronological order that addresses the formation of the three adjectives of “Persian,” “Iranian,” and

“Islamic” art that have characterized the cultural history or the practice of art in Iran respectively. The hypothesis behind this argument is that the attribution of each adjective to the collective body of artefacts or to the practice of art is a function of the politico-cultural circumstances that prioritize one identity over the other. The argument begins with a glance at the cultural history of Iran, when the nation was on the verge of entering into a new era in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This era was marked by the emergence of a circle of intellectuals whose unconditional belief in the cultural achievements of the Enlightenment, the empiricist sciences, and the Western narrative of Persian history and literature helped them to develop a new mentality of Iranian nationality. Iranian intellectuals counterbalanced the authority of the religious establishment, or the ulama, in the educational system of the nineteenth century. By disseminating modern knowledge through the early educational

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establishments, these intellectuals furthered societal changes and encouraged the modernization of Iran in the beginning of the twentieth century. Soon, the avalanche of change targeted other cultural domains controlled by the ulama.

By importing the modern narrative of Iranian history and by (re)defining the self and the other in the discourse of nationality, intellectuals replaced the centrality of

Islamic historiography with modern accounts of history. However, the discrepancies between Islamic and European accounts of history resulted in the formation of two different conceptualizations of the past: the despised past, from which the nation ought to divorce itself, and the desired past, which should be revived. Moreover, within the confrontation between these two accounts of history, a different aspect of the Persian language was introduced that claimed to be pristine and authentic, uninfluenced by alien languages and close to the supposed common language of

Iranians before the Arabic language became the lingual franca between Iranians and

Arabs.

Having acquired a modern definition of the self, Iranian intellectuals could successfully supersede the ulama in defining a concrete national identity at the time of the modernization of Iran; however, the temporal duality made the definition of

Iranian identity quite inconsistent and also left a permanent ambiguity in the conceptualization of modernity. In one respect, by divorcing the traditional/Islamic conventions, intellectuals planned to build a modern future for Iran on the basis of utilizing the forerunning aspects of progress and modern knowledge. Thus, they pursued the development of infrastructure, the popularization of modern education, and the establishment of a secular government. In another respects, the modern future that Iranian intellectuals envisaged was supposed to represent the merits of the desired past. In between these two drives, the main parameter that separated the desired and

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the despised past was mainly associated with the late seventh century. During this time, Islam became dominant in the Iranian plateau, and the last non-Islamic dynastic system, the Sassanids, ceased to exist. The disciplinary formation of Persian art studies by Orientalists provided an important opportunity for Iranian intellectuals to reinforce the discourse of nationality. Like nineteenth century European accounts of

Persian history, early theorizations of Persian art manifested the same subtle tendency towards the myth of the Aryan race. These theories characterized Persian art as a uniquely influential tradition with a pristine essence that could resist even the deteriorating impact of invaders. Accordingly, the discourse of Persian art would support the idea that Iranian people are essentially different from Arabs and Turks, and the pristine visual culture of Iran would give testimony to this fact. Therefore,

Arabs and Turks who were traditionally taken into account as the representatives of two peoples who invaded Iran were disrespected. Instead, intellectuals assumed that

Iranians shared the same racial roots with Europeans, which allowed them to feel one step closer to the representatives of modernity and progress. At the time of the

Constitutional Revolution, this proposition worked perfectly with the ideal picture of modern identity that intellectuals pursued.

By the time that Ahmad Shah, the last king of the Qajars, was forced to abdicate in 1925, and the first Pahlavis, Reza Shah, took power, Iranian intellectuals realized that the history of Persian art could add more credit to the (re)definition of

Iranian identity. Henceforth, they used the history and aesthetics of Persian art as a means of refashioning Iran during the first Pahlavi dynasty. In this regard, A Survey of

Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present (1937), the magnum opus of Arthur

Upham Pope, successfully intensified the discursive borders that kept the two sides of

Iranian identity, Islamic and Persian, apart. To a large extent, the amount of attention

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that Persian art received eclipsed the significance of Islamic art, the main scholarship from which the discourse of Persian art was stratified. This also influenced the efforts that Iranian artists of the time put into the practice of other forms of art, especially those artistic activities that did not follow the same aesthetics of Persian miniature painting.

The focal point in the next argument is the notion of negligence: in the aestheticization of Islamic art, the function of time as an important variable was not considered in the evolution of form. In this regard, Islamic art was either considered an atemporal entity independent from the impact of history, or its so-called history was considered limited to a millennium of existence between the formation of Islamic civilization in the seventh century and the beginning of the Enlightenment era in the seventeenth century. The direct impact of this negligence shows itself in the aestheticization of Islamic or Persian art.

Almost a decade after the first publication of the Survey, when excitement around Persian/Islamic art studies abated in the West, it became possible for artists to raise a new voice in the absence of Orientalists and the heavy influence of the discourse of Persian art. The formation of the School of Saqqakhaneh 2 in the early

1960s coincided with the increasing power of the second Pahlavis, Mohammad Reza

Shah, whose plans for the modernization of Iran encouraged the visual culture of the time to be more competitive with the latest movements in the West. In the School of

Saqqakhaneh, Iranian modernists, by borrowing forms and motifs from traditional visual culture and appropriating the aesthetics of modern art, were able to desacralize

2 The word Saqqa in Saqqakhaneh means water boy and Khaneh means house. Saqqakhaneh refers to a public place that is designed for placing a container of drinking and providing water for thirsty passengers. This place is considered sacred. It is usually adorned with votive offerings in a form of drinking utensils, candles, banners, etc.

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traditional art from the halo of religion and history. The prevailing secularism in the language of Saqqakhaneh artists favoured the new framework of identity that had the notion of modern Iran at its core.

The climax of creative activity in the School of Saqqakhaneh had a short time span. By the time of the outburst of the Islamic Revolution in 1978, a major shift in the cultural fabric of society had happened. After Iran was established as an Islamic

Republic, many modern institutions, those that came into being since the twentieth century and made the gradual replacement of the clerical establishment possible, came under harsh scrutiny. The systematic investigation of the influence of modern culture in the different strata of society was conducted by launching a cultural revolution in

1980, which started with a cleansing of the universities and then grew to have influence over other cultural and social institutions.

As one of the main aftereffects of the cultural revolution, the higher education system started to accommodate research-based programs for art students, in which the discipline of Islamic art was the major topic of research. To some extent, the sudden attention to the discipline of Islamic art was an ideological backlash against the practice of modern art. In the final chapter, the 1994 incident, in which Willem de

Kooning‟s painting Woman III was swapped with the dismembered manuscript of the

Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, is brought up in order to underline the ideological proclivities that the cultural revolution defined. Another important phenomenon is the establishment of a systematic way for reading Islamic art. The re-evaluation of Islamic art in the post-Revolution era is conducted on the basis of the supposedly religious content of Islamic art. As a result, Islamic art in Iranian academia is received as an ideologically charged definition.

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Overall, this dissertation demonstrates the level of my engagement with the twentieth-century cultural history of Iran, as well as my interest in critical theory. I cannot claim that my contribution is original, nor that it can be considered anywhere close to the other outstanding works that precede me in this field. I am standing on the shoulders of giants, reviewing different cultural phenomena that shaped my present identity. Therefore, my main argument is indebted to the collected body of research and scholarship in the field Iranian Studies. Most of the works in this field have been completed in the past four decades and outside of Iran‟s cultural borders. The noteworthy contribution of Iranian diasporic scholars in the reinforcement of the different areas of Iranian Studies has given significance and a unique voice to this scholarship; however, it also underlines the fact that in post-Revolution academia,

Iranian scholars have not been able to compete with their counterparts yet. Accepting this fact, here, I am in purgatory with my work, reflecting upon the shortcomings of studying art and humanities in Iran.

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Chapter One

The Great Division: The Cultural History of Iranian Modernization

In reviewing the historiography of Iranian art studies, the dichotomy of

“Persian” and “Islamic” is always an integral part of the discussion. It is almost impossible to mention this dichotomy without taking on the task of defining Iranian identity beforehand. All the ways to conduct such a discussion are united by a common vantage point: to tell the story of the modernization of Iran and the formation of modern nationalism in the early twentieth century. The attributive adjectives of

“Persian” and “Islamic” that qualify the term art also indicate the conceptual and aesthetic divisions inherent to this argument.

Questions concerning the dichotomy of “Persian” and “Islamic” and their qualification with art are diverse and the possible answers open to dispute. In regard to discussing a collection of artworks produced inside the cultural borders of Iran, there is always a distinct pause between the two sides of the dichotomy, as if Islamic and

Persian art simultaneously complete and contrast each other. I argue that the duality is conceptualized based on a modern understanding of Iranian history and culture.

Therefore, in order to show the conceptual discrepancies and/or the inherent correspondences that Islamic and Persian arts manifest, one needs to delve into the history behind the invisible but significant divide between these two intertwined premises of Iranian culture.

In the modern context of studying art in Iran, the term “art,” based on the

Western discourse of aesthetics, is an imported concept relatively new to Iranian scholars. The ontological and epistemological definitions of Persian and Islamic art have come from the European traditions of aesthetics and historiography. Prior to the importation of the modern knowledge of art, Iranian scholars had a different

understanding of aesthetics and visual culture. In other words, the bifurcation of art as

“Islamic” or “Persian” is a modern way of describing a tradition that had been honoured by Iranians as one of the highest ways of visual and textual expression and known as Honar. Honar in Iranian culture does not have any distinct classification or philosophical theorization. Before it was tied to visual culture, Honar was associated with harmony in composition, subtlety in embellishment, and grandeur in form in both literary and visual contexts.

The notion of Honar in classical Persian literature is interpreted differently from the way in which art and aesthetics are usually taken into account. In contrast to the modern discourse of aesthetics, the traditional understanding of Honar does not contain conventional distinctions associated with formal traits, identity, history, ethnicity, or even religion. The traditional conceptualization of Honar takes art as a criterion for evaluating the similitude and unity inherent to the literary and visual signs that carry the sublime notion of art within. When it comes to art, honar-mand, an artist, is a person who could mediate between the sensible and the visible and address the beauty.

Prior to the initial categorization of the art of Muslims in the West, most

Iranian artworks had been categorized under the rubric of Oriental artefacts. This indicates that the cultural definition of Iran was considered as integrated with the culture of other Islamic territories. In fact, when it came to the world of Islam, the

“imaginative geography” of the Orient needed no other designation. With the rapid growth of modern knowledge about Iranian history, literature, and art, a new understanding of the cultural geography of Iran took shape. In this regard, European

Orientalists, by compiling the results of archaeological and historiographical surveys as well as the secular reading of Persian history, played an important role. The new

discourse on Iranian identity benefited from the new standpoint of Western scholars towards the visual and textual culture of Iranians.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Iran was a hotbed of political and societal discontent. This period is marked by the rise of nationalist sentiments among Iranian intellectuals and elites. We can see this socio-political phenomenon as the by-product of a modern revision of Persian culture by the West. The cultural history of Iran, according to the Orientalists, was a new narrative with secular and non-Islamic dimensions. Through translation, this new narrative was turned into a manifesto that could be used to construct the next generation of modern Iranians. The forerunners of this generation are known as “the intellectuals.” Iranian intellectuals stood against the ulama, one of the most powerful establishments after the monarchy.

They tried to revive that classical picture of the self that had been overshadowed and neglected throughout the domination of Islamic narratives over Persian literature and history.

According to the modern definition of non-Western arts, one can apply a historical distinction to different forms of Iranian art by considering a chronological differentiation between those works that were produced before and those after the occupation of Iran in the seventh century by the invasive army of Muslim Arabs.

Emphasis was first placed on this historical turning point after the secular revision of

Iranian history, when, in celebrating the Pre-Islamic art of Iran, it became the dominant mode of studying Persian culture.

Many historians have long regarded the surrender to Islam as the most crucial turning point in the cultural and socio-political history of Iran, but during the nineteenth century, this event took on a different symbolic signification. There are other historically critical moments in the history of Iran with the same climactic effect

that could have been considered as important as surrender to Islam; nonetheless, their significance is overshadowed and even ignored amidst the impact of the Islamic rearrangement of the society between the seventh and tenth centuries. The continuation of Islamic culture in Iran is probably the main reason for considering this historical moment as the most important one.

With the help of secular narratives of history and literature, Iranian intellectuals acquired a new mentality that helped them turn the definition of Iranian identity into a matter of dispute. Due to the tremendous dimensions of the social issues of the late nineteenth century, some intellectuals began to develop a deep sense of resentment towards the ideology behind the Shi‟ite clerical establishment. Their critical anger firstly targeted Islamic institutions; then they came to the conclusion that the surrender to Islam was the beginning of the chain of calamities. These intellectual elites tended to construct a new identity by effacing Islamic characteristics from the traditional definition of nationality. In trying to do this, Iranian intellectuals not only had to radically break ties with a tradition that had influenced their culture for more than a millennium, but they needed to put on new spectacles to perceive their world differently. These spectacles were given to them in the form of translated Western literature during the time of modernization. In this context, the term “Iranian

Constitutionalists” addresses those who were inspired by the modern achievements of the West and those who attempted to reject the legitimacy of the traditional systems of governing. Thus, the Constitutional Revolution refers to that political urge to subvert the absolute monarchy.

From a historical standpoint, many interrelated factors resulted in the outburst of the Constitutional Revolution in 1905, each of which had a significant impact on the accumulation of societal and political discontent. One instrumental factor,

however, was the contribution of the translation movement to the gradual formation of the collective awareness of Iranians. First and foremost, the translation movement was a tactical strategy, supported exclusively by the Qajars, the ruling dynasty of the time.

To reinforce and modernize the Iranian army, European army officers were invited to

Iran. Then, the modernization of Iranian army necessitated orchestrating and networking among other institutions. To have control over this network, Iranians had to acquire Western knowledge. This caused the quick development of the translation movement in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was through translating the knowledge of the West that Iranians started to see themselves through the lenses of others and achieve an oppositional alliance against the ruling system. This alliance was reinforced by the power of the language of modernity.

Although questioning the prominent presence of Islamic institutions in the hierarchy of power was one of the causes that the constitutionalists pursued, their greatest efforts were put into constructing a new discourse of discontent. In other words, by the time the urge to acquire knowledge snowballed, the initial curiosity of

Iranians about Western culture transformed into an irresistible avalanche of change aimed at the different dimensions of the traditional structure of the society and, more importantly, the absolute monarchy. Ervand Abrahamian, the prominent historiographer of the modernization of Iran, believes that “the Qajars built new institutions to strengthen their position, but the same institutions, by creating a modern intelligentsia with new interests, concepts, and aspirations, ultimately undermined the

Qajars” (Abrahamian, “The Causes of the Constitutional Revolution” 395). The formation of Islamic art as a discipline in Europe was concomitant with a great transformation of the mentality of Iranians.

The “Orientalist” Discourse of Despotism Revisited

At the onset of the twentieth century, Iran, like other independent countries or colonized territories in the Middle East and Asia, was experiencing a grave level of cultural and political instabilities. If only one key concept could be chosen to reflect the poor political situation of Iranian society at that time, it would be that the collective identity of Iranians was on the verge of falling apart. It seems that the last traditional dynastic ruling system, the Qajars (1795-1925), was no longer capable of sustaining the dominant ideology upon which Iranian identity was constructed.

The Qajars inherited the concept of Iranian identity from their powerful predecessors, the Safavids (1501-1726). The Iranian collective identity constructed based on Shi‟ite doctrine shortly after the political empowerment of the Safavid dynasty in the early sixteenth century. Founded by a pious Muslim king, Shah Ismail the First (1487-1524), this powerful dynasty made Twelver Shi‟ism the state religion.3

This political act added a new layer of identity to the definition of the Iranian nation and situated the Sunnis, the followers of the major branch of Islam, in the category of

“others” in the domain of pre-modern Iran. Three centuries later and after many political upheavals, the old discourse of Shi‟ism was in the hands of the most impotent kings. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, one of the longest reigns of the

3 Shi‟ism has different subdivisions and branches. The Twelvers believe in the tradition of Imamate after the Prophet, which means only the descendants of Mohammad were supposed to complete the line of succession after his death. These twelve successors, also known as Imams, were infallible, ergo the true leaders of the Muslims; nonetheless, aside from Ali, the prophet‟s son-in-law and the first Imam, none of them could rule over Muslims. According to the Twelvers, eleven Imams were murdered by the usurpers of Muslim leadership, but the twelfth Imam (Mahdi the Messiah) is still alive and has been living in occultation since the ninth century. The Twelvers believe that one day Mahdi will come back to save the world from tyranny and injustice. In his absence, Muslims have to wait and follow a supreme cleric (Mojtahed), whose mastery in Sharia is acknowledged by other ulama. Acknowledging the legitimacy of kings accordingly was a function of the ulama and Mojtaheds. The discrepancies over the number of infallibles and the possibilities of the arrival of the saviour in the past have generated the different branches of Shiite.

Qajars was about to reach its fiftieth anniversary: simultaneously, all of the pre- modern institutional structures were about to face a whole new world, one saturated with cultural dissonance.

The Qajars came on the stage of politics with strength and confidence. Aqa

Muhammad Khan (1742-1797), the founder of the Qajar dynasty, successfully established a ruling system over the ruins of the two short-lived preceding dynasties and crowned himself king.4 Ervand Abrahamian, in his substantial book A History of

Modern Iran, describes a type of traditional solidity in the gradual formation of executive institutions in the first half of the nineteenth century. Abrahamian views this solidity as lying in the way in which the Qajar‟s reign was based on a successful collaboration among royal families, nobles, ministers, notables, tribal chiefs, landlords, merchants and, more importantly, the ulama. His successors could hardly maintain this system and at the end of the nineteenth century, after many unsuccessful attempts to adapt modern bureaucracy and emulate European governments, the last

Qajar kings left “behind merely a skeleton of a central government [with] bureaus without bureaucracies […]” and institutions that “had become ministries in name, only existed on paper” (Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran 9). It was inevitable for the

Qajar kings to encounter modernity; however, it cost them their absolute monarchy.

As the unstable structure of the Qajars‟ sovereignty started to tremble at the slightest breeze of change blowing from the West, an unexpected domestic force started to shake the ground where they had upheld their royal throne. The combination of external and internal forces resulted in 1905 in a national protest known as the

Constitutional Revolution. The Constitutional Revolution divided the history of Iran into a “before” and “after” its outburst; it accelerated the importation of the modern

4 These dynasties are the Afsharids (1739-1796) and the Zandiyeh (1751-1774).

discourse of nationality. Nowadays, when placing the concept of Iranian identity under critical investigations, this controversial subject fluctuates between two polar opposites: the religious and the secular agencies. The history of this dichotomization also originated in the Constitutional Revolution.

As noted earlier, the guardians of the religious aspects of Iranian identity are known as the ulama, who belong to the clerical establishment and are considered as high-ranking masters of Islamic law and Quranic Knowledge. Mansoor Moaddel believes that “[the ulama] constitute a social category defined by their distinctive unifying religious and occupational functions that set them apart from the rest of the society” (520). At the frontlines of the debate over national identity stand the intellectuals as the supporters of Iranian modern identity. In the early twentieth century, the intellectuals appeared as a strong minority whose power came from their close encounters with the modern discourse of knowledge.

Having read the Western body of knowledge represented in travelogues, philosophical texts, scientific and historical documents, and even novels, the new generation of Iranian intellectuals took refuge in their understanding of European model of social and cultural progress to define Iranian nationalism. They acquired a new knowledge of the self that at first could not easily supersede the dominance and power of Shi‟ism in the structure of Iranian identity; nonetheless, they were able to make the authority of the ulama limited to the close circle of religious seminaries for almost seventy-two years between the Constitutional and the Islamic Revolutions.

This ebbing period of religious authority provided an opportunity for the intellectuals to prepare society and import the discourse of modernity.

Ali M. Ansari, in The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, argues that in the nineteenth century, the intellectuals saw “the organization of Islam in Iran more

closely approximated a „church‟ in the Western sense than the equivalent structures in the Sunni Ottoman Empire” (25). Thus, within the analysis of the cultural background of the Constitutional Revolution, we can deduce that the secular and anti- establishment causes of the French Revolution made more sense to Iranian intellectuals than any other political and religious drives. It meant that not only had the dichotomy of Shiite versus Sunni started to lose its significance for the intellectuals, but also that the discursive power of Islam in defining societal and political structures, as well as cultural institutions, fell into abeyance. As a result, the initial alliance that intellectuals and the ulama shared against the absolute monarchy of the Qajars diminished due to the growing distance between their ideologies.

The discourse of modern nationalism targeted the authority of Shi‟ism, and in so doing, it provided considerable momentum to the slow-paced movement of society towards a modern and secular consolidation. Up until this moment, on the railroad of history, the old handcar of Iranian nationality had faced many ups and downs while being powered by different passengers. To the eyes of many observers at the end of the nineteenth century, Iranian identity, with its only religious passenger, had become an abandoned vehicle of wasted dreams roaming in the midst of nowhere. Having no idea of the mechanism by which the speeding train of the West powerfully traveled, the religious passenger of the handcar was driving it singlehandedly for almost three centuries.

At the time of the Safavids, Shi‟ism was supposed to mobilize Iranians to stand against the growing power of the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the threatening

Uzbek troops on the western and eastern sides of their territory, and at the same time give legitimacy to the sovereignty of the Safavids kings. After three centuries of conducting these duties, sometimes successfully and many times in failure, Shi‟ism

had spent every ounce of its religious power in order to keep the concept of identity sustained. With no touch of glory, in the late nineteenth century, Iranian identity had nothing to demonstrate except a shadow, or even worse, a “caricature”5 of what

Herodotus once called “The Noble Persians” (Ansari 12, 10).

The Qajar‟s political incapability and mismanagement during their one hundred and twenty-six years of sovereignty (1789-1925) have left behind a long list of political, social, and cultural blunders and shortcomings. Today, when historians want to address the numerous political failures of the Qajars, there is no better example than the two back-to-back defeats of the Russo-Persian Wars in 1813 and

1826. For Iran, these wars resulted in conceding to Russia a vast part of

Transcaucasia, including Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Dagestan. Again in 1857, the region of Herat, now in Afghanistan, was separated during a short yet humiliating quarrel between Iran and the British army, which at the time was to support Herat‟s independence from Iran. After these defeats, handling foreign policy was out of the

Qajars‟ royal hands. Moreover, they offered nothing in terms of holding together the warp and weft of the state‟s internal affairs as well. Granting unjust concessions to powerful European countries, Qajar kings put natural and cultural resources on auction several times, and consequently, they turned Iran‟s political field into a virtual stage of rivalry between Russia and Britain over its natural and cultural resources.

These concessions increased Iran‟s political and economic subordination to foreign powers. When the financial aid received from Europeans was liquidated so as to conceal the political impotence of the government, the intellectuals and the

5 James Morier was a British envoy, who spent several years in Iran and wrote a satirical work of fiction about Iranians in the early nineteenth century. His observation of the Qajar era is reflected in his novel The Adventures of Haji Baba of Isfahan. How Morier has portrayed Persians later received many critiques from Iranian scholars, as his book is considered a “literary caricature of Iranian decadence and hypocrisy.” Al M. Ansari, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press, 2012, 12.

distinguished clerics, representatives of the modern and the traditional sides of society respectively, joined in one monolithic language of protest.

The dimensions of harm that the Qajars did to Iran becomes more tangible in light of the fact that the two longest reigns in this dynasty belonged to the most unqualified rulers. Fath‟Ali Shah and Naser al Din Shah reigned more than eighty- eight years in total. Thus, towards the last few years of their absolute monarchy, when the county was on the verge of falling apart, Iran was buried under debt, contaminated with poverty, and supersaturated by national discontent towards the decaying monarchy.6 The Constitutional Revolution was, in fact, the sudden release of the gradual growth of discontent in different strata of society and a fatal blow to the dying body of the Qajar dynasty.

Few facts provide more ease in revisiting the history of the Qajars; otherwise, this review would strongly resonate with many stereotypical and tedious accounts of

Oriental despotism. According to the Western rendition of the Orient, the personalities and reigns of the despotic sultans and shahs are by default associated with ignorance and tyranny. The popularity of these Orientalist approaches towards the Qajar dynasty is quite discernable in many European historical observations in the nineteenth

6 Ervand Abrahamian, in his seminal book, A History of Modern Iran, begins the historical narrative of modernity in Iran by enumerating the formation of its executive institutions throughout the nineteenth century. These traditional institutions were gradually consolidated in the succeeding decades. The first Qajar, Aqa Muhamad Khan, successfully established a ruling dynasty over the ruins of two short-lived dynasties, the Afsharids (1736-1796) and Zandiyeh (1751-1994). The consolidation of his reign was the result of an efficient traditional hierarchy based on the collaborations of royal families, nobles, ministers, notables, tribal chiefs, landlords, merchants, and ulama. His successors were barely able to maintain this system. At the end of the nineteenth century, and after many unsuccessful attempts to adapt modern bureaucracy and emulate European governments, Naser al Din Shah left “behind merely a skeleton of a central government … [and] bureaus without bureaucracies,” in Abrahamian‟s words: “institutions had become ministries in name, only existed on paper.” See: Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 9.

century.7 Accordingly, as Abrahamian summarizes, “for the nineteenth century

Europeans, the Qajar Dynasty was an epitome of ancient Oriental despotism” (Iran between Two Revolutions 35).To avoid these black-and-white readings, one should keep in mind that, as actual historical figures, the Qajars comprised the last traditional ruling system struggling hard to reproduce an ideology that had already lost its discursive premises. They were in fact from a dynasty whose political consolidation during the 1790s was contemporary with the post-French Revolution era and its total downfall in 1925 was only eight years after the October Revolution in Russia. These facts make the history of Iran during the Qajar dynasty more comprehensible to explore than any other stereotypical account of Orientalism. For Fath‟Ali Shah (r.

1797-1834) and Naser al Din Shah (r. 1848-1896), the most famous Qajar kings, one way of coping with losing ground was to let the visual culture of Iran reflect the inevitability of change. Therefore, as politically impotent kings who happened to be at the top of the hierarchy of power, they brought art back to their courts and became the generous patrons of artists and literary figures.

Over the course of a century, Qajar kings constantly sought political validation through two major but conflicting forces. On the one hand, they wanted to appease the ulama, by giving them autonomy over educational, juridical, and economic institutions; thus, the ulama could regulate seminaries, schools, courts, and religious endowments and perform major duties that nobody but they would be capable of administrating. On the other hand, they had an eye on the power and potential that

7 Even before the close encounter of European intellectuals with Persian culture in the nineteenth century, a few European scholars, including Montesquieu in Persian Letters, had already initialized the notion of despotic kings as an accepted proposition. Hamid Dabashi asserts that this conceptualization of Persian despots was crucial for Montesquieu in postulating the fear of despotism in general, and in French society of the early eighteenth century, an idea which eventually shaped Montesquieu‟s main argument in The Spirits of the Laws. Hamid Dabashi. Persophilia. Harvard University Press, 2015, p. 54.

modern institutions and technological achievements might bring via Europeans.8 In between these two contradictory interactions, the Qajar kings remained oblivious to the cultural zeitgeist of Europe; in other words, they had not developed the mentality to accept modernity as a holistic phenomenon.

Indeed, they actually wanted to keep a fragile equilibrium between being stereotypically mighty and greedy kings on the one hand and the agents of God on earth on the other. Thus, as true medieval demagogues, the Qajars kept Iran backward as if Iranians did not share the same time with Europeans. However, the more they appeared politically incongruent and lagging, the more Iranian intellectuals strove in total opposition to them and their religious supporters to decrease their tremendous cultural distance from Europe.9 Despite the fact that Iran was never colonized by any

European country, her situation in the time of Naser al Din Shah, especially towards the end of his reign, was nothing less than a colonized and exploited territory.

In Kamyar Abdi‟s analysis of the development of archaeology in Iran,

“Nationalism, Politics, and the Development of Archaeology in Iran”, there is an

8 Moaddel believes that this deep political reliance on the ulama and foreign countries was rooted in “the tribal background of Qajar leaders [which] provided neither the legitimacy nor administrative structure to rule a country.” See: Moaddel, “The Shia Ulama and the State in Iran,” p. 523. 9 Some examples of the Qajar‟s inconsistent policies show that the time lag between Iran and Europe was not symbolic but real. Mangol Bayat in her book Iran‟s First Revolution: Shi‟ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909 brings an example in this regard. At the outbreak of war with Russia, Fath‟Ali Shah recruited his army with the spiritual help of the supreme cleric of the time. Having enjoyed Fath‟Ali Shah‟s patronage and receiving “royal appointment for the administration of a mosque and its endowment in his home town, Naraqi [the prime Mojtahed of the time], fully supported the Qajar monarch, issuing upon request a fatwa declaring jihad against the Russians when Iran‟s forces were waging war against its northern neighbour” (13). It seemed that Fath‟Ali Shah would need two defeats in a row in order to eventually yield to a secular reform. Monica Ringer believes that the only diplomacy that Naser al Din Shah knew was granting concessions to Europeans without any concern about “the very danger of European imperialism policy in the region.” (41) He sacrificed the economic independency of Iran and even lost his credibility among the ulama. See: Mangol Bayat, Iran‟s First Revolution: Shi‟ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909, Oxford University Press, 1991, and Monica Ringer. “Ulama and the Discourse of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Iran.” Iran Between Tradition and Modernity, edited by Ramin Jahanbegloo, Lexington Books, 2004.

instance that indicates how in the absence of collective awareness of Iranian cultural heritage, French archaeologists Marcel-Auguste and Jane Dieulafoy easily violated the concession of archaeological excavation in Iran and took (read: ransacked) all the founds in Susa to France. Abdi explains: “The Iranian government officially protested to the French government. In response, in 1889 the French government invited Naser al-Din Shan to visit the Persian exhibition at the Louvre. Naser al-Din Shah, joyful in finding a chance to travel to Europe, accepted the invitation, viewed the exhibit, and withdrew the protest.”(54)

Interestingly, the first sparkles of the Constitutional Revolution, the Tobacco

Protest, rose from the most traditional stratum of society, the ulama, and not the intellectuals.10 Although the Qajars‟ strong bonds with Shiite clerics were retained in favour of boosting their political legitimacy, none of them shared the same degree of orthodoxy and conservatism with the ulama. The ulama were aware of the political intentions of the Qajar kings, but no doubt they knew that their own power over the religious institutions would be at stake without the full-scale support of the Qajars.

Therefore, while they tolerated each other‟s presence in the hierarchy of power, there was still room for the kings to enforce some radical changes. This is probably one of the reasons that some of the modern moves in the pre-modern structure of Iran faced no harsh criticism from the ulama. The Qajar kings were in general open to change,

10 The “[p]opular Iranian protest against the shah‟s granting of a monopoly to the British in the sale and export of tobacco … was led by religious scholars, merchants, liberal intellectuals, officers, and Islamic modernists, who encouraged resistance to economic concessions that could serve as a prelude to foreign rule. Smoking was prohibited, the bazaars were closed, and strikes and demonstrations were held. Religious legitimation was provided by Ayatollah Hasan al-Shirazi, a spokesman for the ulama, who issued a fatwa against smoking tobacco. Mosques offered sanctuary to protesters and served as centers of resistance and political organization. The protest set a precedent for cooperation between the ulama and merchants in limiting the shah's power.” Oxford Islamic Studies Online, Tobacco Protest (Iran), 1891-1892. http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t125/e2389. Accessed 10 August 2017

though the supposed change often arose out of political despair. Acknowledging all the traditional and religious bonds that kept their reign together, they also were aware of the necessity of embarking on gradual social reforms by importing modern knowledge, politics, technology, and culture.

Another factor that makes the history of the Qajars worthy of more critical consideration is the way in which they quite indirectly caused a change in the dominant discourse of aesthetics in Persian literature and visual culture. Fath‟Ali

Shah, in the hands of painters, was always represented as a fancy king with a beard elongated to his small waist. Paintings of him usually demonstrate a figure bejewelled from head to toe, with piercing eyes emphasising the authoritative presence of the

Shah (See Figure 1). By portraying Fath‟Ali Shah in a manner unlike the tradition of classical Persian painting and more like representations of monarchs in European paintings, Iranian painters navigated portrait painting to reach out a new style. Trying to break away from the isolated framework of Persian classical aesthetics, the Qajar artists extended the boundaries of Persian painting – with the help of their kings.

To some extent, artists fulfilled their goal of constructing a new pictorial language during the reign of Naser al Din Shah. In regard to painting, Naser al Din

Shah was an open-minded patron. Not only did he support artists who experienced alternative aesthetics, but he even allowed his beloved artist, Kamal al Molk, to practice naturalistic visual representation by detaching the Shah‟s halo of kingship and representing him merely as a tiny subject in his famous painting Mirror Hall ( See

Figure 2). Furthermore, Naser al Din Shah had enough influence to offer strong support for photography. The openness to modern aesthetics continued after his reign.

Only five years after the invention of cinematography in France, cinema entered Iran –

even though the ulama neither admitted it nor approved of any other influential elements of Western culture.

Figure 1: Mirza Baba, Fath' Ali Shah (1798-1799), In Peerless images: Persian Painting and Its Sources by Eleanor Sims; with Boris I. Marshak and Ernst Grube. Yale University Press, 2002.

Figure 2: Kamal Al Molk (Mohammad Gaffari), Mirror Hall (1895-1896). Golestan Palace, .media/File:Mirror_Hall.jpg Accessed14 August 2017/#تاالر_آینه/Tehran. fa.wikipedia.org/wiki

Although Naser al Din Shah was a mediocre poet with some interest in painting, when it came to photography, he showed an enthusiasm much stronger than mere interest. He was actually one of the talented Iranian pioneers in this field. The servants of his huge harem, dwarfs, eunuchs, and even his beloved cat were among his favourite subjects, as well as his numerous wives and children. To some extent, an important part of the documentation of the king‟s private and social life was done in the time of Naser al Din Shah. After making his first visit to Europe and being deeply impressed by modern European cities, he saw it as necessary to provide opportunities for artists and craftsmen to appropriate European culture and knowledge in conducting major artistic projects. The first urban reconstructions of Tehran, the first public auditorium for conducting religious ceremonies (Tekyeh Dowlat in 1868), and even the first equestrian statue of a king after Islam were among the European influenced projects that Naser al Din Shah supported.

This urge for cultural change can be observed in one of the drastic aesthetic turns in Persian painting. It was through the unconditional support of Nasr al Din Shah that Kamal al Molk, one of the distinguished artists of the time, dared to adopt

Western aesthetics in painting and construct a new visual framework for the next generation of artists, in that the practice of traditional arts had been marginalized for a while. In terms of patronage, Naser al Din Shah can be considered an exemplary sovereign. From the representation of Fath‟Ali Shah as a bejewelled monarch to that of Nasr al Din Shah, who was ready to humbly become an ordinary figure in Kamal al

Molk‟s paintings, Persian painting underwent a huge conceptual and formal change.11

11 In his study of the evolution of form in Iranian painting, Siamak Delzende offers an iconography of the representation of Qajar kings in court paintings and follows the pattern of change in the position of kings sitting as a subject for painters. With respect to Naser al Din Shah‟s interest in naturalistic representation, Delzende takes the notion of the sitting subject as

For Fath‟Ali Shah the great defeat of his undeveloped army in two battles with the well-armed Russian soldiers had a grave lesson. Stefani Cronin believes that in the first decades of the nineteenth century and after the occupation of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798, many of the Islamic ruling dynasties became relatively aware of their political vulnerability in trying to sustain themselves on the basis of traditional structures. Therefore, they hoped that with the help of a modernized army, they would be able to achieve the secrets of European armies and enhance “their standing vis-à- vis other states in the region”. But more importantly, for Fath‟Ali Shah “the recovery of lost territories through military means was highly significant” (Cronin 199). To strengthen a traditional army consisting mainly of a patchwork of tribal troops,

Fath‟Ali Shah, through his proficient crown prince, Abbas Mirza, invited European army officers to build a modern military organization for Iran. Arguably, it was through the recruitment of an Iranian-organized army that authorities started to understand the necessity of imitating and adapting modern European institutions, as well as acquiring modern knowledge.

The first program that dispatched students to Europe was conducted in the early nineteenth century. When those students returned, they had become somewhat knowledgeable about the modern sciences through their encounters with languages and learning about what they believed belonged to the rational and invincible

Europeans. Abbas Mirza, the only wise prince of the Qajars, did not attain the throne and died before his father, but his commissioned group of experts tried to introduce their new accomplishments into the traditional structure of the society. They hoped to

a way to elucidate the emergence of a modern mentality for both Iranian artists and their patrons. To some extent, since this moment, Persian painters have adopted the aesthetics of representational painting and detached themselves from traditional aesthetics.

transfer the rationality of Europeans through translating and utilizing the different disciplines of modern sciences, as well as the discourse of politics and history.

Although Iranian intellectuals were hoping to get close to the source of modern power by absorbing European knowledge, they could hardly anticipate that the same socio-political and scientific strength as the Europeans might be achieved in the near future. It was felt that there was a huge gap between the underdeveloped terrain of the

Iranian self and the modern identity of the others. This new perception came as a huge shock. It was as if, by wiping the dust of oblivion off the surface of their consciousness, they could finally see their real backward selves. Perhaps it was possible for Fath‟Ali Shah to hope to reclaim the captured territories of his realm by embarking on an ambitious plan to systematize and organize a modern army, but at the time of Naser al Din Shah, when Iranian intellectuals were trying to digest the consequences of the greatest cultural shock of their time, competing with the West was no longer their main concern. As a result, “Naser al Din Shah limited [himself] to less ambitious reforms” (Abrahamian, “The Causes of the Constitutional Revolution”

392). Despite the fact that the strengthening of the army was as a tactical reaction in response to political circumstances, it engendered a major reform in society and facilitated the unfolding of the multilateral process of modernization.

The first hesitant steps taken to depart from traditional structures later became confident strides toward modernity. In 1852, the establishment of the first modern school in Tehran, known as Dar al Fonun, was a response to the demands of the newly formed army. Dar al Fonun was home to almost “250 students each year, mostly from the sons of the upper class,” who were “offered secular subjects such as foreign languages, political science, engineering, mineralogy, military sciences, and veterinary sciences. Over forty students of the early graduat[ing classes] were sent to

Europe to complete their studies” (ibid.). The first instructors and teachers of this school were French experts and Iranians who had graduated from European schools. It was in Dar al Fonun where, through the development of pedagogical activities, the importance of translation was deeply felt.

The translation movement of the mid-ninetieth century was supported by this generation of enthusiastic Iranian intellectuals, who utterly immersed themselves in the magical world of Western literature and knowledge. In the late nineteenth century, when many important literary works were translated into Persian, the literary establishment of the time put on a new garment. The opportunity to access foreign texts let Iranian intellectuals do more than copy Europeans. One of the most important coping mechanisms that the new generation of Iranian intellectuals adopted to deal with their tremendous cultural shock was analyzing their situation in regard to the ideal model – namely European civilization.

The cultural history of the importation and adaptation of modernity in Iran in the nineteenth century can be viewed as another example of the ways that non-

Western societies are comprehended through the prism of Orientalism. The hegemony of the grand narrative of European modernity has become a matter of dispute among diasporic Iranian scholars, raising questions regarding the role that Iranians played as the recipients of modernity. Coming to the conclusion that the modernization of Iran was only the result of being passively exposed to a Eurocentric conceptualization of knowledge would be theoretically incorrect. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi is one of those diasporic scholars whose re-examination of the importation of modernity in his salient book Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography stands against the stereotypical representation of Iran as a passive recipient of the grand narrative of modernity. Therefore, while it seems inaccurate to render

modernization as the only way for Iranians to catch up with the speeding train of modern Europe, the totality of the discourse of Orientalism makes it difficult to have an impartial observation of the two sides of the history of modernity. In reviewing this history, the significant role of non-European cultures is undervalued. This has to do with the cultural circumstance that eclipsed the significance of the Orient.

The stereotypical account of the despotic kings is a rudimentary approach to understanding the socio-cultural backwardness of Iran during the Qajars, but their tyranny and ignorance are undeniable parts of the story. When the hegemony of the

West was about to roar triumphantly all around the Orient and European Orientalists were gleaning knowledge patiently from non-modern colonies, in Iran “despotic” kings had already relegated indigenous knowledge to the margins of scholarly importance. They wasted resources on pointless wars and on ignorant policies.

On this point, the Qajars are not the only examples. During a century and half of struggling with many socio-political issues, the Qajars faced problems that they had inherited from the former dynasties, mostly that of the last kings of the Safavids. In between the growing colonial power of Europe and the rapid fall of neighbouring colonies into greater dependency, Qajar kings tried to speak through the only language they knew; hence, they unknowingly refused to recognize the disunity between what they traditionally had believed in as Iranian nation and what in reality was about to take shape as Iranian collective identity, as the result of a new emerging mentality among the people.

During the reign of the last kings of the Safavids, when cultural and socio- political entities were vacuumed up by the accelerating bigotry of Shi‟ite clerics enabled by the paralyzing impotency of kings, Iranian artists and scholars had to keep up stamina to preserve by all means possible the last remnants of art and literature.

Although Iranian art did not die due to negligence, a formal comparison between the golden epoch of Persian art in the early Safavids and the obvious mediocrity of the early Qajars would reveal a serious decline in the aesthetics of Persian art. The impact of the decades between the Safavids and the Qajars was immensely destructive to artists. They found themselves alone in a huge bewildering void that gradually turned into a prevailing cultural oblivion.

This intellectual void continued until the consequences of the Russo-Persian wars in the nineteenth century necessitated inevitable socio-cultural reform. Thus, exclusion, negligence, and poverty came to interfere with creativity and productivity.

The crucially important factor – communicating knowledge – ceased to occur. As the

East and West became rivals in regard to acquiring and using knowledge, it was

Europeans who took advantage of the social and political predicaments of Islamic countries such as Iran and developed an unquestionable advantage in exploiting the cultural achievements of the others.

Consequently, the West was able to frame its contribution to the project of modernity as the only valid version. For Iran the constructive confrontation with the

West happened when Iranians dared to travel to Europe. Taking part in the same process of navigating the land of the “others,” albeit belatedly, Iranians “[came] to

Europe as travelers, merchants, students, or diplomats” and this time they saw their

“literature, poetry and history had preceded them in Europe; yet, their identity was known only as the others.12”

12 In Persophilia, Hamid Dabashi, a distinguished Iranian scholar at Columbia University has a completely different opinion about the nature of the scholarly interaction between pre- modern Iran and Europe. Although Dabashi confirms that Iranian intellectuals have belatedly developed a self-awareness of their socio-cultural identity, he sees the fondness of European intellectual for Persian culture as the sign of the transmission of knowledge from Persia to Europe. Dabashi traces the fascination of the West with Persia back to the classical era, then follows the influences of Persian culture in the most eloquent examples of European literature,

Modernity Retrieved: Remapping One’s Own Imaginary Geography

Having taken the Eurocentric accounts of modernity into consideration, the devastated intellectuals had only one way left to mend the troubled framework of their society: to yield to the hegemony of European model of progress. By virtue of this solution, some critics believe that modernity in Iran is viewed as an imported formula imposed on traditional society, only partially received by a minority of intellectuals and unsuccessful in transforming the religious discourse of the dominant ideology into a secular one. The experience of modernity in this regard is like a sudden rupture in the cohesion of pre-modern society and an incomplete imitation of the grand narrative of European modernity. Therefore, it seems inaccurate to call the emergence of this incongruity in the context of traditional society as a move towards modernity.

It can simply be acknowledged as the unprecedented consequences of becoming modern.

There is also an alternative standpoint regarding the critique of Orientalism, wherein the hegemony of Eurocentric accounts of modernity is a matter of dispute.

The Eurocentric conceptualization of modernity is potentially problematized by considering modernity as a collaborative intellectual effort between the West and the

Orient and not the outcome of the intellectual monopoly of one culture over the other.

The intellectuals‟ frustration with the cultural environment of Iran in the nineteenth

art, music and, more importantly, politics and philosophy. According to Dabashi, since the Enlightenment, European scholars by alluding to Persian culture detached it from its indigenous private sphere of the courts and transferred it to the public sphere of Europe. Then when Iranians began visit Europe, they saw their culture in the Western public sphere surpassed their presence. So the circulation of knowledge started in Persia and came back to its origin through Iranian intellectuals travelling abroad; meanwhile, Europe constructed its palace of knowledge based on appropriating the merits of Persian culture. To some extent, Dabashi aims to revisit the critique of Orientalism in a totally different way from Edward Said in Orientalism. Yet, Dabashi‟s argument suffers from the same problem that questioning any dichotomy would do, which is the prioritization a metaphysical center for culture over the other‟s context. Despite the fact that he tries to question the dichotomy of the West and the East, his elaboration of Persian culture just reverses the dichotomy and does not deconstruct it.

century, which urged them to hastily apply a guaranteed formula of progress, is among the evidence that might underscore the validity of the first standpoint; however, another narrative testifies to the contribution of Iranians in the history of modernity. If the accounts of despotic kings who ruled over decaying societies are fully accepted as the main reason for the socio-cultural backwardness of a non-modern realm, there would be no choice but to accept a ready-made formula of modernization as the best remedy for this malaise. Henceforth, it is possible to review the history of modernity from a different viewpoint, wherein the homogeneity and linear arrangement of the history of modernity would be disturbed by a series of unseen non-

European accounts. This alterative narrative destabilizes the presence of the European narrative as a grand narrative over other accounts of modernity.

Having invested in a subaltern narrative of history, Tavakoli-Targhi is among the scholars whose critical standpoints target the Eurocentric definition of modernity.

In Refashioning Iran, Tavakoli-Targhi underlines the significant role of the scattered centers of knowledge lying outside of the European intellectual zone in the formation of an alternative rendition of modernity. In his argument, he brings the significance of a prolific epoch, when Persian culture was acknowledged and respected in the courts of the Mughals kings (1526-1857), to the center of attention, thus decanonizing the normative discourse of modernity. His investigation offers two interrelated arguments in relation to time and (alter) space, which he sees as the main variables that give discursive dimensions to the Eurocentric account of modernity.

While Tavakoli-Targhi follows in the footsteps of Edward Said and Stuart Hall in explaining the formation of the oppositional binaries that construct and define the discourse of Orientalism, his re-evaluation of modernity reflects on Raymond

Schwab‟s argument in The Oriental Renaissance: Europe‟s Rediscovery of India and

the East, 1680-1880. Schawb claims that the significance of Europe‟s “rediscovery” of the East is on a par with the rediscovery of the Greco-Roman civilization at the time of the Renaissance. In his engagement with the unnoticed cultural history of the

Orient, Schwab showcases Eastern civilizations as unknown sources of inspiration, and sympathizes with the representation of the Orient in the works of the European

Romantics of the early nineteenth century. Schawb‟s positive reading of the Orient is almost three decades prior to Said‟s harsh critique of the intellectual hegemony of the

West in the scholarly and literary representation of the Orient.

In contrast to Said, Schwab acknowledges the significance of literary interactions between the West and the East in dismantling the cultural partitions that separate them. Schawb‟s argument concerns a conceptual decline in the authority of religious accounts in the discourse of history after the entrance of non-biblical sources from the Orient in the literature of Romanticism. As mentioned before, the influence of the Orient on European modernity is similar to the intellectual impact of Greco-

Roman culture on medieval Europe. They both offer a secular version of the past independent from the religious accounts of history but were powerful enough to influence the language of representation in the present.

The entrance of Oriental sources into the discourse of history had the potential to successfully reframe a non-Islamic version of the Orient. Therefore, the Orient that

Schawb takes into account differs from the medieval opponent of Christian Europe.

This romanticized version of the Orient introduces ancient Asiatic literature and languages as gates to the unknown worlds of the non-Christian territories. This new perspective suggests alternative narratives of religion, history, and culture that would challenge the normative discourse of modernity by subverting the dichotomy of the

West and the East, or in a broader view as Stuart Hall mentions the West and the Rest.

Tavakoli-Targhi also observes the formation of an alternative narrative of

Orientalism in order to question the authority of the West in defining the reception of modernity in the cultural context of Iran. He elaborates on a literary reciprocity between European and Iranian accounts of history and literature. Through this interaction, the ontological and epistemological achievements of the West in reading the cultural history of Iran were imported and translated into the Persian language.

The idea that Tavakoli-Targhi emphasizes is that the origin of this knowledge was native to Iranians. Trying to acquire a new understanding of Iranian history and culture through the translation of European resources on these subjects, Iranian intellectuals started to understand their history and culture in a quite different way.

Therefore, they developed a radical consciousness about their own cultural and historical identity. As a result, they were able to discard the intellectual languor that the social circumstances of the post-Safavid era had imposed upon them. This also helped them gain momentum in their rivalry with the ulama for control of the center of meaning in the narratives of history and language.

Tavakoli-Targhi then, by analyzing the interactive relationship between

Iranian scholars and European Orientalists, furthers Schwab‟s argument in order to emphasize the participation of Persian classical literature in the European

“rediscovery” of the East. In attempting this, he alters some stereotypical presumptions about the Orient, which view the East as a passive receiver and the West as an active agent producing and exporting knowledge. If we acknowledge Said‟s critical approach towards the history and geography of the Orient, as set and analyzed by the Orientalists, we can repurpose the critique of Orientalism in order to have a better perception of the multidimensional, dialogic, and temporal aspects of modernity. In other words, modernity “can be viewed as a product of a globalizing

network of power and knowledge that informed the heterotopic experience of crisscrossing peoples and cultures and thus provided multiple scenarios of self- refashioning. Whereas Europeans reconstituted the modern self in relation to their non-Western others, Asians and Africans began to redefine the self in relation to

Europe, their new significant other.” (Tavakoli-Targhi, “The Homeless Text of

Persianate Modernity” 131).

In Tavakoli-Targhi argument, Foucault‟s theorization of “heterotopia” plays an important role. Having introduced different principles of heterotopia, Foucault, in defining „culturally alter spaces‟, considers time and space as the main properties involved in the definition of heterotopia. Foucault conceptualizes heterotopia to explain how multiple layers of meaning are posited within the physical or mental dimensions of a normative space through time. In Tavakoli-Targhi‟s argument, the temporal definition of heterotopia underlines the idea that the fluid borders of modernity can fluctuate between places, in which the past and the future are perceived reciprocally by the present occupants of modern and non-modern loci.

By elaborating the temporal and spatial dimensions of the discourse of modernity, Tavakoli-Targhi observes that the topography of modernity consists of spaces (or alter space) of cultural interactions between the two sides of the observer and the observee. In other words, one way of understanding modernity is as a function of the symbolic interactions between modern and non-modern agencies. The significance of the “other” in this interaction is not less than that of the self. However, it is the temporal and spatial definitions of this interaction that determine to which side of this dichotomy the centrality of the discourse of modernity is oriented. Based on the power of an agency that controls and applies knowledge to the discursive

definitions of time and geography, modernity is considered as an intellectual output of a certain culture.

Historically speaking, in the trajectory of modernity, the West has not always been the most dynamic and vanguard agent. Perhaps the most useful historical fact to indicate the validity of adopting a heterotopic standpoint to define modernity is to compare the relationship between the Christian and Islamic worlds before the

Crusades, with that of secular Europe and the religious Middle East in the final centuries of the second millennium. When the world of Islam was in its ascendency at the dawn of the second millennium, members of Christian European society were the consumers of Islamic knowledge and constantly vigilant of the Muslims‟ increasing power. In the centuries following the Crusades and the empowerment of the Ottoman Empire, the menacing presence of the Ottomans in Eastern Europe started to solidify the borders between these two rivals. Within these borders in

Europe, a secular discourse of knowledge gained power and confronted medieval

Islamic scholasticism. Out of this confrontation, a normative understanding of otherness was born, in which the Orient was categorized by an imaginary geography and a lag in time. According to the “modern” mindset of the West, the Orient did not share the same time with its European counterpart. “Temporalized concepts [that] employed to awaken a nation to self-consciousness [such as] revolution, development/progress and liberation” (Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran 1) were not commonly known in the Orient before their encounter with the West. Thus, the cultural significance of the Orient was reduced into a single state of backwardness observed as a frozen concept in the past. By accepting “the conventional

Enlightenment story” in which modernity is “by-product of “Occidental rationalism”

Tavakoli-Targhi concludes that there will be no way of progress for non-European societies except being the subject of modernization, or Westernization (ibid. 2).

The heterotopia of the modern is the desired future for the non-modern, in which all the wishes of a so-called “backward” society could be fulfilled, whereas in the heterotopia of the non-modern, the formidable past stays unchanged and provides materials for carbon dating the parameters that are involved in the formation of modernity. The non-modern takes the West into consideration as the “heterotopia of modernity and scientific rationality” and the Western patterns of progress as a reliable and ready-made formula of progress (ibid. 4). Therefore, this perception generates a

“horizon of expectation,” where “the future past of the desired present function[s] as a normative scenario for the prognosis or forecasting of the future Iran” (ibid.) In return, the role of societies such as pre-modern Iran would be to function as a “laboratory of experimentation,” where the sudden emergence of non-modern situations and anomalies are the best cases for practicing how to diagnose the possible problems of modern societies (ibid. 3).

There is another way to question the validity of the normative understanding of modernity. The unreliability of dichotomies pertaining to the discourse of modernity – such as the other and the self, modern and non-modern, and the West and the Rest – can be better explained according to what Derrida refers to as “différance.” The plane of otherness in the discourse of modernity is a stage of constructive interactions where different layers of becoming take shape. In the equation of modernity, the modern and the non-modern do not stand for a rigid signification; they acquire their meaning through the connections that tie their meaning together. Derrida‟s explanation of the linguistic flip in the word différance, or “difference with an a,” addresses the discursive quality of the boundaries that hold together the two sides of a binary

opposition and dictate their identities (Speech and Phenomenon 129). In the

Eurocentric understanding of modernity, modernity thus represents the metaphysical presence of the cultural context of the non-modern societies; and in the dichotomy of the West and the East (the Rest), it prioritizes the identity of the former over the latter.

In defining différance, Derrida avoids using the word “identity,” since “to differ” in différance “signifies nonidentity, [and also] signifies the order of the same” (ibid.).

Thus, what we may refer to as the identity of each side of the binary is defined on the basis of a differential recognition of them, not the “presence” of a metaphysical signification. More importantly, it is almost impossible to reach a solid definition of otherness based on a differential recognition of it. The formation of a solid identity, modern or non-modern, will be always deferred and otherness will always convey a fluid signification.

However, it is important that both sides of the dichotomy acquire a self- awareness of each other‟s presence. For each pole of the binary of the modern self and the other, self-awareness is acquired through the communication of or, more precisely, the exchange of linguistic signs within the discourse of knowledge. The immediate step for “refashioning self,” according to Tavakoli-Targhi, is translation and the appropriation of signs. Aided by these two techniques, a society, regardless of to what degree it might be considered modern or traditional, can revise itself, and eventually the borders of otherness lose their constructive signification. As Said has thoroughly explained, the Eurocentric narratives of the Orient are an inseparable part of the history of colonialism and the political clashes between Europe and the Islamic world.

Therefore, depending on which region was dominant and extending its borders and which was experiencing a shrinking of its territory and authority, Europeans and non-

Europeans have always been in the process of becoming modern or experiencing modernity.

In between envisaging the possible future and observing the alternative versions of the future past on the plane of the present, one important concept comes to contradict the normative meaning of the past. The geography of the self for Iranians found new borders when a different version of the past was unveiled through questioning the authority of the Arabic language in Persian literature and the Islamic accounts of history in the historiography of Iran. Both these decentralizing processes are the fruits of the translation movement in the nineteenth century. The modern concept of the past situated the Iranian timeline of progress in accordance with a distinct historical moment. This critical moment is marked by the downfall of the

Sassanids in a series of battles with the powerful army of Muslim Arabs in the seventh century. This turning point came to significance in the nineteenth century through the

“modernist emplotment of Iran‟s ancient history as a tragedy … [and] comprehension of Muslim conquest as a force engendering the reverse progress of Iran.” (Tavakoli-

Targhi, “Contested Memories” 150). According to this version of history, everything behind the downfall of the Sassanids would belong to the glorious pre-Islamic era when in Persia, the Oriental version of Atlantis, Persian culture was mother to other cultures and rocked “the cradle of civilization,” while others were simply primitive or uncivilized. This venerated past was defined within an ideal geography, which is referred to as “Iranzamin” (Sabet 48).13

13 Firoozeh Kashani Sabet, in her historical inquiry on the formation of modern geography in Iran, brings the notion of “Iranzamin” in relation to Iranian‟s nostalgia for the ancient Persian empires. In Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946, she says: “In Iran, the rise of the geographic discipline, which can be labeled the „new geography,‟ sprang from the desire to protect the country from further territorial abatement in the aftermath of its disappointing territorial losses to Russia, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire. Shrinking frontiers deepened nostalgia for Iran‟s ancient empire while committing intellectuals to learning about

Iranzamin, the land of glory much wider than what was left in nineteenth century Iran, lingered on in the collective memory of Iranians throughout the post-

Islamic era. Whenever someone wished to reproach the misfortunate present through recollections of the glorious past, Iranzamin was to be conjured up out of oral or written Persian literature to remind Iranians of their glorious past and their true self.

Ferdowsi, by composing the Shahnama, has given a strong literary account of

Iranzamin. The critical turning point in the linear timeline of the history of modernization generated a chronological duality in the conceptualization of the past.

As a result, in regard to review the history of Iran, the concept of the past was both valued and despised. Whenever the past was associated with the ideal geography of

Iranzamin, the result of this happy union became a center of signification; yet, when it was taken into account as a criterion for measuring the socio-cultural backwardness of

Iran, the past represented only an entity to be reproached or forgotten. The duality in defining the past provides another clue in examining the great divide in the definition of Iranian nationality.

Restoring History and Language

In reviewing the story of modernity in Iran, the most prominent cultural phenomenon that may come to mind is the emergence of a secular disturbance in the religious aspects of the collective identity. At the time of the Constitutional

Revolution, the ideology of Shi‟ism still had a strong influence on the discourse of identity, especially when the ulama found Western patterns of progress quite antithetical to the Islamic definition of the Iranian nation. In contrast with the ulama,

the country‟s remaining dominions.” See: Firoozeh Kashani Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation 1804-1946, p. 48.

Iranian intellectuals did believe in the compatibility of the European model of modernity with the ideal picture of Iran in the future.

Pressured by the approaching wave of change, the ulama had no choice but to either resist the secular forces of the discourse of modernity or find a middle ground where they could adjust and retain their authority over traditional institutions. From a certain moment in the history of the Constitutional Revolution, the inner clash between the two sides of the constitutionalists formed the dichotomy of the secular and the religious. The more the intellectuals associated themselves with the Western patterns of progress, the more they felt disassociated from the religious agencies. The results of this division showed its impact on the religious consistency of Iranian identity. For the first time, a secular force was as strong as religion in mobilizing people and giving direction to their protest.

This secular disturbance had an impact on the Constitutional Revolution and helped the formation of a non-Islamic viewpoint in a society that had a prominent reputation for accommodating religious institutions and practicing piety. I should remind the reader that, at the time of the Constitutional Revolution, the majority of

Iranian people were not knowledgeable of the modern aspects of their own revolt.

Although the trustworthiness of the ulama among Iranians might have made it almost impossible for the minority of pro-modern intellectuals to question the authority of the ulama, the intellectuals could convert their tendency towards change and reconstruction into a nationwide protest. An important cultural parameter was involved in the profound confidence of Iranian intellectuals, which helped them supersede the religious establishment in redefining Iranian identity; but where did this profound confidence come from?

In order to decanonize the discourse of Shi‟ism, intellectuals needed to fight back with the same weapons that the ulama used to protect the dominance of their ideology. The scene where the ulama and the intellectuals started their confrontation was the discursive arena of history and the weapons they used were linguistic signs.

The surprising superiority of the intellectuals also addresses a shift in the discourse of history and language, which brings the binary opposition of “Persian” and “Islamic” to the surface of the culture.

In theorizing the transition of power over the centre of signification from the ulama to the intellectuals, Tavakoli-Targhi draws attention to the disciplines of historiography and linguistics in the cultural context of Iran in order to explain how intellectuals gained their power to disturb the discourse of religion. Tavakoli-Targhi tries to elucidate moments of intellectual mastery and the influential presence of

Iranians; he is interested in the collaboration among Iranian scholars in the study of literature and science. The main site for these intellectual collaborations was the lively and liberal court of the Mughal kings in pre-colonial India. During the reign of the

Mughals, the Persian language was the lingua franca of the circle of elites and functioned perfectly as a passage to the knowledge of ancient languages.

In Refashioning Iran, Tavakoli-Targhi brings up instances of scientific attempts to translate modern knowledge into the Persian language by Perso-Indian scholars in order to show their significance in the dissemination of knowledge.14

These examples draw attention to the fact that Indo-Persian scholars approached

14 Among the many examples of the Perso-Indian scholars that Tavakoli Targhi refers to as influential and who completed the circulation of knowledge between the West and the East, Tafazzul Hussein Khan is a prominent figure whose translation of modern science were completed before westernized institutions came to dominate in Iran. Tafazzul Hussein Khan‟s translations of Isaac Newton‟s Principia (1687), William Emerson‟s The Principals of Mechanics (1754) and Thomas Simpson‟s A Treatise of Algebra (1745) into Persian were at least fifty years ahead of the translation movement in Iran. See Tavakoli-Targhi, “The Homeless Text of the Persianate Modernity.” Iran Between Tradition and Modernity, p. 139.

modern sciences rather willingly and acquired epistemological insights into modernity before becoming the passive subjects of the European Orientalism in the nineteenth century. Having started from the court of Akbar, the powerful king of the Mughals in the sixteenth century, the commissioned Iranian scholars efficiently continued to develop a dynamic and rich “Persianate” literature in pre-colonial India by composing

Persian dictionaries and Persian grammar texts in Sanskrit.15 Therefore, when

European Orientalists came to explore the ancient Asiatic languages to find the origins of the Latin, Greek, and Germanic languages, Iranians provided the prerequisites of such an inquiry.

By navigating Indo-Persian literature and studying the Sanskrit and Pahlavi languages, European scholars could bridge the gap between Oriental and modern linguistics. Two among many, William Jones (1746-1794) and Abraham Hyacinthe

Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) attempted to introduce another classical world based on their separate research on Sanskrit and Pahlavi. To enable them to delve easily into the ancient languages of the Asiatic texts, these Orientalists had always an Indo-

Persian scholar at their side to assist them.16 Anquetil Duperron, in 1771, by translating the Avesta, the primary religious text of Zoroastrianism, into English “for the first time [introduced] an Asiatic text independent of biblical and classical sources

[and] opened a new outlet to the ancient East.” (Javadi 56). Jones, after acquiring an immense knowledge of the Persian language, launched a huge linguistic mission: to theorize the ethno-lingual connections between the Persian language and other Indo-

15 According to Tavakoli-Targhi, a Zoroastrian scholar named Dastur Ardeshir Nawshiravan composed a comprehensive Persian dictionary in Akbar‟s court. More importantly, books on Persian grammar in Sanskrit for Indian pundits were written at around the same time. Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, 22. 16 “Anquetil Duperron was trained to read and decipher Pahlavi texts by Zoroastrian scholars Dastur Dara bin Suhrab […], Dastur Kavus bin Feradun […] and Manuchehri Seth.” See Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, 26.

European languages. His efforts to introduce a different feature of Indo-Persian culture is described by some scholars as “la Renaissance Orientale” in the early nineteenth century (ibid.).

Jones, as the founder and an active member of The Asiatic Society of Bengal in India, was introduced to a very particular but indistinct aspect of Indo-Persian literature represented in a collection of sectarian books in Persian. This sect, known as the Neo-Mazdeans, was mainly based on the tenets of Zoroastrianism and Islamic philosophy. In short, it can be seen as a happy marriage between a minor and a major creed of Iranians and as a scholarly-religious response to the formation of Shi‟ism as a political discourse in the sixteenth century.

The tempestuous landscape of religion in Iran in the sixteenth century involved many encounters and clashes through which different ideologies emerged and were disparaged. By inviting religious scholars from different Shi‟ite communities in the

Levant, as well as in Iraq and Bahrain,17 Safavid kings attempted to expedite the formation of Shi‟ite scholarship in Iran, and at the same time, Mughal kings were preparing their courts to welcome and accommodate expelled ideologies from Iran.18

Dasatir, or Dastire Asemani, and Dabistan Mazaheb are among the scholarly fruits of the migration of ideologies from Iran to India.19 These works, framing an alternative

17 Before the Safavids, Shi‟ism was considered as a minor religion with less intellectual engagement with state structure. In order to utilize its doctrine in rivalry with Sunni ulama, “Shah Ismail and Shah Tahmasp invited renowned Twelver Shi‟ite ulama from Arabic- speaking countries Iraq and Bahrain, and Jabal Amil in Syria, to reinforce Shi‟ite ulama already in Persia.” See Rula Abisaab. “Converting Persia: Religion and Power.” The Safavid Empire, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2004, 8. 18 Shah Tahmasp, the second king of the Safavids, followed his father‟s footsteps and became a patron of the Twelver ulama. By courting and supporting them, Tahmasp facilitated the formation of “a new religious bureaucratic class” in the sixteenth century. See: Rudi Mathee, Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2012, 176. 19 It seems that Jones had an informant, Mir Muhammad Husain, one of the most intelligent Muslims in India, who introduced these books to Jones. See: Bruce Lincoln. “Isaac Newton

timeline and narrative of history, brought more wonder to Jones, whose literary and scientific efforts were focused on the elaboration and rationalization of the Aryan myth. Jones, by relying on a scientific standpoint, wanted to make a network of connections among different disciplines such as historical linguistics, philology, and mythology in order to question the authority of the biblical narratives of The Book of

Genesis. Having invested in the linguistic values of the Neo-Mazdeans textbooks,

Jones in fact stepped into the realm of the rationalization of mythology. Jones‟s hypothesis brought the Pre-Islamic language of Iran into the category of ancient languages, claiming that it is stratified from the same stem that the Latin, Greek,

German, and Celtic languages had originated.20 To Jones, Dasatir and Dabistan

Mazaheb appeared not only as new sources for ancient history but also spectacular collections of pure Persian vocabulary. Henceforth, he could complete his work on the myth of the Aryans by including the Persian language; and, by including the Persian language, the myth of the Aryans found its way in the discourse of Iranian identity.

Dabistan Mazaheb and Dasatir belonged to a series of books known as the

Dasatiri Texts. These books were written by a group of Persian scholars whose spiritual leader is known as Azar Kayvan. At the dawn of the second millennium of

Islam (in about the late sixteenth century), the Safavid kings were still struggling over the institutionalization of Shi‟ism as the state religion. The ulama reinforced this policy by repurposing the religious and pedagogical doctrines of Shi‟ism as the only reliable reference for general and scholastic activities. In these circumstances, Azar

Kayvan, as a Zoroastrian cleric, made his first move to separate himself from the religious atmosphere of the time by claiming that, “with the coming of the Islamic and Oriental Jones on Myth, Ancient History and the Relative Prestige of People.” History of Religion, vol. 42, no.1, 2002, p. 13. 20 Lincoln in his essay explains how Jones‟ ambitious plan is actually influenced by the rationalization methods of Newton in studying mythology.

millennium, the dispensation of Arabs and Islam had come to an end and a new period of Persian superiority was beginning” (Sheffield 539). This conspicuous contradiction with the dominant religio-political milieu of the time apparently forced Azar Kayvan to leave Iran. Hoping to benefit from the democratic predilections of the Mughal kings, Azar Kayvan embarked on an irreversible journey to Patna in northern India, where his alternative opinions in religion would be welcomed. Being open to other monotheist and even polytheist religions, Azar Kayvan had a quest to found a universal language of belief. His ideas reflected in the Dasatiri Texts strongly resonated with the religious policies of Akbar.21

Haloed by the virtue of the metaphysical originality of its doctrine, Tavakoli-

Targhi has described Dasatir as a “Celestial Book” (Tavakoli-Targhi, “Contested

Memories” 164). It was initially translated into the Persian language in the seventh century at around the time when Islam was gaining strength in the Arabian Peninsula and the last non-Islamic dynasty in Iran, the Sassanids, was drawing its last breath. In a latent rivalry with the Quran, Dasatir offers stories of Persian mythical sages in sixteen epistles. In this book, real and pseudo historical figures, with their ground- breaking roles in pre-Islamic mythology, are represented in chronological order based on the succession of real or mythical dynasties. Dasatir shares another similarity with the Quran: the most important miracle of Islam, the Quran is understood as being protected by God, hence its rhymed prose in the Arabic language is untouchable and immune from falsification. Likewise, Dasatir claims to offer a pure version of the

21 Akbar, “[…] a man of profoundly mystical temperament, had conceived the notion of a „divine religion,‟ a sort of ecumenism, which would be able to assemble all religious spirit in a single spiritual community capable of overcoming all confessional barriers and limits.” See: “ĀẔAR KAYVĀN,” Encyclopaedia Irannica, August 18 2011, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/azar-kayvan-priest.Accessed 25 July 2017.

Persian language devoid of the influence of any other languages, especially Arabic loanwords.

Yet, the miscellaneous ideologies in Dasatir offer bits and pieces of other religions, including Islam. The Dasatiri Texts can be read as a site of intertextuality, based on a combination of other texts wherein the author(s) hoped to construct new discourses for Iran history and language with the help of the forgotten history and language of Iranzamin. The investigations on the structural and conceptual rivalry between Dasatir and the Quran made it possible for scholars to find a new premise for identity.

Not only did the composition of the Dasatiri Texts offer a subversive version of religion, but it also targeted the millennia-old tradition of the Islamic reading of

Persian history and mythology. In this tradition, the significance of the mythical and pseudo-historical figures of the pre-Islamic era was marginalized by downplaying their roles or interpreting their stories and conceptual resemblances and discrepancies with Quranic accounts of the Book of Genesis and the history of mankind on earth as a testimony that “the basis for telling the truth about history” is the Quran (Tavakoli-

Targhi, “Contested Memories” 156). In opposition to this claim, the scholarly works of Azar Kayvan and his disciples that subvert the Islamic contextualization of history seem to be a kind of disciplinary revenge against the cultural monopoly of Islamic culture over Persian textual culture. The re-evaluation of Persian mythology in the

Dasatiri Texts was more interesting to Jones than any religious account of the Book of

Genesis. In Jones‟s theorization, these texts became “the basis for telling the truth about the (counter) history of the Aryans.

In the context of discussing the authenticity of the Dasatiri Texts, a prominent discrepancy exists among scholars regarding the authenticity of the historical accounts

or the literary value of the supposedly purified Persian language offered in these sources. This implies that these texts carry a strong ideology, which casts shadow over their historical solemnity or literary value. Many believe that these works have no credibility. Their overt contradiction with Islamic documents makes them susceptible to harsh rejection by Muslim scholars, for example. The radical agenda of the Dasatiri

Text to revive a forgotten creed based on a selection of ideas from Zoroastrianism,

Abrahamic religions, and even the non-monotheistic sects of East Asia is blasphemous to Islamic clerics. Furthermore, the excessive usage of neologisms and jargon in making a so-called purified Persian language has created serious doubts around the accuracy of the initial claim. Although many do not acknowledge the linguistic innovation of the Dasatir, it played a significant role in the formation of the subversive language of the Constitutional Revolution by offering an alternative spectrum of non-Islamic Persian signs. Therefore, disputes over the literary value of the Dasatiri Texts do not decrease their influential impact on modern Persian historiography and language.

Fath-allah Mojtabii, in his entry on Azar Kayvan in The Great Islamic

Encyclopaedia, makes a short note about two important impacts that the Dasatiri

Texts had on Persian language. The linguistic innovation in the Dasatiri Texts influenced the compilation of one of the first Persian dictionaries, known as Borhan e

Ghaa-te (The Strong Argument), written in 1652. Jones‟s interest in Dasatir was passed on to other British Orientalists. According to Mojtabaii, a Zoroastrian scholar named Molla Firooz-e Parsee, on a visit to Iran in 1771 found a copy of Dasatir in

Isfahan and took it back to India. His English translation of Dasatir attracted much attention, including that of Jonathan Duncan, the governor of Bombay (1795-1811), and his successor, Sir John Malcolm.

In 1813, Sir John Malcolm, a high-ranking British diplomat in Iran and India, completed his survey on the history of Persia,22 which drew attention for its innovative approach toward Persian history as an unexplored subject in the academic field of

Europe.23 The publication of The History of Persia in Europe received a wide range of academic attention and acknowledgment. In 1870, the first Persian-translated version of Malcolm‟s text was published in India. Malcolm‟s approach to the history of Iran introduced a different perspective by taking the history of pre-Islamic Iran into account. In contrast to his European predecessors, Malcolm‟s priority in gathering information was to glean details from personal encounters with Iranian and Indian cultures. He explored Iran like a traveler and came up with a comprehensive collection in history. As a high-ranking British diplomat with complete fluency in the Persian language, Malcolm‟s field of experience extended from Iran to India. His diplomatic prestige and influence gave him access to indigenous knowledge of Persian history.

Therefore, in contrast to many European historians, his first step was to take into consideration the historical accounts that Greco-Roman and biblical prototypes of

Persian historiography had pushed into shadow (Lambton 104).

This approach in fact decentralized two major narratives. On the one hand,

Malcolm‟s acknowledgement of the indigenous Oriental sources credited the non-

Western dimensions of Romanticism in the nineteenth century. He brought a collected body of knowledge to the center of attention, which, prior to his time, had not been recognized as reliable and authentic documents; thus, he helped other European

Romantics to question the sovereignty of Western classical narratives. On the other

22 “The History of Persia by Malcolm is the earliest full-length history of Iran in English, and that alone gives it a certain interest and even importance.” See: A.K.S. Lambton. “Major- General John Malcolm (1776-1833) and „The History of Persia.‟ Iran, vol. 33, 1995, p. 103. 23 “Down to the seventeenth century, knowledge of the ancient Persians and their religion has been largely restricted to the account given by Herodotus.” See George Sarton. “Anquetil Duperron (1731-1805),” Osiris, vol. 3, 1937, p.193.

hand, by referring to different Persianate sources, he introduced those historical narratives that had been out of the Islamic domain of history. This assertively questioned the totality of Islamic historiography and the superiority of the post-

Islamic era as the chronological starting point for writing about the history of Iran. He paid attention to the margins of Persian historiography and to the body of official documents. However, these were the same shady documents that, at the time of the secular revision of history, were used to give pre-Islamic mythology ascendency over

Islamic narratives.

Therefore, Malcolm‟s contribution in the formation of a new narrative of history is undeniably important. Having realized that there is an alternative version of history that does not resonate with the Islamic accounts of history, Iranian intellectuals found the history of pre-Islamic Persia, as chronicled by a Western scholar, a story that they wanted to hear. More importantly, the unraveling evidence of such a history and civilization were retrieved through archaeological investigations and revisiting

Persian literature. Therefore, these radical Iranians not only found the Orientalist version of Persian history a testimony to the existence of a glorious but forgotten past, but they also saw the possible compatibilities of these new narratives with the stories of the Shahnama. What this means is that the most profound non-Islamic book of

Persian culture has always been more than a compilation of fables and myths; rather, it is a document proving that Iranzamin did exist and can be revived again.

Having showcased Persian culture as the new rival for traditional Islamic ideology, the literary remnants of the past consolidated the new vocabulary of nationalism. The radical understanding of history helped the intellectuals to cope with the cultural backwardness of their time. Before the victory of the Constitutional

Revolution and the establishment of the first National Consultative Assembly in 1906,

the intellectuals had rehearsed their march to a different future and a new realm where the linguistic signs were taken as the only ammunition. Back to the very beginning of the history of the modernization of Iran, although Fath‟Ali Shah‟s political urges for the restitution of Transcaucasia from Russia through the modernization of the army was never fulfilled, out of his desperate attempt a more powerful institution emerged.

In a quest to regain its power, this new institution targeted the legitimacy of the monarchy.

When the Iranian parliament voted in 1925 that last king of the Qajars should abdicate, Iran entered into a new era marked as modern-ized. Intellectuals‟ increasing consciousness of history and language made it possible for them to examine the arbitrary relationship between the legitimacy of the absolute monarchy and the discourse of Shi‟ism. The susceptibility of the discourse of political Shi‟ism to be dislodged by a stronger discourse, such as modernity in the early twentieth century, continued to exist for almost half a century; however, Iranian intellectuals could not sufficiently develop a modern mentality to observe the same arbitrariness between their modern identity and the new discourse of history. As a result of modernization, the discursivity of Iranian identity found a new direction and the dichotomy of

Persian/Islamic achieved a solidified border.

Chapter Two

Persian or Islamic: The Duality in the Discursive Definition of Art

Although the discipline of Islamic art offers a rich bibliography and a discourse of aesthetics elaborated by a variety of opinions, this branch of art history is still very young. Islamic art as a discipline is a product of Western scholarship and has a century-old history. The novelty of Islamic art makes it a dynamic field of study, as well as a discourse susceptible to many critical analyses. The first issue that a persevering art history reader may encounter is an uncertainty in the definition of

Islamic art. In order words, no clear answer to the question “What is Islamic art?” exists. In search for possible answers, first and foremost, the reader needs to overcome the introductory rudiments that a literature review of Islamic art offers; yet, there is no guarantee that any answer/s will be unravelled at the end.

Many of the recent investigations in this field can be considered as strong critiques of the early principles that had set this discourse in motion in the first place.

Recently, the dynamism of this field has successfully attracted much attention to itself, especially from Islamic academia. The academic activity of Muslim scholars in this field has also accelerated remarkably. Although the participation of Iranian, Turkish, and Egyptian scholars in producing and enriching this discipline has become more noticeable, there is an academic gap between Muslim scholars and their powerful counterparts in the West.24

That Muslims are increasingly taking part in Islamic art studies does not conceal the fact that for a long time they were not considered as active members of the community of Islamic art researchers. Their participation demonstrates a belated

24 Hossein Keshani. “Toward Digital Islamic Art History.” Journal of Art Historiography, vol. 6, 2012, 2

academic response to investigations that were consolidated decades ago out of their intellectual zone. When the authority of Western scholars in Islamic art studies is disputed, two questions come to mind: was the intellectual and cultural context of the

Islamic community empty of the notion of art? And, what type of knowledge made it possible for Western scholars to construct such a discourse?

Although the absence of Muslim scholars in the discursive formation of

Islamic art implies the fact that the monopoly of Western scholarship would left no room for the contribution of Muslims, it is also arguable that there was a limited voluntarily engagement on the part of Muslims. More importantly, Iranian intellectuals, in their reception of Islamic art, displayed different reactions. In the early twentieth century, around the same time that European Orientalists were engaged in a new scholarship, Iranian pro-modern intellectuals were struggling to re-configure their national identity. Therefore, the whole disciplinary process of the formation of the knowledge of Islamic art could have been beneficial to nationalistic sentiments, but the discourse of Islamic art took a different turn in its scholarly definition through its reception and appearance as a subdivision of Persian art.

In the following argument, the story of the formation of Islamic art as a discipline will be repurposed in order to define the parameters that generated a division in the definition of art in Iran. As discussed above, for Iranian constitutionalists in the closing era of the Qajars, the vigorous reframing of Iranian historical narratives to reconstruct society was a matter of cultural awareness. By destabilizing the traditional definition of identity, the Iranian nationalist movement entered a new era in 1925, after the downfall of the Qajars. From 1925 onward, the modernization and secularization of social and cultural institutions in Iran continued to progress throughout the reign of the last dynastic system in contemporary Iran, the

Pahlavis. The beginning of this era was marked by the continuation of the nationalist movement. This time, the discourse of nationality was not an ideological apparatus targeting the ruling system; now, in the 1920s, nationalism was a cultural movement mediating through the visual arts and serving the cultural sphere of the Pahlavis.

Including art in the hotbed of cultural ferment at the dawn of the Pahlavis, the first generation of intellectuals was in fact looking for a stronger force than literature to invigorate Iranian identity. In fact, the term “Persian art” was coined as a result of the chronological overlapping of the formation of the discourse of Islamic art in the

West and national strivings for the construction of a non-Islamic identity in Iran. The contradiction is apparent only if we consider the fact that the scholarly achievements of the West, in systematizing the study of Islamic art, had coincided perfectly with the secular tendencies of Iranian intellectuals. More importantly, the absence of Islamic narratives in the establishment of Persian art made it possible for the nationalists to simply appropriate the new system of the study of Islamic art and turn it into the new discourse of Persian art. In this regard, the European and American Orientalists played a prominent role.

The Discipline of Islamic art

The formation of Islamic visual culture can be reviewed through the history of the broad and sudden expansion of Islamic civilization in the first century of its establishment. This history contains multiple accounts of political and cultural clashes between the army of the new Muslim Arabs and those of other nations. After the

Prophet‟s death in 632 C.E. and over the course of a century, Islam greatly expanded its borders and turned its tribal and nomadic community with scattered centers in the

Arabian Peninsula into one of the largest empires of all time.

To the west, Islam conquered the Levant, North Africa, and a major part of the

Iberian Peninsula. To the east, it dominated the whole territory of the Sassanid Empire in Persia and reached up to the borders of India and China. Gradually, in just under than two centuries, a large part of the world of antiquity yielded to the powerful

Muslim armies. Most of the large area covered by the early Islamic state has remained culturally Islamic to this day, with the exception of the Iberian Peninsula, where Islam and its cultural manifestations between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries were gradually swept away by the Spaniards.

The majority of the nations who submitted to Islam had their own long history of civilization and art. The cultural clashes of the early Islamic era had both constructive and non-constructive results. One the one hand, with the domination of

Islam, the pre-Islamic societal rules of the conquered lands were strongly radicalized to the core and as a result, some aspects of their pre-Islamic culture disappeared. On the other hand, while the Muslim conquerors could not easily force people to relinquish their pre-Islamic culture, they found the visual culture and language of the non-Muslim civilizations a proper medium for representing the message of Islam.

The birth of a new visual culture that could mediate between the two sides of the cultural clash was in general the continuation of the previous art forms in a new

Islamic context. However, a distance of more than a millennium lies between the formation of the visual culture of Islam and the consolidation of a language to articulate its aesthetics. More importantly, this language was achieved by Western scholars in Europe.

This gap offers two hypotheses. On the one hand, it suggests that probably in the Islamic tradition of thought, the articulable aspects of visual arts were theoretically insufficient to produce a substantial discourse for aesthetics. One the other hand, it

was non-Muslim scholars who played an important role in the consolidation of such knowledge. The former hypothesis has recently become a matter of dispute among

Islamic art scholars; Muslim scholars in particular navigate their way through this field by constantly challenging its accuracy, whereas the latter seems to be a needless argument. In the early twentieth century, Islamic art as a discipline was established by

“European academics and museum curators” (Rizvi, “Art” 13). This category used to be situated as a subdivision of the art of late antiquity and the medieval period, according to Eurocentric narratives of art history. It turned into an independent branch of art when European and, later, American scholars applied their scientific methodologies to the systematized study of Oriental artefacts. The results were embodied in a new scholarship labeled “Islamic art.”

Oleg Grabar, one of the distinguished figure of Islamic art history in the second half of the twentieth century, believes that this discipline was constructed and enriched on the basis of three different activities: archaeology; the collection of

Oriental artefacts such as rugs, ceramics, miniature paintings, and metalwork; and thirdly, “Orientalism, which instilled, through dry and inhospitable grammars and furtively read travel accounts, romantic notions of faraway lands and exotic cultures”

(“Reflections on the Study of Islamic Art” 2). He also argues that in this scholarly effort, the prominent presence of the West takes control over this scholarship and that the “Muslim world did not participate in its development” (ibid.). Therefore, the

European methodologies of “completing [a] bibliography, a survey of sources, and tripartite conclusions” ruled over this field for almost half a century (ibid.).25

25 In this article, Grabar claimed the Western approach towards the study of Islamic art up to thirty years before his time was almost the only applied methodology that had made the “study of Islamic art easy to define.” See “Reflections on the Study of Islamic Art, p. 2.

Needless to say, the contributions of Muslim scholars would be instrumental in strengthening the discursive language of this discipline. Hypothetically, if a discipline, as an active premise of investigation, is supposed to engender a network of communication and interaction among scholars, a variety of different opinions that concern the main subject should be included; otherwise, the inevitable controversies of a so-called discipline hinders scholars from achieving a solid theorization.

In the early days of Islamic art studies, Orientalists took an authoritative step toward setting the fundamentals of the discourse of Islamic art firstly and solely on the basis of the Western knowledge of arts. By virtue of navigating the visual culture of

Islam in the absence of non-Western viewpoints, the first generation of scholars faced fewer controversies and came to conclusions faster and more easily. The early introductory books on Islamic art contain a very confident literature, which assertively reflects upon the privilege that Western academics presumed in probing Islamic art.

Recent studies have already problematized the accuracy of many of the early theorizations, especially those that are overgeneralized statements highlighting Islamic art as essentially religious, non-representational, or aesthetically original.

Although the domestic documents that might shed lights on Islamic knowledge of art were scarce and scattered and were not accounted for in the early studies, there are limited but invaluable instances from the Iranian traditions of hagiography and documentation, in which the masters of art and crafts as well as traditional techniques are introduced. As an example: in 1931, a very important document, Bahram Mirza

Album (Murraqa-e Bahram Mirza), was discovered in the Topkapi Palace by Mehmet

Ağa-Oğlu. Murraqa is a form of illustrated hagiography of artists and calligraphers and the only original document in the Persian language that addresses the tradition of transcribing and illuminating manuscripts in pre-modern Iran. Ağa-Oğlu characterized

this document as “[…] a discovery which some believe will alter the study of Persian art … the preface was, in fact, a history of Persian painting written in Persian in 1544 by Dust Muhammad, a document that would form the cornerstone of countless subsequent studies of Persian manuscript painting” (Simavi 5). Topkapi Palace had another important hidden document within its treasury, known as the “Topkapi

Scroll,” which belongs to the classical epoch of the Timurids in fifteenth-century Iran.

Gulru Nacipoglu, a contemporary scholar of Islamic art studies, introduced the

Topkapi Scroll as a handbook of architectural ornaments. These remnants of the past have revealed the possibility of having another source for Islamic art from Islamic culture, but the chances were slim that Western scholars could have had access to them at the beginning of their inquiries.

One can bring a few excuses forward to account for the negligence of Western academics. It would be easy to place the blame on the social and cultural situation of the post-Safavid era (1726-1796), when the cultural history of Iran became drained of highlights and even the artistic achievements of the Qajar era could hardly bring back any glory. For declining arts such as miniature painting, the harm was irreversible.

Even the tradition of compiling documents in a form such as Murraqa had to find refuge in the margins of Persian literature, and notable experiences such as the

Bahram Mirza Album were never repeated again.

The second reason can be explained by the way in which Persian literature was privileged by elites and patrons; thus, the visual culture had to submit to the higher cultural position of literature. In the history of miniature painting, it was always the transcription industry and the demand for the reproduction of literary texts that would bring visual arts into consideration. After the wane of the transcription industry in the

seventeenth century, the tradition of miniature painting almost ceased to exist, and the subsequent styles of painting could not repeat that old grandeur.

Therefore, the authority of Western knowledge over the visual arts of the

Orient was more indisputable than its textual culture. Moreover, the universal language of art made it easier for scholars to employ the rich scholarship of aesthetics in the study of non-Western arts, conveniently without having to learn the Persian language. More importantly, the new knowledge of archaeology was a superseding principle defying all barriers by imposing its own scientific language.26 Therefore, the

West could retain its ostensibly unquestionable authority in the domain of visual arts.

Even after the discovery of those scarce sources, Western scholars of Islamic studies kept underrating the authors of those hagiographic documents by comparing them and their scholarly products with Giorgio Vasari and the tradition of European art historiography. Therefore, the European culture of high art seemed sufficient as an

“essential reference point” (Troelenberg, “Regarding the Exhibition” 11). The prominent presence of an informational lacuna in the history of Islamic visual culture and the paucity of reliable sources from the eighteenth century onward compelled

European and American Orientalists to believe that, in regard to visual arts, there was an epistemological lack in the indigenous body of knowledge. But does this mean that art was not contextualized in the Islamic tradition of ideas? To answer this question, we must turn back to the very beginning of the story of Islamic civilization.

26 Among a wide spectrum of archaeological speculations conducted by Western archaeologists, a significant figure whose discovery and decoding of an ancient inscription in Iran was a turning point in the study of Iranian ancient history: “From 1836 to 1841, Henry C. Rawlinson copied the trilingual inscription at Bisotun and made a major breakthrough in deciphering the cuneiform script. Later, based on the recently translated cuneiform inscriptions and classical texts, Rawlinson published the first modern history of ancient Iran from the Median to the Sassanian periods, in a series which eventually culminated in the publication of The Seven Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World.” See: Kamyar Abdi, “Nationalism, Politics, and the Development of Archaeology in Iran.” American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 105, no.1, Jan. 2001, p. 53.

In the early stages of the consolidation of Islamic civilization, absorbing the visual culture of others became the main characteristic of the artistic language of

Islam. As long as the practice of art did not violate the main tenets of Islam, artistic activities were both acknowledged and practiced by Muslims. The practice of art in

Islamic society had two separate manifestations in the public and private spheres.

Visual arts in the public sphere were limited to the complicated language of abstraction. The non-representational arts were a means of decoration and beautification that functioned in different religious sites, such as congregational mosques, shrines, and mausoleums. Figurative arts were rather freely practiced in the royal courts, where monarchs could impose their power over the rules of representation. This aesthetic duality served the practices of visual art within the context of Islamic laws and left only sculpture out of the two spheres. The practicality of this compromised adaptation resulted in the gradual independence of Islamic art from its inspiring sources and facilitated the adaptation and appropriation of other traditions in art. The geopolitical proximity of Islam and other powerful empires influenced the newly shaped Islamic school of thought. Through the many clashes between the Islamic and the Byzantine empires, Muslims were able to incorporate

Greek philosophy and sciences into their own worldview. Indeed, the acquaintance of

Muslims with the classical definition of beauty as reflected in Greek philosophy formed the fundamentals of Islamic theology.

In the wake of the dispersion of the intellectual achievements of the School of

Alexandria, the first Christian institution of higher learning that was formed in the second century CE, Muslim scholars were introduced to the classical world of ideas with the help of “Hellenized Christians” of the Byzantine Empire (Papadopoulo 34).

Through the translation of Christian theological documents into Arabic, “the

Neoplatonic and mystical conception of the great Greek theologians … were to exercise a considerable influence on all Muslim thought, whether theological, mystic or philosophic” (ibid.). In this context, the definition of beauty can be understood as having been an answer to a series of questions that Islamic philosophers had been asking throughout their ontological inquiries in philosophy. In this new school of thought, beauty is defined in relation to a metaphysical source that links things and beings to itself and to each other, gives meaning to abstract concepts, and makes the manifestations of ideas in the material world beautiful. In a metaphysical rendition of beauty, beautiful testifies to the metaphysical presence of Divine Beauty. Thus, aesthetics and theology are taken as equal.

The recognition of the link between metaphysical beauty and its material receptacle in the world can be considered the main step in a theological understanding of beauty: everything can be beautiful as long as they carry similitude with other divinely beautiful entities. For Muslim theologians, the realization of beauty is the fruit of a religious practice in which a person, by his or her realization, feels close to the origin of beauty. This definition of beauty does not specify a set of criteria for understanding the artistic and material values of an artwork. This means that the mediation of capital-A Art in the contemplation and recognition of beauty had been little acknowledged by Muslim philosophers. Accordingly, the knowledge of aesthetics with its secular dimensions does come from this philosophy. The metaphysical understanding of beauty pursues similitude and resemblance among visual signs in order to show that the direction of all beautiful beings is toward the

Transcendental Signified. Based on the similitude that signs share, no arbitrariness exists between them and the concept that they represent. Thus, beautiful entities are not identified based on their differences. They do not need otherness, negation, or

temporality in order to be defined. It is to say that the conceptual tools of the discourse of aesthetics are not recognized in this school of thought. Unless a new mindset does not disturb the idea of unity and similarity, in the absence of taxonomy, historiography, and documentation, the religious framework of beauty cannot offer a systematic methodology for studying the visual culture of Islam.

The critical turning point in Western culture, the Renaissance, was in fact a revolution in understanding the order and meaning of signs based on differences. The determined link between the “Truth” and signs lost its essentiality, and as other centres began to replace the centrality of meaning, then signs were no longer the manifestations of Truth. This secular move simply did not happen in the context of

Islamic countries before their close encounter with modernity.

In The Order of Things, Foucault exemplifies Don Quixote as “the hero of the

Same” (46) and the one who never “cross[es] the clearly defined frontiers of difference, or reach[es] the heart of identity,” thus marks the emergence of the modern understanding of signs, when “resemblances and signs have dissolved their former alliance” (50). The “essential rupture”(55) that Foucault highlights in the history of the Western thought, is indeed a phenomenon that Islamic culture did not experience in the same way that its counterpart did after the end of the Middle Ages (ibid.).

Unlike for Western and Christian culture, the rupture has not happened from within for Islamic culture. When Islamic thought was losing ground with respect to keeping its metaphysical philosophy as a sustainable premise for knowledge, the discontinuity

“between thought and culture” (ibid) happened as the result of a belated acceptance of modernity.

It was through modernization that the main rupture imposes its dividing forces on the metaphysical apprehension of beauty from outside. Apparently, this new

division problematized the adequacy of Islamic philosophy to examine its knowledge of beauty. The consequent discontinuity in the trajectory of the metaphysical understanding of beauty generated more controversies. Modern knowledge, or what

Foucault describes as “the classical thought of the seventeenth century,” “[excluded] resemblances as the fundamental experience and primary form of knowledge,

[denouncing] it as a confused mixture that must be analyzed in terms of identity, difference, measurement, and order (52).” To accept this important prerequisite of the modern mentality, Islamic philosophy had to either admit the arbitrariness of the relationship between signs and their meanings or to prioritize the profane multiplicity of the signs over their sacred similitude in being united as a body. It seems that in between the adaptation of modern thought and the retention of its own principals, the theological framework of beauty experienced a temporary setback during the climax of the modern reading of Islamic art. Thus, in its absence, modern knowledge took control as the new discourse of Islamic art.

Having relied on a systematic reading of the Orient, Western scholars introduced Islamic art through differential categorizations and taxonomical designations, some of which now seem quite arbitrary and overarching. The modern knowledge of Islamic art was not easily achieved. Starting from the very beginning, designations such as “Arab Art” or “Mussalman Art” were carelessly used as labels for artefacts from Islamic countries – labels that could easily convey negative connotations. This addressed the old political rivalry between the Christian and

Islamic religions from medieval times and brought the same Western mindset to the early twentieth century, when many Islamic countries on the verge of surrendering to modernity were either still a colony or striving to construct their own modern/secular nationality. At the same time, the main guardians of Islamic art, the Ottoman Empire

and the Qajars in Iran, were desperately striving to keep their reigns intact by imitating the modern structures of European societies. In the beginning of the twentieth century, it seemed that the enduring rivalry between the Christian and

Islamic worlds ended up in favour of the West when Islamic rulers in one way or another found their future in submitting to Europeans through the importation of empiricist sciences, bureaucracy and modern technology. Having generalized the art and culture of Muslims, European scholars attributed random terms to every Islamic entity regardless of its regional identity. This attitude could be understood as an indication of the cultural supremacy of the West over “the Rest.”

Oriental Objects on Exhibition

So far in this account, the discipline of Islamic art has been considered as a discursive practice used by Western scholars to delineate the visual culture of Islamic territories. The significant merits of this discursive practice could not have sufficed to form a comprehensive knowledge of Islamic art, if the visibility of the artistic objects had not been brought into the surface of attention. It means an important part of the knowledge of Islamic Art is formed by the way in which its materiality becomes visible before its discourse becomes articulable. It addresses the significance of the sites of visibility where objects gain significance through the ways in which their historical and temporal worthiness are framed.

This aspect had initially less to do with the disciplinary formation or the aestheticization of Islamic art. The significance of the non-discursive (the visible) aspects of the knowledge of Islamic art addresses the role that antique collectors and connoisseurs played in the formation of this discipline. It also draws attentions to the fact that if the knowledge of Islamic Art is not understood as a product of Islamic scholarship, the reason must have to do with the cultural context of the Orient, which

did not have any official place of visibility solely dedicated to artistic artefacts. In this regard, mosques and shrines because of their religious functionality could not showcase the visibility of their architectural characteristics and abstract ornaments as

“art”.

The visible and articulable aspects of knowledge are explained by Gilles

Deleuze, in his reading of Foucault‟s notion of the episteme. Deleuze conceptualizes history as a multilayered entity comprised of different ages. Each age, or stratum, is

“made from things and words, from seeing and speaking, from the visible and sayable, from the bands of visibility fields of readability, from contents and expressions”

(Foucault 47). By adding a new layer to the knowledge of art history, Western connoisseurs and art historians defined the Islamic stratum of art by providing the visible and articulable aspects for it. Deleuze says: “An age does not pre-exist the statements which express it, nor the visibilities which fill it” (48). Therefore, the knowledge of Islamic Art has been cultivated equally by two traditions: first, the

European tradition of Art History and aesthetics, which maintained the discursivity of

Islamic art by providing a proper language and empiricist methodologies that enabled this knowledge to be organized into an academic discipline. The second is the exhibitory method of framing objects in museums, galleries, and even private collections. The latter tradition, as Kishwar Rizvi discusses in an article from 2007, is a modern method of spectatorship in which objects can be studied, reproduced, and displayed.

Interestingly, in the formation of the discipline of Islamic art, non-academic institutions played an important role. In other words, the intellectual engagement of the West, in giving order to the haphazard collection of Oriental objects, mainly favoured European connoisseurs and antique dealers. Many of the misleading titles

used to refer to Oriental artefacts belonged to the lexicon of the antique markets of the nineteenth century. This underlines the fact that at the time of the popularity of Europe antique markets, no adequate language for talking about Islamic art existed. This language was achieved later, as a by-product of the cultural ferment of Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. For Oriental objects, the Belle Époque was the time when they became the main subject of a series of private and public exhibitions.

The first outcome of modern speculations on Islamic art was a considerable number of catalogues and introductory books published for or after an exhibition. The content of these catalogues was primarily oriented towards offering general and taxonomic information. Before the public exhibitions, the unknown domain of Islamic visual culture was largely confined to antiquarians‟ repositories.

A rivalry emerged among antique dealers as they enriched their possession of antiques with different Oriental objects. Grabar addresses this rivalry by considering the significance of the antique collectors in the disciplinary formation of Islamic Art.

To some extent, one of the primary motivators for acquiring academic integrity over the complicated and diverse nature of Islamic visual culture was to respond to antiquarians‟ demands for a practical and systematized method of evaluating Oriental objects. Grabar, in his book on Persian miniature painting, Mostly Miniatures, underlines the emergence of a vogue in the nineteenth century for collecting Persian miniature paintings among a wide range of art collectors, from “military officers and other officials of British India”; “Parisian jewellers … excited by the fine details of the Persian images”; “members of rich Russian merchant families”; diplomats and travelers, to “painters like Henri Matisse and even Pablo Picasso” – all of whom pursued their interest in Oriental antiquity, exoticism, and aesthetics through Persian miniatures (9). Moreover, museums and universities became home to a considerable

number of Islamic artefacts. These sites reinforced the visibility of Islamic art and facilitated the immigration of the Oriental antiques from private space into the public space. Subsequently, the early Islamic art scholars baptized the antique objects of

Islamic colonies with their knowledge of art and museology and turned them into artefacts and masterpieces of Islamic visual arts. Without these means of rendering it visible, Islamic art would have stayed in the domain of private collections, with its impenetrable halo of exoticism. Unlike in the confining situation of private collections, as Islamic objects such as miniature paintings were in the past, in the

West, publically showcasing Islamic artworks became necessary for the categorization of those invaluable items.

A quick glimpse at the cultural map of Europe in the late nineteenth century reveals that between 1880 and 1910, the rivalry among antique dealers transformed into a strong interest among connoisseurs and antiquarians to showcase their collections. This new trend initially manifested in the form of private shows limited to the circle of antiquarians. Starting in Paris, the first exhibition was a call to evaluate the artistic value of oriental antiques, but due to the upsurge of interest among collectors and commentators, oriental artefacts found their stage in public exhibitions.

In short order, many exhibitions were held in Paris (1893-1903), London (1893), and

Stockholm (1897); one exhibition, in 1905, was even held outside of Europe – in

Algiers, the capital of Algeria, a French colony at the time.27

In all of these early exhibitions, the same strategy of showcasing the Orient was followed. In their best attempt to give order to the huge and disorderly world of antiques, the first commentators drew a line between museum-worthy objects and

27 The dates are from David J. Roxburgh, “Au Bonheur des Amateurs: Collecting and Exhibiting Islamic Art, ca. 1880-1903,” Ars Orientalis, vol. 30, 2000, various pages.

those ornaments of little value that could be found everywhere outside of the close circle of European collectors. This helped these objects to find better positions and greater visibility later in museums, galleries, and public exhibitions.

David J. Roxburgh‟s revision of one of the early exhibitions of Islamic art, in his article “Au Bonheur des Amateurs: Collecting and Exhibiting Islamic Art, ca.

1880-1910,” offers a detailed study of the significance of European collectors in providing visibility for Islamic art and facilitating the emergence of a robust language for articulating Islamic artefacts. He says:

Collectors not only collected but also reviewed exhibitions and promoted their collection through publications. In this way there were able to manipulate and to take advantage of it, giving greater visibility to an artistic tradition that would be then more systematically acquired by state museum. (17)

In Roxburgh‟s analysis, the collection of Adolphe Goupil is described as one of the important private collections that introduced artefacts of Islamic visual culture to the circle of European connoisseurs. In enumerating its significance, Roxburgh asserts that “Goupil‟s selection, comprehensive in its coverage of media, paralleled the emerging scholarship on Islamic art”; Goupil‟s collection contained almost 290 antiques, plus many invaluable European works of art (13). According to Roxburgh, the main theme was chosen based on a general division between the Orient and the

Occident. This division brought a new approach to the categorization of Islamic art by emphasizing the existence of an ancient civilization behind the visual culture of Islam and by separating Oriental art from primitive art. This recognition was alongside a sense of admiration that commentators of the time gave to Islamic civilization for its glorious past. This standpoint was accentuated toward the end of the nineteenth century, and associating Islamic art with the past became commonplace among scholars. Another standpoint came into consideration via exhibitions such as Goulip‟s

and remained as part of other Islamic art exhibition for at least half a century. In

Goupil‟s collection, the parallel presence of European high arts with Islamic arts could be considered as a reminder to visitors that European masterpieces of the Renaissance are still the “essential preference point” in evaluating a work of art (Troelenberg,

“Regarding the Exhibition” 11).

In the other two exhibitions that took place in Paris in 1893 and 1903, the new notion of “Muslim Art” was placed on the agenda. These exhibitions tamed the nebulous nature of Oriental antiques by submitting them to a new order with the same vocabulary that Western scholars used in the discourse of art history. Each individual approach to classifying the Oriental objects initialized a different attributive adjective for the Oriental objects, such as Mussalman and Muhammadan, and with each adjective came a different signification. The more the quantity and quality of the exhibitions were improved over time, the more scholars became involved in identifying the character of the Oriental objects.

An important milestone in the evolution of Islamic art as a discipline occurred with the opening of an important exhibition in Munich known as The Masterpieces of

Muhammadan Art. This exhibition, in “the wake of the World‟s Fair” (Troelenberg

“Reading the Exhibition” 5) in 1910, was a massive representation of the visual culture of the Orient, during the ferment in Europe before the Great War. Through the close collaboration among German Orientalists and a wide range of European connoisseurs, the Munich exhibition became an exemplary arena in which Oriental objects could be reframed as masterpieces of Islamic art. As its name suggests, this exhibition was distinguished by three important factors that separated it from its previous counterparts: first, the artefacts of Islamic visual culture were labeled as masterpieces; the second is that for the first time an association was made between the

visual culture of the Orient and the dominant religion of that geography, and third,

Friedrich Sarre (1865-1945), the curator of this exhibition, successfully made a connection between the cultural purposes of the exhibition and German academics.

Thus, the visible and articulable aspects of Islamic art found a common ground in the formation of a new knowledge.

In a recent study on the impact of the Munich exhibition on the scholarly development of Islamic art, “Regarding the Exhibition: The Munich Exhibition

„Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art‟ (1910) and Its scholarly Position,” Eva-Maria

Troelenberg acknowledges Friedrich Sarre as “the main academic protagonist”28 behind the organization of the Munich Exhibition, whose close circle of experts added a distinct character to the newfangled discourse of Islamic art (ibid.). In Troelenberg‟s view, by offering “professional methods and scholarly direction of formal analysis,”

Sarre and his group hoped to be able to popularize Islamic art and introduce it as a

“sophisticated way that might lead somewhere beyond romantic Orientalist notions such as the bazaar or the shopworn cliché of the Arabian Nights” (ibid 8).

A decade before the opening of this exhibition, Josef Strzygowski, by questioning the Greco-Roman roots of Western architecture in his book Orient oder

Rom: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Spätantiken und Frühchristlichen Kunst (1901), had brought the controversial notion of the Orient into the genealogy of Christian art.

Trying to address the Orient as an “Eastern source”29 for the great architectural

28 Eva-Maria Troelenberg, “Regarding the Exhibition: The Munich Exhibition Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art (1910) and its Scholarly Position,” no. 6 (June 2012), 5. 29 Talinn Grigor in his study of the influence of German Orientalists on the formation of the late Qajar, early Pahlavis architecture explains thoroughly about Strzygowski‟s controversial hypothesis. By publishing Orient oder Rom in 1901, Strzygowski “rejected the Rome-centered scholarship on architectural forms and instead made a solid and rather sophisticated case for their Eastern source.”(564). Grigor believes that in contrast with the normative accounts of art history such as that of the Giovani Teresio Rivoria in Le Origini dell' Architettura Lombarda

achievements of Europe in the dawn of the second millennium, Strzygowski followed the same strategy used by British Orientalists in approaching the Asiatic languages as they searched for the roots of European languages. Therefore, the Munich Exhibition had the indirect support of German art historians who wanted to question the supremacy of Greco-Roman arts in shaping European culture. In accounts of the

Munich Exhibition, the name Josef Strzygowski cannot be missed, since, with his challenging theory, he not only underlined the rivalry between the Orient and the

Occident, but also brought the myth of the Aryan as the superior race into the modern rendition of Oriental art. Again, the Romantic tendencies of European scholars in finding a non-Western discourse in which to ground a counter-theory for the conventional cultural history of the West repeated itself from within an Orientalist standpoint. This time, though, it was Islamic visual culture that was supposed to draw on similarities and differences between two sides of antiquity.

Via the Munich exhibition, the term “masterpiece” entered into the lexicon used to describe Islamic art. Being characterized as masterpieces, Islamic artworks were given the same characteristic that used to be attributed only to notable instances of European art. According to Troelenberg, Sarre‟s policy of attributing “masterpiece” to Islamic artefacts was in favour of canonizing a tradition whose formal characteristics and language of aesthetics had less to do with what was conventionally acknowledged as “masterpiece” in the Western tradition of visual arts, while, at the same time, validating the supposed need for academic recognition from the same tradition. Thus, Islamic art could be known and venerated despite the fact that “the

(1901)Strzygowski‟s argument draws attention to the possible racial connections between Europeans (Nordic and Germanic) and Indo-Persian peoples; a hypothesis that favoured the formation of the myth of the Aryans in 1930s. See: Grigor, Talinn. “„Orient Oder Rom?" Qajar „Aryan‟ Architecture and Strzygowski's Art History.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 89, no. 3, 2007, pp. 562–590. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25067341.

traditional codes employed for judging works” in the context of European aesthetics do not necessarily work with Islamic art (ibid 10).

Before the Munich Exhibition, any adjectives that were applied to Islamic art expired soon after the opening of each succeeding exhibition. All of those titles now reside in textbooks as mementos of the golden age of “Visual Orientalism”; however, since the very beginning of the formation of Islamic art as a discipline, the durability of the related meanings of these adjectives has been guaranteed by the circulation of the comments, analyses, and reviews that each exhibition generated.

Having been summoned into the laboratory of modern taxonomy, each new meaning tried to remove traces of the past from the objects. Consequently, objects with palimpsests from the unknown past eventually lost their aura, and instead they were granted exhibitory values, identities, and, more importantly, a new center for signification. The most important fallout of the Munich Exhibition was the invention of the term “Islamic art,” which could connect all the diverse signs together and, surprisingly, unite them. However, this time it was the differences that came to shape the modern category of Islamic art. Having inherited the exhibitory achievements of its predecessors, the Munich Exhibition became a turning point in the history of

Islamic art.

In the guidebook for the Munich Exhibition, a new and very important methodology for studying Islamic art was introduced. This exhibition directed its conceptualization of the art of Muslims at replacing the former vaguely stated

Orientalist values with the unifying capacities of religion. On the one hand, this scholarly move emancipated the objects from the previous traditions, which were imbued with misunderstandings. On the other, it introduced another presupposition for the act of observing them, albeit, with no guarantee that further misunderstandings

would be prevented from happening. According to the curators of the Munich exhibition, “[t]he exhibition … approaches to the staging and presentation concept

[were] „unhistoric,‟ „unethnographic‟ and „without preconditions,‟” the main purpose of the exhibition was to reduce the often mistaken presuppositions about Islamic art

(Troelenberg, “Framing the Artwork” 37). The curatorial logic of the Munich

Exhibition showed a scholarly preference towards adopting a pseudo- phenomenological standpoint among researchers. This reductionist attitude by excluding presuppositions such as history from the study of Islamic art was aimed at narrowing down the observers‟ viewpoints to the extent that the collective body of the

Islamic objects would be perceived as “art” and subsequently understood as tamed objects for further “Western contextualization” (ibid.). The exclusion of other pertinent disciplines, such as ethnography, was done to make a distinction between this exhibition and other world fairs of the time; nonetheless, history and the latent discourse of race stood out as the main disturbing clues of the „phenomenological‟ orientation of the exhibition, despite the initial “unhistorical claims” (47).

In general, the Munich Exhibition helped the art of Muslims to come out of the shadows of antique markets and find a new position in the hierarchy of art history.

Avinoam Shalem, who co-edited a 2010 book on this exhibition, After One Hundred

Years: The 1910 Exhibition “Meirsterwerke Muhammedanischer Kunst”

Reconsidered is a thorough investigation of the academic consequences of the Munich

Exhibition, addresses Strzygowski‟s theory, which observed the 1910 exhibition as a turning point in the history of the Eurocentric understanding of art. Prior to the consolidation of the new discourse of Islamic art, the art of Muslims had no succession in the evolutionary trajectory of the form, according to the narratives of

European art history. For instance, in Banister Fletcher‟s A History of Architecture,

the “Tree of Architecture,” Shalem underlines that the position of Saracenic

Architecture is “doomed to be kept in the past, developing no further twigs and having no access to the present” (5).It is frozen somewhere in the seventh century and belonged to “the non-historical” category along with other non-Western styles; whereas, out of the Romanesque Style, a close neighbour of Saracenic Architecture, the future branches of architecture have ramified.

Islamic art was recognized in other ways. Having been framed within the huge

1910 exhibition in Munich, the art of Muslims was repurposed as an alternative inspiring source for modernists to practice non-conventional aesthetics. Shalem cites from this important part of the catalogue to draw attention towards one important matter:

“In addition to reaching our scholarly goals, the task of the exhibition is to present the purely artistic significance of this area of the arts which to many is unknown or misunderstood. The exhibition intends to demonstrate that Muhammadan artworks deserve to be considered on a par with the art of other cultures, and that the color harmony and ornamental grandeur may well serve as an inspiration and open up new direction for modern art.” (3)

If Islamic art functioned in the way that the catalogue hoped, then the exhibition helped it to gain a modern aspect as well as academic recognition outside of its original context. Therefore, from its castrated position in the arboresque order of the

Eurocentric history of architecture to being considered a close associate of

Modernism, Islamic art compensated for its historical time lag by taking a huge modern step. It was through the Munich exhibition that, for the first time, the participation of Persian artists and craftsmen as “active” agents in the formation of

Islamic civilization was brought to the center of attention. Between the 1920s and the

1930s, Persian art became an independent subject for many Islamic art-related exhibitions.

In the Munich Exhibition, “[i]n the field of painting and the art of books, the

Persian part, compared to other Islamic lands, was unrivalled” (Korn 320). The golden signature of Persian illuminated miniatures on each invaluable manuscript cast a permanent shadow over those of other Muslim nations. Following Friedrich Sarre and his circle of scholars, many others began to discern the aesthetics of Islamic art in respect to its Persian roots.30 This recognition was concurrent with other modern investigations by Orientalists who had viewed the cultural heritage of Persia as an exceptionally different phenomenon. However, there is something different about the

Western conceptualization of Islamic art; the last invention of the West was perceived differently in Iran.

The “Birth” of Persian Art

In reviewing the theoretical development of Islamic art, there is a shift in the focal point of research after the popularization of Persian art studies among German and American Orientalists. The preambles of these shifts had been provided in the

Munich Exhibition and accelerated with the resumption of Oriental studies after the

Great War in the 1920s. The years between the two world wars in Europe were imbued with academic engagement with Persian art. Through a new understanding of the spatial and temporal dimensions of Persian culture, scholars of Persian art developed a transcendening notion of Iran as the pristine habitat of Persians where the history of civilization started. Therefore, they came to the conclusion that it was

30 Friedrich Sarre, in the catalogue of the Munich Exhibition, says: “The considerable treasure of artistic capacities, accumulated by century-old tradition in the subjugated civilization, was not lost. In particular, it is Persian art and culture, which, coming from the Iranian highlands and from Mesopotamia, subsequently permeates the eastern Islamic world, and which also expands to the Western Islamic countries. The caliphate of the Abbasid, residing in Baghdad, is culturally completely of Persian make, and in many parts a mirror of the splendour-loving and sumptuous Sassanian Kingdom.” Translated by Lorenz Korn, in “From the „Meisterwerke Muhammedannischer Kunst‟ to the Survey of Persian Art: The Munich Exhibition and Its Aftermaths,” p. 317.

Persian culture that gave significance to Islamic art, not vice versa. By the time

Iranian intellectuals understood the importance of these studies, the discourse of

Islamic art had already been eclipsed by Persian art. Although the participation of

Iranian intellectuals in the theorization of Islamic art was negligible, they took part actively in the formation of the discipline of Persian Art.

Considering the cultural circumstances of the 1920s, the intellectuals‟ proclivity for Persian art would be predictable in Iran. Simply put, if the discourse of

Islamic art in the early days of its formation had conveyed fewer religious connotations than it did, it could have been considered as being as influential as any other imported discourse that helped the Constitutionalists to reinforce Iranian nationalism. What this means is that the reception of Islamic art was totally different from the way in which Persian history and literature were received. Iranian intellectuals preferred to go beyond the discipline of Islamic art and pay more attention to the Persianate dimension of it, especially the part that would resonate better with the dominant accounts of Persian history, the superiority of Persian art and crafts, and the non-semantic roots of Persian civilization, almost the same subjects that

American and German Orientalists emphasized in their conceptualization of Persian art. Just as the discourse of Islamic art was being created in Europe, the influence of religious authorities over Iranian culture was decreasing in Iran. In the shadow of the waning religious establishments, the emergence of Islamic art would be unseen. Not only did it add little that was new to the purportedly existing knowledge of art, but the attributive adjective “Islamic” seemed to have conflicting connotations in the collective consensus of the period over the credibility of Persian culture and its idolized pre-Islamic values.

About twelve centuries before Oriental artefacts were able to grasp attention in

Europe, the visual culture of Islam had been forming, evolving and changing; however, the loose attachment of the practice of art and crafts to Islamic scholarship made it difficult for Islamic visual culture to find a proper discourse of aesthetics on the basis of the Islamic understanding of beauty. To some extent, the visual arts had a limited scope of practice under the vigilant eyes of Islamic clerics. In fact, kings had been always the real powerful patrons of art in Islamic countries such as Iran. Even though the legitimacy of the monarchy was credited by the religious establishment, most of the time, artists from different guilds took refuge from religious zeal in the royal courts. In the absence of the canonizing power of Islamic scholarship, the discourse of Persian art was more welcomed by Iranian intellectuals than that of

Islamic art.

Likewise, at the time when Persian history and language induced scholars to pursue a different origin for European civilization, it was expected that Persian art would do the same in reinforcing the accounts of the Aryan myth and the pre-Islamic history of Iran. Moreover, the scholarly acknowledgment that Persians art received from Western scholars was invaluable for Iranian intellectuals. They desired a discourse as powerful as the revised discourse of Persian history in order to continue the project of “refashioning” Iran.

The last but not the least important reason for the unsuccessful reception of the

Western discourse about Islamic art is the inadequate condition of the cultural and educational institutions that were intended to accommodate different imported disciplines, or the lack thereof, in Iran. Museums and art schools were among the first places that pre-modern Islamic countries needed to provide. In Iran before the 1920s, no modern educational system existed to receive any new knowledge of arts, with the

exception of Dar al Fonun, the first modern university established in 1851. More importantly, concepts and activities such as collecting, preserving, and exhibiting artworks were almost alien to the traditional society of the time. Arguably, in the absence of pertinent academic and cultural institutions that could contain and nourish the articulable and visible dimensions of art, the reception of Persian art would have been problematic as well. Nonetheless, the successful accommodation of the discourse of Persian art shows that somehow the cultural and educational prerequisites for receiving and maintaining the discourse of Persian art were provided in the post-Qajar era.

After the forced abdication of the Qajar dynasty by the fifth National

Consultative Assembly in 1925, Iran entered into a new era which its supporting political ideology sustained for almost fifty-four years, until its cultural achievements were drastically abrogated by the outburst of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. For Iran, this period can be understood as a time in which the nation entirely divorced from traditional systems and joined the club of the Middle Eastern countries that were struggling to acquire a modern collective identity. Before the transition of power and in the wake of the Constitutional Revolution, the discourse of Iranian nationalism was taken up by a group of elites whose nationalistic objectives were later deployed in the future cultural framework of the Pahlavid era. Talinn Grigor calls these intellectuals

“The Early Pahlavi Modernists” (20). In her narrative of the formation in 1921 of a fraternal association, known as Anjoman-e Asar-e Melli or the Society of National

Heritage, Grigor credits the emergence of this unprecedented cultural phenomenon to the accumulation of consciousness among Iranian elites of the classical history of Iran.

Anjoman was composed of highly educated individuals who “wholeheartedly believed in the inherently utopian and totalistic universal modernism for Iran with all of its

productive and destructive patterns” (Grigor “Recultivating “Good Taste”” 20). By incorporating the knowledge of Iranian cultural history into their new understanding of Western culture, they planned to define a modern cultural framework for Iran. The members of Anjoman welcomed the discourse of Persian art more warmly than their constitutionalist predecessors had once received the Orientalists‟ representation of

Persian literature and history. If this representation became the means of the revolutionary changes by which the Constitutionalists aimed to “refashion” Iran,

Persian art as the full product of Orientalism in the hands of “Iranian modernists” turned into an ideal model for re-constructing Iran. Anjoman helped assimilate the modern disciplines into the cultural and political objectives of the first Pahlavis by commissioning European and American archaeologists, art historians, and architectures. Accordingly, the ideology that Anjoman supported was the fruit of an alliance between Persian history and culture on the one hand and, on the other, archaeology and architecture that made many major projects of cultural renewal, planned during the reign of Reza Shah the first Pahlavi, possible.

Grigor‟s enumeration of Anjoman‟s cultural activities shows that architectural projects were the focal point in the major project of Iran‟s re-construction. During the five decades between the 1920s and the 1970s, forty mausoleum complexes, sixty preservation projects, one public library, and one national museum were erected, carried out and constructed in order to incarnate the grandeur that was associated with

Persian literary figures, civilization, and culture.

The wholesale project of refurbishing Iranian identity provided an opportunity for Anjoman‟s members to examine the new knowledge of Persian literature, history, and art in the crucible of European modernity. They showed sincere interest in cultivating and naturalizing “the new parameters of modernity” and at the same time

included their “anxiety over collective memory, public space, and the cultivation of cultural taste” in their futuristic agenda (ibid.). In other words, Anjoman‟s conceptualization of modernity oscillated between two poles, the near and the far history. They demanded the revival of the ideal picture of the past, and at the same time tried to revolt against the traditional framework of Iranian culture. This undecided temporal orientation also implies the secular intentions of Iranian modernists, since the desired past was conceptualized according to non-Islamic narratives of a non-Islamic era. Arguably, the results of reviving the glory of the past might be considered a renaissance of pre-Islamic Persian culture. Nonetheless, relics of the past, ruins of bygone Persian history, and archaeological discoveries were brought to the center of attention in order to give testimony that not only did Persian art perfectly visualize those narratives that were repeated in Persian verse and prose, but it proved that “modern Iran‟s relationship to its cultural heritage [is] about Iran‟s equal rightful place in the network of modern nations” (Grigor, Cultiva(ting)

Modernities 15).

Due to the absence of religious authorities from the main stage of politics in the Pahlavis era, Iranian intellectuals could easily envisage the fulfillment of their wish in the near future. In particular, when Great Britain had officially helped the former Qajar Cossack Brigade, Reza Khan, to ascend to power and take the throne, he was able to provide the proper political ambience for the resurrection of classical pre-

Islamic values by suppressing the ulama. In the absence of the traditional advocates of

Islam, it was much easier to take the cultural history of pre-Islamic dynasties into account. One of the first tasks they set themselves was to invite European and

American archaeologists and art historians to Iran in order to endorse Iranian culture with more tangible evidence as well as a scientific framework. It was through

Anjoman that, in 1925, Arthur Upham Pope, the famous American researcher of

Persian art, was invited to Iran and asked to give a lecture on Iranian cultural heritage.

Interestingly, the first and the last projects conducted by Anjoman during the

Pahlavis‟ reign share the same symbolic value that we can expect from the cultural climate of modernized Iran. As stated earlier, Anjoman started with a series of restoration projects.31 The first project, in 1934, was the construction of a modern mausoleum for Ferdowsi, the classical figure of Persian poetry and the composer of the Shahnama. Anjoman unwittingly ended its last major project in 1972 by completing a joint mausoleum for Pope and his wife Dr. Phyllis Ackerman in Isfahan, one of the historical cities of Iran where the heights of Islamic/Persian architecture are located and where Pope had started his field research in 1925. Between these two milestones along the timeline of the society‟s projects, Anjoman put three important figures on the same stage of grand recognition for their achievements in reviving

Persian literature and art, albeit with a millennium of cultural and temporal lag. The symbolic correspondence between Ferdowsi and Pope and Ackerman would address the importance of literature and art in the construction of a collective identity; in the meantime, let us discern the role that Pope played in refurbishing Iranian identity.

Arthur Upham Pope

Even up to the present, researchers on Persian art have remained interested in

Pope and what he has done for Persian art and culture. In the context of contemporary

Iran, Pope has been both admired and demonized by Iranian scholars. Most of the

31 According to Grigor, many Persian classical poets and scientists already had designated and known burial chambers, but the Society, by modernizing their tombstones, reframed these classical figures in relation to their new role for modern Iranians as the national heroes of the past. The restoration projects include Firdausi in Tus in 1934; Hafiz and Shah Shuja in Shiraz in 1965, Avicenna in 1952, and Baba Taher 1970; I Hamadan, Nader Shah in Mashhad in 1959, Kamal al Molk in 1962 and Omar Khayyam in 1963 in Nishapur; and finally, the joint mausoleum for Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman in 1972 in Isfahan.

admiration comes from the cultural field of the second Pahlavis (1942-1979), when

Pope was immensely venerated and supported by the Shah and Queen of Iran. After the Islamic Revolution, Pope‟s publications have remained as one of the main resources for Persian art studies, but his ambiguous personality, which swings between “a surveyor and a purveyor of Persian art”32 has eclipsed his academic achievements (Kadoi 4). His close relationship with the Pahlavis, and especially his nationality as an American, made him by default an agent of the Great Enemy under the guise of an Orientalist.

In 2014, when Richard Nelson Frye, Pope‟s last colleague, passed away, his last will was to be buried in Isfahan and in Pope‟s mausoleum, which caused a huge controversy in Iran. Due to his lifetime devotion to Persian art, Professor Frye five years before his death was officially promised that he would receive a proper burial in

Iran. However, when it came to fulfilling Frye‟s will, the angry mob at Isfahan forced the authorities to break their promise. Right after the announcement of Frye‟s death and before any preparation for transferring his body from the United States to Iran, a group of radical extremists organized a series of public protests against Frye‟s burial.

At the protest, Pope‟s name was raised as being the American spy who plundered

Iranian heritage and filled American museums with stolen objects in the name of archaeological research. One of the Isfahan extremist members of parliament accused both Arthur Pope and Richard Frye of being American spies. A few days after the man‟s speech in parliament, Pope‟s mausoleum was vandalized and covered with graffiti. Two months later, Frye‟s relatives in Boston decided to cremate his remains and the mobs in Isfahan stopped protesting and vandalizing.

32 In Yuka Kadoi‟s words: “As Pope himself admitted, he was not only a „surveyor of Persian art,‟ but was more likely to have acted as a „Purveyor of Persian art‟ in order to make a living.” See: Yuka Kadoi, “Introduction,” Arthur Upham Pope and a New Survey of Persian Art, edited by Yuka Kadoi, Brill, 2016, p. 4.

Nowadays, the mausoleum is partially restored and the aggressive graffiti has been removed, but the building and its surroundings are hardly recognizable as a cultural or tourist site. Its main entrance door is locked, and no access is provided to the tombstones and the interior space. Of the two brass plaques that had the names of

Pope and Ackerman on them, Pope‟s has been removed and Ackerman‟s name can hardly be read. The mausoleum does not have visitors, except those who know the history of this abandoned building and the significance of Isfahan as a spiritual hometown for Pope, Ackerman, and Frye. All and all, Pope‟s mausoleum is out of sight and nobody in Iran cares about the American Orientalists anymore.

From devoted scholar to opportunistic antique dealer, Pope‟s name has been brought up in various discussions whenever the discourse of Persian art is subjected to review. With the recent upsurge of post-colonial studies, Pope has become a very important figure in the review of Iranian art history and Persian art. He is also an exemplary figure for studying the way in which the West treated the visual culture of the Orient in the twentieth century. Contemporary to Pope were many other European and American Orientalists working with the same enthusiasm; nonetheless, Pope and his scholarly/connoisseurial endeavours have always been at the top of the long list of

Persian art scholarship.

From his earliest days in Iran, Pope adopted a biased standpoint towards

Persian art. In the very beginning of differentiating the discipline of Persian art from

Islamic art, Pope devoted his scholarly experience to the history of Persian art and aligned his work perfectly with the nationalist ferment of the time in Iran. His biased opinion, which later turned into a blind love for Persian culture, makes his works distinguishable and different from that of other Orientalists. Pope‟s first stay in Iran was only few months before the official enthronement of Reza Shah, and Pope‟s

speech about the past and future of Persian art had a great influence on his audience, especially on the future king. Since then, and until his death in 1969, Pope and

Ackerman received full support and coverage from the Pahlavis for their projects, publications, and residence in Iran, a royal reward that remained exclusive to them.

What in return did Pope and Ackerman give to Iranians?

One of the most famous compliments to Pope, given by Prince Firouz Mirza, a distinguished member of the Society for National Heritage, has been quoted several times in recent research on Pope.33 In his letter of gratitude in 1928, Prince Firouz

Mirza wrote:

[Iranians] appreciate a great deal what you are doing to popularize Persian art in America and in Europe. We can only congratulate you for the books you intend to publish, and I believe every Persian will be enthusiastic about learning from authoritative leaders in the knowledge of art, „What the World Owes to Persia,‟ a fact which Persians themselves do not know. (Gluck and Siver 298).

This segment of Firouz Mirza‟s letter, with its arbitrary claim about the quintessential role of Persian civilization in history, along with the conceited tone of its writer gives us a glimpse to the modernized mentality of the new generation of Iranian intellectuals. At first, chauvinism, the new attitude of Iranian elites, almost oozes from each line, indicating that in the dawn of the Pahlavis, Iranian elites were no longer those devastated constitutionalists with little hope in their future. The new era was approaching: the Qajar dynasty was over and the new king, Reza Shah, was aiming to replace the old picture of Persia with a new powerful version and introduce modern

Iran to the West. Still, when unapologetic Firouz Mirza thought of Persian culture as nothing less than magnificent, he must never have forgotten that Iranians, including

33 Kishwar Rizvi, in “Art History and the Nation: Arthur Upham Pope and the Discourse on Persian Art in the Early Twentieth Century,” and Talinn Grigor in “Gendered Politics of Persian Art: Pope and His Partner” have referred to this letter; originally, Firouz Mirza‟s letter was published in Surveyors of Persian Art.

himself and his like-minded friends, had their strong sense of nationality and pride boosted with the help of modern narratives of Persian history and art, a cultural gift from the Orientalists. Thus, while the writer situated himself within a supposedly influential culture, he subtly admits the authority of the others in the formation of his modern consciousness of Persian culture. What Firouz Mirza probably would not notice was that, by accepting the “rhetoric of nationality” from the Orientalists, other discourses such as racism and colonialism were imported as well (Rizvi 47). However, the warm reception by Iranians and their acknowledgment of European and American scholars‟ producing such a rhetoric for history and art without questioning its accuracy were probably the main reasons that Pope could proudly assert: “Persia was a sleeping beauty; she woke up to my kiss” (Bloom 77).

The romantic relationship between Pope and Persian culture started when his dilettantism in Persian carpets transformed into a scholarly drive to achieve a

“systematic review of Persia‟s artistic development, in all its variety and unity and its vast temporal extent” (Sadiq 1). Apart from holding international congresses on

Persian art34; establishing and administrating the American Institute of Persian Art and

Archaeology in the United States35; organizing one of the greatest international art exhibitions, the Burlington Exhibition of Persian Art in 1931 in London; and documenting Islamic and Persian architecture, Pope‟s main contribution in awakening

Iran from her historical “slumber” was to give a well-documented narrative of art history to Iranian nationalists. For those who were waiting for more evidence to

34 Between 1926 and 1969, the year before his death, Pope organized five international congresses about Persian art: Philadelphia in 1926, London in 1931, Leningrad and Moscow in 1935, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington in 1960, Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz in 1968; after his death were two more, in Oxford in 1972 and Munich in 1975. 35 This institute later developed into the Asia Institute and joined with Pahlavi University (now the University of Shiraz). After the Revolution, the Asia Institute was disbanded. Pope and Ackerman‟s residence in Shiraz, a Qajar-style mansion known as the Narenjestan, was turned into a museum, along with Pope‟s office.

celebrate the revival of true Iranian identity, Pope‟s articulations seemed to present a prominent milestone.

The narrative that Pope constructed for Iranian nationalists is the first comprehensive history of Persian art in English. Pope, through gathering the work of previous European Orientalists on Persian and Islamic art, attempted to organize the scholarly works on this subject in one big collection. Up until this moment, Pope had organized three international congresses and two international art exhibitions, the literary outcomes of which were considerably thorough. The second international congress in London 1931, which followed the London International Exhibition, provided the main material for Pope to situate Persian art among and above other powerful cultures. Jonathan Bloom, in his critical biography of Pope, has enumerated those works presented in the second congress. According to Bloom, these were focused on how different nations throughout history took Persian art as a source of inspiration. Through the works of European scholars, including Paul Pelliot, David

Talbot Rice, J. Shapley, T. J. Arne, Ernst Kuhnel, and Josef Strzygowsky, Persian art was introduced as influential to “Chinese painting, North African art, Early Christian art, Byzantine ceramics, Anatolian ceramics, Scandinavian art forms, and European painting and architecture” (Bloom 87).

Pope and Ackerman added their essays and included a huge collection of photographs and illustrations. Pope was a skilled photographer and Ackerman was a talented draughtsman. In one grand multivolume book, A Survey of Persian Art from the Prehistoric to the Present, they introduced the history of Persian art to the West only a year before the outbreak of World War II. More than a comprehensive history,

Pope set up his theory about Persian art in the introduction of the Survey, in which he more or less paraphrased and extended the lecture that he had given for the members

of the Society in 1925. In his first attempt at constructing an aesthetic framework,

Pope excluded the representational characteristics of Persian art and generalized all the artistic works as decorative arts. When it came to telling the story of this decorative art, Pope took extra care in fabricating a narrative that stands relatively close to the cultural history of Iran but loosely matches the Eurocentric account of art history, and thus composed an aesthetic manifesto for Iranian nationalism. Pope drew a timeline for Persian art with a glorious beginning in the far past and an unfortunate end point at the dawn of the nineteenth century. In between, the glory of Persian art waxed and waned many times during each political upheaval or invasion, but the

Persianate soul of the culture remained intact and rose each time from the ashes and ruins.

This timeline contained a general history of the consistent “exactness and clarity” of craftsmen and artisans in creating artworks, the people to whom Pope attributed an extraordinary intelligence and creativity in producing arts. Pope believed in the durability of a specific formal trait in the tradition of Persian art, a genuine loyalty to the purity of form, regardless of the impact of external forces. Based on the longevity of Persian art, Pope believed that even the cultural aspects of Islam could not bend the old tradition of Persian art to follow; quite the contrary, it was Islam that, after passing through the “Persianate cultural machine” gained its very aesthetic values.

This aesthetic element that Pope held dear has an atemporal and essential quality that keeps artworks in a formal harmony throughout their history. Apart from his true belief in the huge contribution of Iranians in the formation of human civilization, Pope also believed that traces of Iranian wit and intelligence are discernible in the invaluable relics of the past. Therefore, a timeless Persianate soul

influences almost all cultures but itself stays intact. To some extent, Pope‟s elaboration addresses the pre-existence of a Persianate metaphysical center for art.

This is an idea that has always been pleasing to Iranians, not only at the dawn of the

Pahlavis but also for Iranian scholars after the Islamic Revolution.

Pope, in estimating the antiquity of Persian art, had a tendency to make associations between Persian and Greek civilizations, as if “Persians are the Greeks of

Asia”; therefore, Europe, for a new artistic renaissance, would need to copy the pure form of Persian art, while Persia would need to hold onto its artistic traditions in the decorative arts (Shapiro 83). Pope also did not hesitate to arbitrarily attribute achievements to Persian art that now seem inaccurate; he went too far in depreciating some achievements of Western and non-Western arts whenever comparison would not help his argument. For instance, he attributed the invention of many techniques in architecture, pottery, and textiles to Persians and considered Persian art as more creative and influential than that of the Chinese and Egyptians, two peoples whose civilizations Pope continued to appreciate (though in his judgement, they were not as genuine and creative as Persians).

Meyer Schapiro, an early critic of Pope‟s methodology for studying Persian art, describes the constant admiration of Pope and other Orientalists of Persian art in the Survey as though they spoke of the qualities of style in Persian art as the

“permanent biological products of a Persian species of man” (ibid.). This idea here addresses the popularity of some racial standpoints that Pope assiduously followed.

One of the examples that Pope enumerated in his lecture in 1925 may cause the contemporary reader to raise his/her eyebrows in wonder:

It was a Persian invention, the pendentive with its delightful stalactite development that made possible the development of dome architecture in Asia. There is a difficult problem in the construction of domes and for all their architectural and engineering mastery, the Roman never understood

dome construction and never saw any way to put a round dome on a square building. (“The Past and Future” 102)

Whereas the architecture of the dome in Iran has a unique characteristic, this statement could have been believed only by an audience who had not heard of the architectural achievement of Greco-Roman civilization or any monument, such as the Pantheon or

Hagia Sophia.

In a similar critique, Schapiro continues:

[Pope] cannot find enough adjectives to describe the logic, rationality and naturalism of this favoured people. When he asserts that “Persian art throughout its whole history has been distinguished by clarity and exactness,” it is not evident what his standard of clarity and exactness is, in what sense the ornament he admires for its intricacy… is more clear or more “exact” than the Romanesque ornament which he condemns as confused. (83)

Schapiro takes Pope‟s exaggeration in admiring Persian artists and his generalization of art into a meta-narrative as a sign of non-academic argumentation. In his review,

Schapiro comes to the conclusion that the “defects of the Survey are not due simply to the undeveloped character of the studies in this field or are intrinsic to the elusive, variable qualities of the objects themselves” (84). Moreover, he thinks that a “careful reader” can correct historical inconsistencies “on the basis of the abundant facts presented in the Survey and a comparative knowledge of the arts of other regions”

(ibid.).

Schapiro‟s review shows the reader that Pope in his narrative of Persian art is not completely interested in making a genuine academic argument. As mentioned earlier, many of his predecessors and contemporaries had already attempted to enrich the discipline of Persian art; however, none of them had tailored their standpoints to the nationalist sentiment of Iranians in the way that Pope did. In other words, Pope introduced a language for constructing national memory and retrieving Iranian identity, even though this language contained a vocabulary of racism. Pope‟s main

argument in the introduction of the Survey is framed by racist statements; Arabs,

Turks, and Mongols, the traditional rivals of Iran, are introduced as “scarcely more than half civilized” or even “hardly civilized” and their art is depreciated as the sheer imitation of the Persian without communicating with its splendour (Pope 98).

In this regard, Pope was following in the footsteps of William Jones and his race-oriented reading of Indo-Persian languages in establishing the superiority of the

Aryan race. As mentioned earlier, Jones in his genealogy of European languages had a controversial hypothesis for decentralizing religious narratives. He introduced the

Indo-Persian and Semitic languages as two separated descendants from two different

Asiatic languages. According to Jones, the Indo-Persian languages ramified from the same branch as Greek and Germanic languages, whereas Semitic languages stemmed from a much younger branch and belonged to a racially different people from Aryans.

Pope‟s configuration of Persian art follows the same pattern. Therefore, in making subdivisions in Islamic art, not only “any good Islamic art must perforce be

Persian” (Wood 125), but Persians, in producing Islamic art, were “ranked above those of the Semitic Arabs and nomadic Turks” (Necipoğlu, “The Concept of Islamic

Art” 6). While this idea seemed to be a perfect conceptualization of Persian culture for

Iranian elites of the time, Turkish scholars have never forgiven Pope for his racist theorization of Islamic art and his authoritative liberty in attributing the highlights of

Islamic tradition to Iranians. Their bitterness towards Pope is better understandable if one considers the concurrency of the construction of a modern nation in Iran and

Turkey and the remapping of the Middle East during the 1920s and 1930s. In the cultural and political competition over the authority of Islamic heritage between two traditional rivals, Pope helped Iranians to make Islamic art an important part of their identity.

After the publication of the Survey, Pope‟s Austrian counterpart in Turkey,

Ernst Diez, bitterly complained that he could not compete with Pope and the historiography of Persian art in the historiography of Turkish art. Like the evolution of identifying adjectives for the art of Muslims, Pope, by holding an international exhibition under the name of Persian art in London, added an ethnic signification to

Islamic art. Therefore, nationalists in Iran started to “utilize ethno-racial terminology

(such as „Iranian‟ and „Aryan‟) … as a way to distinguish themselves from their neighbours and also distance themselves from terms such as „Islamic‟ or „Muslim‟”

(Rizvi, “Art History and Nation” 50).

Gülru Necipoğlu, in her post-colonial reading of the historiography of Islamic art in “The Concept of Islamic art: Inherited Discourses and New Approaches,” analyzes the racist exaltation of Persian art in contrast with the cultural multiplicity inherent to the definition of Islamic art. For Necipoğlu, any generalization implied by

Orientalists toward Islamic art is unacceptable as well. In both cases, an essential ontology of Islamic art becomes an incomplete and inaccurate account. Necipoğlu believes that both generalizations and exclusions in defining Islamic art are two sides of the same coin of Orientalism. While Necipoğlu‟s conclusion is indeed pertinent to the critique of Orientalism, the formation of Persian art as a discipline unfolds another side of the critique.

In his survey, Pope demonstrates a determined sense of Orientalism towards

Persian culture, even though his mastery of articulation and his interest in art have almost camouflaged his stereotypical standpoints. For Pope, the temporal boundaries of the civilized and utopic Persia, Iranzamin, belonged to the perfect past. The artistic climate of the present time was associated with malaise and deficiencies; hence, the cure for the future was contingent upon reviving the glorious past in the present.

Interestingly, at the time that “form” played an important role in the aesthetics of

Modernism, Pope “turned a witheringly contemptuous eye on modern art” (Wood

118). The “exactness and clarity” of the form and the “unbroken stream of artistic development” that he observed in Persian art manifested a spiritual visual language to which only Persian artists could speak to in the past (ibid,). However, in spite of all the spiritual quality that this new species, “Homo-Persicus” could possess, Pope saw the influence of modern art in the time as being more deteriorative to Persian art than any other historical threat (119). If in the past Persian art could survive the Arab,

Mongol, Turk, and Afghan invasions and each time rise from its ashes, the influence of modern art was a completely different case. Accordingly, modern art was a sign of the “gaudy and vulgar taste” of Europe, when in “the age of horror [European artists] produced so many monstrosities in the middle of the nineteenth century,” it was unfortunate that in the first encounter with the West, Iranian artists faced the

“depressing low ebb” of modern aesthetics (Pope, “The Past and Future” 106).

Pope‟s conservative inclination towards the purity of form in visual arts placed his aesthetic preference in contrast to the avant-garde dimensions of modernism. It also contrasted with the practice of representational painting that Iranian artists had pursued and had been trying to master since their acquaintance with Western painting.

In other words, Pope, like other Orientalists, considered imaginary dimensions for the spatial and temporal aspects of the Orient and its visual culture; in this case, the real

Iran and the Persian culture of the time did not fit in those coordinates. Thus, Persian art needed to be revived and meet the supposed expectations of its loyalty to traditions.

For early Islamic art scholars, the art that Muslim artists of the time had produced were not as important as the works of arts that their ancestors had created.

When Muslim artists quite voluntarily started to leave their traditions behind and imitate Western aesthetics, the West lost its interest in them. It seems that the Orient had to communicate through coordinates that Orientalists determined. Probably all the prestigious names that Pope bestowed upon Persian art had a price, which the new generation of Iranian artists had to pay or stand apart from the glorious world of

Persian aesthetics.

The insignificant presence of nineteenth-century Persian painting and the

“omission of the work from its living artists” in the Burlington Exhibition reflected

Pope‟s disinterest in non-traditional artworks (Rizvi, “Art History and Nation” 52).

Apparently, the role that Iranian artists of the time were supposed to play in the future of Persian art had little to do with their practice of Western art, which means that

Persian art seemed to be only a “historical artefact” and not a living artistic trend

(ibid.). When non-traditional and contemporary artworks were mainly “dismissed by

European observers as mere curiosity or as derivative from superior Western models,” modern art as a living trend would be reserved for Western art and history (ibid.).

The End Point

Schapiro‟s review of the Survey can be seen as a scholarly alarm for an emerging literary phenomenon in the reading of Persian art. The problem that

Schapiro underlined is actually a fallacy in argumentation and reasoning. Although the

Survey is a rich collection of the early research on Persian art, conducted and written by a variety of pioneering academics in this field, Pope‟s orchestration of the material is in the service of spotlighting some physical and allegedly metaphysical traits in

Persian art and culture, many of which are not aligned with convincing evidence. As noted earlier, Pope‟s mastery in using a sophisticated language and the enthusiasm of his elite audience for hearing this persuasive rhetoric eclipsed its argumentative issues.

Instead of reasoning, Pope‟s statements have a distinct political purpose in favour of boosting Iranian nationality. As a result, the sharp recognition of Schapiro did not have any echo in the midst of the warm reception of the first publication of the Survey.

For decades, there was no room to question the accuracy of the politically charged rendition of Persian art that Pope offered.

Because of this fallacy, many aspects of Pope‟s argument were susceptible to a quick rejection. The intellectual supremacy of Persians, which gained its significance based on a racist reading of literature and history, had a very short academic duration.

In our time, Pope‟s theorization of Persian art can be only seen as a good example of an Orientalist definition of the cultural geography of the Middle-East in the crucial years between the First and Second World wars. In fact, out of the cultural field of

Iran, the Survey quickly lost its academic value. To some extent, the recognition of this fallacy has less to do with Pope‟s endeavours in producing a Western framework for the history of Persian art; yet, if this framework was correctly imposed on Persian culture, the risk of having fallacies in the argument would be negligible.

Despite the fact that now many of the biased opinions that Pope stated about

Persian art are being subjected to critical examination in post-colonial studies, some parts of his main argument have yet remained valid in the current cultural field of Iran.

The metaphysical dimensions and the transcendental premises that Pope projected onto Persian art have lingered on the literature of art criticism, even though after the

Islamic Revolution the dichotomy of Persian and Islamic has had a major shift in its order. In other words, the same fallacy in argumentation has been inherited by the new generation of Iranian critics. It seems that the center that Pope constructed for the significance of Persian art has remained, though the relatable discourse that keeps the centrality of the center has been shifted from Persian to Islamic.

Chapter Three

In the Beginning, There Were Miniatures

There are a few instances of painting belonging to the culture of Iran to which the word “masterpiece” may be attributed in Art History books. Miniatures from different classical Persian manuscripts are among these examples. Stuart Cary Welch, famous American scholar and admirer of Persian art, has written a book about the beauty of one of the most famous manuscripts of The Shahnama, known as Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp. Welch‟s eulogies of the spectacular beauty of miniatures in this specific copy are charming to read. Welch, in admiring Persian painting, is not alone.

Iranian readers often feel flattered by reading page after page of adoration of their national art written by Western scholars. These paintings have safeguarded their prestige strictly within the category of Persian miniatures.

In regard to other trends of painting, attributing the word “masterpiece” without the company of “Persian” needs more elaboration and care, as “Iranian art” has a fragile identity to maintain. Between miniatures and other forms of painting, there is a compilation of knowledge and a long list of eulogistic critics, who remain the primary references for aesthetic judgement. The subject of this knowledge and nostalgia for the past is Persian Art. A century ago in Europe, Persian illuminated manuscripts and their miniature paintings were brought to the center of the art world‟s attention. At the height of the Western fascination with the art of the Orient and

Islamic territories, miniature paintings were examined for their historical value and stunning beauty. From European antique markets in the nineteenth century to the exhibitions of Oriental artefacts before the Second World War, miniatures were circulated among art dealers, university libraries, and museums throughout Europe and North America.

In less than two decades, after the first public exhibitions of Oriental artefacts, where illuminated manuscripts or pages of the dismembered antique books were displayed, articles and books about Persian art and painting were published. Although it seems that the formation of the discourse around Persian art could support artists and the visual culture of Iran, it brought some conceptual confusion instead. The consequent issues have persisted within the current situation of art in Iran.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, the major disciplinary achievement in reading and categorizing the native art and culture of Iran was the fruit of at least a century of Western research on Persian culture. In pursuit of constructing a modern society and an ideal picture of the self, Iranian intellectuals had faith in European modern knowledge of the sciences and humanities. Therefore, it is admissible to see the consolidation of Iranian modern culture as the result of acquiring a new awareness of identity based on the Western discourse of Persian history and art. In spite of the nationalist tendencies of the time aimed at constructing a new identity oriented toward a modern future, the discipline of Persian art that supported the discourse of nationalism was premised on the merits of the past. This means that the art of the present was excluded from the circle of attention during the process of modernization.

In other words, the avant-garde attitude was underappreciated, while this move was actually a modern game-changer for Iranian art.

In the early twentieth century, the term “revival” had a ubiquitous presence in the literature of modernization. Having read this rearticulated history of Iran, Iranian nationalists took the revival of the past into account as a primary step in constructing a modern identity. In so doing, the inclination of Western scholars to rearticulate the classical history of Iran played an important role, but one question remained unnoticed: What does represent the identity of Iranian art, its past or its present?

Western scholars conducted a systematic study of Persian art in which there was little room for the visual culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. By absorbing knowledge of Persian art, enthusiastic nationalists in Iran appropriated the same attitude as Western scholars. Thus, artists and their efforts to adopt European art were pushed to the margins of attention. As a result of being out of the scope of their research, modern artistic endeavours in Iranian painting received no proper recognition from either a foreign or domestic audience.

This leads us to see a conceptual disharmony between Persian art (the

“darling” subject of the Orientalists) and Iranian art, which was the existing practice of non-traditional artists. The disharmony between Persian and Iranian art may highlight other controversies that the disparate categories “Persian” and “Iranian” hold. In a broad sense, identity is the most fundamental subject that, since the modernization of Iran, has been brought into different disputes. What type of identity would be appropriated– and which one could best be appropriated – in order to refashion the subjects of modernized Iran: Persian, Iranian or Islamic?

Because of the exclusive attitude that privileged the art of the past, the collective body of Persian art could not successfully deal with the true identity of art at the time. Modes of European art as practiced in Iran were received with a combination of negligence and criticism. However, in the second half of the twentieth century, the category of Iranian art started to accommodate a totally different artistic entity with a strong inclination towards modern art which defied the indifferent attitude of its audience. At this point, the discourse of Persian art could not easily offer a compatible framework for the study of modernism in Iran. However, the ideology of the past, a historical melancholy, continued to dominate in the modern era. Miniature

paintings have been always remembered as the masterpieces of Iranian art, as a primordial model of aesthetic and beauty in art.

The story of the recognition of the tradition of miniature painting has a parallel narrative that revolves around the notion of negligence. In this story, the negligence is in regard to the other trends of painting which had fewer similarities to their older sibling. The contemporary art of Iran has been constructed in between the recognition and neglect of its viewers/interpreters. In the subsequent argument, the main point is to underline the moments of negligence in readings of Persian/Iranian art, which resulted in the emergence of a discursive gap in the discipline of Iranian art.

Persia vs. Iran

In regard to finding possible answers to the question of the aesthetic identity of

Persian art, a certain level of care must be given to the usage of the signifiers

“Iranian” and “Persian,” especially in the context of Western languages. There is a discernible difference between the implications of Persian and Iranian art. They are two distinct attributive adjectives with different connotations towards culture and art, even though they both describe the visual culture of the same nation. As an accepted convention in the Western context of art history, Persian art does not include examples of Iranian modernism – those works of art that mostly belong to the twentieth century.

This unwritten rule was established by the early publications on Persian art in the

West. Subsequently, the newer category of Iranian art is applied in addressing the practice of modern aesthetics in the visual and performing arts.

The fabric of this difference is temporal and comprises the main reason for the existence of such a disparity in the scholarly preference of non-Iranian readers toward the classical history of the Orient. Western scholars, in their initial studies, found

“Persian” to be a convenient adjective for characterizing the collective works of art

produced in the Iranian Plateau from the dawn of the Persian civilization to roughly the eighteenth century, when they believed that Persian art had lost its classical merits.

The existence of such a temporal discrepancy makes the implications of

“Iranian” and “Persian” confusing, especially when it comes to translating non-

Persian texts into the Persian language. The cultural connotations that “Persian art” conveys address a wider range of history and geography in which both pre-Islamic and Islamic art speak of two millennia of artistic activity within a larger territory than the current map of Iran. Therefore, for non-Iranian readers, the indigenous art of Iran is characterized as “Persian.” Yet, is the term “Persian art” able to cover the artworks after this historical range? The answer for Iranians is positive, since they see no temporal gap between Persian and Iranian art, whereas for Orientalists, the combination of modern Iran and art, under the shadow of the long history of Persian culture, was quite ambiguous to read. It was as if these two entities, modern and

Persian, do not make a meaningful alliance together in the context of art.

Therefore, there is an implicit signification in the notion of identity whenever the words “Persian” and “Iranian” are brought in Art History. One way to postulate the issue of identity is in analyzing the conceptual differences that these adjectives would manifest in different contexts. When the possible confusion about the implication of “Persian” and “Iranian” are not discernible as such to indigenous readers, the emergence of a shift in the trajectory of aesthetic from traditional to modern sounds more smooth and quite predictable in the evolution of its form, whereas to the eyes of the others it would be a radical shift disturbing the consistency of a tradition.

In relation to art, Farsi (the Persian language) does not reflect any sharp difference between these two names. If one wants to translate the word “Persian” in

Persian art from English into Farsi, one will use “Iranian” as an equivalent for

“Persian.” When Iranians started to translate Western books about the visual culture of

Persia, Persian art was translated as “Iranian art” without conveying any temporal significance. Arthur Upham Pope, in compiling surveys on Persian art in A Survey on

Persian Art from the Prehistoric Time to the Present (1938-39), takes the notion of

Persian to include present-day art, even though the art of the present allocates a very small portion of the whole collection to itself. When this book was introduced to

Iranian scholars, the title of the book then was translated word by word as Sairi bar

Honar-e- Iran.

The word „Persian‟ in Persian art is almost untranslatable, unless it is taken as an indirect signifier for addressing the non-Islamic aspects of Iranian culture. For many scholars, the cultural differences between the before and the after of Islam (i.e., before and after the invasion of the army of Muslims in the seventh century) are more critical to the fabric of Iranian collective identity than the temporal difference between the past (traditional) and the present (modern). That is to say, the past and the present for Iranians have another historical dimension.

Nowadays, it has become informally acceptable to take the implication of

„Persian‟ as a political tool for separating the national identity from its Islamic dimensions. For instance, after the Islamic Revolution in1979, many diasporic

Iranians in the United States or Europe prefer to introduce themselves as Persians in order to emphasize the non-Islamic part of their Iranian identity or show their detachment from the new political conditions that the Islamic Republic of Iran represents.

What is the literal meaning of Persia/Persian in Farsi? In Farsi, the closest word to Persia is “Pars” or “Fars” and (F)Parsi could be an equivalent word for

Persian. Both Iran and Pars have a deep etymological history. In his study on the

“Evolution of the Names Iran, Arya, and Fars (Persia) in Ancient Texts,” Reza Mordai

Ghiasabadi follows the origin of the names “Iran” and “Persia” in the remnants of the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia. His study shows that the traces of names similar to Iran date back to clay tablets and inscriptions of the Mesopotamian civilizations long before Iran had a central state or unified ruling dynasty. Those Mesopotamian names, which had phonetic similarities with the word Iran, were used to refer to the people of a region in the eastern part of the Tigris. Proper nouns such as Artta, Erin, and Eren are among the names that Sumerians used in order to address a mountainous land beyond the eastern part of their territory. In one instance, the name Aren was used in a Sumerian tablet to refer to eastern soldiers.36

“Fars” has a more discernible trace in the Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions, which are Old Persian cuneiform texts from the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries BCE.

In the earlier geography of Iran, Fars was a vast region in the southern part of the

Iranian Plateau. Nowadays, Fars is the name of one province in the southern part of

Iran with the capital city of Shiraz. In close distance of one hour driving towards north from Shiraz one can see the ruins of Persepolis in Marvdasht. Achaemenid kings (550-

330 BC) were originally from this region. Moradi Ghiasabadi claims that Darius the

Great was the first king of this dynasty, “[who] appears to have decided after the early years of his rule to call his entire country by the name Pars, which was previously the name of a subordinate region” (np). He continues:

According to [the Achaemenid] inscriptions, [they] had no specific name for the country that they ruled. Darius the Great (and Cyrus the Great in his inscription) indicated his country by mentioning names of smaller realms that had been distinct political entities before his rule. Interestingly, such listing of

36 Reza Moradi Ghiasabadi, “The Evolution of the Names Iran, Arya and Fars (Persia) in Ancient Texts,” Ghiasabadi, www.ghiasabadi.com.

subordinate countries has been repeated only once, in the eighth inscription attributed to Xerxes in Persepolis, and has not been observed in other Achaemenid inscriptions. … The name [Pars] became common after it was introduced by Achaemenid kings and used through the dynasty‟s history. It also found its way into Western and Eastern languages after some phonetic changes. Persian and Arabic texts dating back to the Islamic Middle Ages (9th–17th century AD) have usually recorded the name as Fars which is apparently an evolved form of the ancient term Pars. (ibid.)

D. N. MacKenzie in his entry on “ĒRĀN, ĒRĀNŠAHR” in Encyclopaedia Irannica asserts that in the early Sassanid inscriptions, the name Iran is brought forward as the official title of the founder of the Sassanid dynasty, Ardašīr the First, who crowned himself the King of the Kings of Iran. MacKenzie believes that Ardašīr‟s successor

Šāpūr the First followed his father‟s tradition and employed the word “Aryans” in his own title to denote his sovereignty over the people as King of the Aryans. Šāpūr coined also the new term “Iranshahr”/“Iranzamin” to directly refer to his empire. With the coining of Iranshahr, different implications were gradually given to the name Iran, and its usage multiplied when combined names for cities and the titles of high-ranking citizens and army officers. Iran and Iranshahr were also used interchangeably (ibid.).

The widespread usage of the name Iran gave an ongoing validity to its implications. Thus, after the downfall of the Sassanids in the mid-seventh century by

Muslims, when the Arabic language became the lingua franca between Iranians and

Arabs and the modern Persian language was born when Arabian scripts were adopted, the signification of the name Iran retained its pre-Islamic validity. The name, as it is pronounced today, ee-run, was handed down to the next generation of poets and writers through the translation of Sassanid literature into Arabic and the modern

Persian language respectively. Since modern Farsi was established in the tenth century, Iran has had a ubiquitous presence in Persian verse and prose. In Iran as

Imagined Nation, Mostafa Vaziri asserts that: “[T]he politicization of the name of the land is strictly a twentieth-century phenomenon that does not apply to the past,

especially to remote circumstances” (4). Iranian dynasties between the ninth century and the sixteenth century, Vaziri says, “did not use the term Iran in any political sense” and “the term Iran began gradually to be used for the land in an administrative context and to a small degree … in political senses” (ibid.). Despite the fact that for centuries after the dominance of Islam, the name Iran had not been used to address a unified geopolitical territory, the reiteration of Iran in Persian literature maintained the validity of its cultural significance.

The territorial borders of Iran had always been the subject of major changes throughout pre-modern history. Between chaotic situations resulting from each successive foreign invasion and the formation of the next powerful Islamic dynasty, there were many tribal ruling systems in Iran, which had limited control over a smaller region. In post-Islamic historiography, Iran as a geopolitical territory is not always associated with ruling systems. It is in the secular literature of the early nineteenth- century Orientalism that, almost for the first time, such an association was made and became a convention in modern historiography. In the late nineteen century, the same literary reputation came to integrate a variety of ethnic identities into one discourse of nationality. Before the modernization of Iran, the traditional structure of the state and nation could not maintain a steady discourse of nationality. However, based on its literary reputation, the name “Iran” became a proper signifier for the cultural identity of modern Iranians. Meanwhile, in the West Iran was known by its well-known exonym “Persia.”

In the years preceding the twentieth century, the terms “Iran” and “Iranian” became the keywords of the Constitutional Revolution. Iran was brought to the surface in revolutionary literature to fuel the engine of political resurgence against the

Qajars, the last traditional ruling system. Since then, the notion of Iran and the

motherland, Vatan, became synonymous in the discourse of national identity. As

Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi explains thoroughly in his article “From Patriotism to

Matriotism: A Tropological Study of Iranian Nationalism, 1870–1909,” at the time of

Constitutional Revolution, the geopolitical map of Iran was fixed according to what the four important territorial enclosures had left for Iran through “the treaties of

Gulestan (1813), Turkmanchay (1828), Erzurum (1823 and 1847) and Paris (1857),” and the notion of Iran as the motherland was refashioned from a “confederation of territories (mamlik) to a cohesive entity (mamlikat-i Iran or Kishvar-i Iran)” (218).

This new characterization marks the emergence of a different understanding of Iran as a “unified homeland (Vatan) with a distinct character, identity, history and culture”

(ibid.).

Drawing from this argument, Iran can be understood as a territory where a variety of people inhabit and share the same geopolitical identity, no matter how their ethnic background might alter that identity. While the ethnic demography of Iran could not simply be addressed by one word before the modernization of Iran, in the twentieth century, “Iranian” identity found a political priority over other identities.

Until 1935, Persia was an exonym used by the West in political and literary conversations about Iran. It functioned as an umbrella term with a powerful homogenizing impact on all the nouns characterized by “Persian.” The homogeneity of Persian entities can be easily mistaken as a sign of cultural continuity. It also tends to frame Persian art in relation to a timeless and persistent tradition.

In 1935, Reza Shah, the first king of the Pahlavis, “demanded [of the world community] that Iran must be used instead of Persia. In fact, Reza Shah made it clear that any mail addressed to Persia instead of Iran would be returned to sender” (Vaziri

66). Grigor considers the infleuece of German orientlaists on Reza Shah‟s decision instrumental. She says:

Based on evidence gathered in his archaeological digs, the German Orientalist Ernest Herzfelf hypothesized that Achaemnid inscriptions had revealed that the name Iranian coresponded to the ancient term Aryanam Khashathram, the Empore of the Aryans. Soon after, in Novemner 1934, [Reza Shah] decredd that country‟s official name, Persian, be permanentaly changed to Iran, signifying the Land of Aryans ( Grigor “Orient oder Rom?” 562).

Toward gaining the same homogenous power that Persia once had, a strong political implication was attributed to Iran as the name of the country by the first

Pahlavis, Reza Shah. This replacement was actually a declaration of the resurrection of Iran as a modern nation. The term “Iranian” then became the new adjective to signify the unified identity of the modernized country. Although soon after Reza

Shah‟s request, the conventional usage of “Persia” ceased within the domain of international politics, the word Persian continued to exist within the established literature of Iranian studies in the West.

“Persian” is still a valid word that may be used to describe some Iranian exports such as saffron, caviar, carpets, pistachios, handicrafts, and so on in non-

Iranian languages. In Farsi, “Persian literature” and “the Persian Gulf” are among very few instances in which the word Persian is translated into Farsi. The translation of the

Persian Gulf is Khalij-e-Fars and Persian literature has been translated as Adabiyat-e-

Farsi. While Persian and Iranian art manifest a temporal difference, and Iranian art is associated with modernism, Persian literature is not bifurcated into classical and modern on the basis of its adjective. Persian literature has its own modern evolution but does not show any gaps in its signification. In other words, there is no such term as “Iranian literature” or Adabiyat-e- Irani valid in either the Farsi or the English language. The authority of Iranian literary scholars over Persian literature prevented the discipline from presenting any form of conceptual or temporal inconsistency, but

scholars of the visual arts could not share the same level of confidence in maintaining indigenous knowledge of Aesthetics or Art History.

In the early twentieth century, a cultural collaboration was formed between

Western scholars and Iranian nationalists, resulting in a mutual language, despite their different approaches regarding the temporal understanding of Iranian culture. Within the great project of modernization, when Iranian nationalists tried to envisage a modern future for Iran, the grand narrative of Iranian identity was consolidated on the basis of the glorious history of the past. It became difficult for nationalists to choose between the merits of the past or the potential of the present in order to have a clear prospect of a modern future. Even for Iranian pro-modern nationalists, the cultural aspects of the past became instrumental because they viewed the acknowledgement of

European intellectuals (the custodians of modernity) as a reliable criterion for the project of modernization. If European scholars admitted to the merits of Iran‟s past, there must have been something about it that was essential to the construction of a modern society. Therefore, when a whole body of research written in Western languages testified to the grandeur of Classical Persia, there was no need to question the cultural significance of the past.

As a result, the cultural context of Iran in the first half of the twentieth century became a laboratory to test the capacity of the past to make an “ideal” future. During the modernization of Iran, when intellectuals were trying to divorce from many aspects of the traditional system by renovating society, the phantom of the past was conjured up through the glorification of Persian literature and art. In between these two different driving forces of renovation and revival, Iranian identity had to accommodate inherent contradictions between the past and the future.

The Dilemma of Temporality

If the conceptual inconsistency between the adjectives “Persian” and “Iranian” was the only parameter affecting the formation of the aesthetic identity of Persian painting, it would be much easier to deal with the controversy. However, the discussion is more complicated because, over and above the temporal

(mis)understanding of Persian/Iranian culture, there is the timeless adjective

“Islamic,” which adds more ambivalence. The controversy that the Islamic aspects of

Persian/Iranian art convey is crucial to the conceptualization of this category. As with

Persian art, the early studies of Islamic art were wrapped up in assumptions derived from nineteenth-century Orientalism, and thus it was easy for scholars in this field to make overgeneralized conclusions about the timeless aspects of the subject. In the beginning of the theorizations of the aesthetics of Islamic art, it was much easier to take the notion of time out of the scope of research since the metaphysical significations that religion brought in the discourse of art were considered inherently atemporal and ahistorical.

There are two groups of pioneering scholars who manifest secular and religious attitudes toward the temporal definition of Islamic art in their inquiries. The first group, the art historians, consider a limited period of creativity and originality for

Islamic art when it was at its zenith. This is the most prominent approach toward

Islamic art, through which this category is coordinated into a defined historical period and a designated geography. The second group, the traditionalist scholars of Islamic art, tend to tailor their interpretations of art to the “perennial” values of Islam; the essential values that are associated with the pillars of Islamic faith and never changed.

Accordingly, a Muslim artist-in its best effort-elaborates on Islamic core concepts such as the oneness of God to emphasise that there is no difference between the

practice of art, following a tradition, and the practice of religion. While art historians have made a greater contribution to the formation of the discipline of Islamic art, traditionalists with their strong religious tendencies have played an important role as well.

By devaluing the impact of time on the evolution of form in Islamic art, traditionalists consider the art of Muslims to be quite similar to other religious arts, so it could potentially convey the same universal and ahistorical message that other non- modern and religious arts deliver. Henceforth, Islamic art is the continuation of a religious tradition. In this regard, tradition means “truths of sacred origin revealed originally, with the different nuances given to them in different traditional religions

[…]” (Nasr and Jahanbegloo In Search of the Sacred 181). Tradition comes “from

God or Ultimate Reality, speaking metaphysically, with their elaboration and transmission within a historical religious civilization” (ibid.). Accordingly, it does not matter how the formal traits of an artistic tradition change by transmitting from one religion to another, as long as the tradition keeps its conceptual connections with transcendence, it remains intact. As, Iraj Dadashi, a contemporary Iranian scholar, asserts:

While the Islamic tradition has constantly shed light on the fertilized land of art, its existence is supported by its vertical axis of connection to transcendence … Therefore, if a tradition, despite its permanent connection to transcendence, does not transform the transcendental concept through the materiality of an artwork, it will not fulfill its mission. (175)

One way of arriving at this conclusion passed through the way in which the art of Muslims is compared with Christian art, as the closest counterpart. Some early scholars, even those who did not belong to the close circle of traditionalists, such as

Ernst Diez, posited that Islamic art is even stronger in religious expressivity than

Christian art. He says:

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The essence of Islamic theory of art is embedded in religion. The Muhammadan religion, like the Christian is revealed, but goes further by calling itself Islam, i.e., subjection to God. This clear designation became a catchword and a battle cry. Muhammadan is much more definite and limited than Christianity ever was, and these attributes may also be applied to the “art of Islam”.… Accordingly, the art of Islam or Islamic art is the art that expresses submission to Allah. Christian art or Byzantine art indicate nothing of the essential qualities of the religion which gave rise to them, but are mere historical notion. (36)

Although at first glance it seems innocent enough to consider Islamic art influenced by the visual culture of Christian art with a stronger religious language,

Christian art and Islamic art do not share the same temporal pattern of consolidation.

On the one hand, while the formation of Christian art in Europe had a long preamble of almost four centuries of gradual progress, from the murals in the catacombs to the construction of the old Saint Peter‟s Basilica, the first architectural monument of

Islamic art, The Dome of the Rock, was erected right after the development of the first

Islamic state in the late seventh century. In other words, there was no gap between the emergence of Islam, the formation of the first powerful Islamic state, and the first manifestation of art in the public sphere. Unlike Islamic art, Christian art had to avoid persecution by being out of sight for almost four centuries. For Christian art, this period of underground growth and evolution resulted in a completely different visual language than the visual culture of the time. For early Christian art, breaking with the visual conventions of the Greco-Roman arts was a necessity, whereas Islamic art was open to any convention regardless of its pagan or religious background.

The rapid consolidation of Islamic art indicates its aesthetic openness towards alien visual cultures. The formal constituents of early Islamic art might be picked up from different sources and gathered together quite inconsistently. As a result, Islamic art, at least in its early years, can be considered as a conglomerate of various loaned elements that have been jointed together by the power of an external force such as the

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state or the cultural conditions of the new Muslim societies of the time. In this case,

Christian art may seem more pristine, due to the gradual “crystallization” of its form.

Therefore, if any functioning concept such as tradition existed to expose a distinct framework over Islamic artefacts, it would be a function of many different parameters, but on top of everything else, it would be a function of time. The tradition of Persian painting followed almost the same time-oriented pattern that early Islamic art followed. Having passed through the early phases of development, it was shaped by a conglomeration of imported and domestic techniques, and then through the reiteration of each newly formed convention, its artistic identity was constructed, and conceivably many aspects of it was stopped in time. Yet, the diachronic understanding of the tradition is not what traditionalist scholars acknowledge. If the tradition was understood as a collective body of a variety of visual conventions gradually adapted and utilized through time, the formal aspects of miniature painting would be the most important factor, yet form is not the priority for traditionalists. For them, it is the supposed timeless content of miniature painting or any form of Islamic art that defines the tradition.

Eleanor Sims in her review of the tradition of Persian miniature painting draws attention to a simple but very important fact that disproves the so-called timeless dimensions of Islamic art and in turn underlines the fact that the visual language of this tradition is evolved through cultural interactions. In her analysis of the aesthetics of Persian miniatures, Sims compresses the whole history of the tradition of miniature painting into three phases: “isolation, transfer and reuse” which means that Iranian craftsmen were open to adapt and appropriate other traditions and at the same time they maintained a tradition until a new one would penetrate into the former conventions (Sims, Marshak, and Grube 77). Therefore, Islamic art demonstrates a

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hybrid of various styles including a spectrum of traces, from pre-Islamic arts to the presence of exogenous aesthetics.

Although traditionalists have developed a theological language for talking about Islamic art, their devotion to defining the inherent existence of a universal message in Islamic art leaves no room for a proper language of aesthetics. Analyses under this trend fail to offer a comprehensive study or provide a strong methodology unless, prior to any inquiries, all the challenging presuppositions and exceptional examples, which are mostly a function of time and space, were removed from the scope of the study.

Having examined with their focus on the metaphysical dimension of Islamic art, traditionalists adopted a completely different standpoint than that of diachronic understanding of tradition. In this view, in which the perenniality of the tradition in time and space guarantees the stability of form and the fixity of the signification of the visual signs, Islamic art ascends to where the metaphysical aspects of religion reside.

This is, perhaps, the reason why traditionalist scholars prefer to address Islamic art as sacred art. By considering the art of Muslims as sacred, the aura of mysticism is better preserved and the definition of tradition would be more fitting for theological renditions.

Religious readings of Islamic art do not consider the tradition to function as an framework to which an artist can designate the qualifications of his/her work; rather, it is an innate entity existing prior to the art. Therefore, the tradition of Islamic art is timeless and ahistorical in as much as the religion is metaphysical. The artworks that are produced within this structure manifest the divine truth and the divine truth is with

God. In other words, Islamic art manifests/represents “the logos” as the most powerful entity which keeps the divine truth.

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A secular understanding of the tradition of Islamic art offers another argument.

Accepting the fact that tradition is a function of time would be synonymous to appreciating change and difference. If a tradition varies from time to time and its supposed form does not stay the same, no visual sign within it can have fixed signification. We can follow the traces of change through time and follow the impurities and contaminations which a sign and a tradition respectively absorb, so how could it be possible to address the logos, the universal truth, through a multiplicity of transitional signs in Islamic art?

In contrast to the traditionalist view, art historians who adopted a secular approach relied on the notions of time and progress. Because the discipline of Art

History had a greater influence on the discursive formation of Islamic art, the academic studies of Islamic art are mostly oriented toward a secular reading of art.

Although the widespread influence of the art historians is quite impressive, this methodology is also problematized by the way in which time is discursively argued.

Unlike the traditionalists‟ view point, in the secular reading of Islamic art the concept of time is not excluded; however, it is conceptualized as a constant concept not a variable factor. The secular reading of Islamic art offers a chronology with important historical benchmarks covering a time span of a millennium. This definition suggests that Islamic art belonged to the past; hence, it is independent from any unpredictable parameters that might arise in the present or the future. By considering a fixed time span for Islamic art that does not include the present, the temporal dynamism of

Islamic art would be under-appreciated. According to the conventional accounts of Art

History, Islamic art is defined as being situated between the era of late antiquity and that of the early Enlightenment. Starting in the seventh century and shortly after the formation of the early Islamic states, Muslims started to develop their own creative

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understanding of visual arts and handicrafts as a distinct form of art. For centuries, this unique artistic form flourished, but by the seventeenth century it was in noticeable aesthetic decline. Within this period, Persian miniature painting has even a shorter duration; it occupied roughly three centuries of that history, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Several considerations combine in the idea that Islamic art actually has an ending point. History tells us that on the one hand, this ending is concurrent with the gradual decline of Islamic empires in the Middle East. On the other hand, the increasing power of European colonialists in the same region and beyond made it possible for Western scholars to freely impose their knowledge on the

Orient.

The presence of European colonialists redefined a new map for Islamic territories in terms of which the spatial and temporal dimensions of the art and culture of Muslims were rearticulated. The Europeans‟ belief in their superior ability to read the art of the others and applying a practical methodology resulted in a temporal

(mis)understanding of Islamic art. Johannes Fabian terms this attitude in anthropology as the “denial of coevalness,” which occurs when scholars “represent their knowledge in teaching and writing […] in terms of a discourse that consistently places those who are talked about in a time other than that of the one who talks” (140). The same phenomenon of the “denial of coevalness” happened in the disciplinary formation of

Islamic art. From the very first inquiries in this field, the discursivity of time became the main parameter in the formulation of its aesthetics, taxonomy and criticism. The same methodology goes to the study of Persian art as well. However, the discursivity of time in the discipline of Persian art plays other important roles.

Before engaging with the visual culture of Iran, Orientalists had already completed a survey on the history and literature of the East through which the cultural

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history of Iran made a major contribution. Because of the significance of Persian history, the initial attempts to construct a systematic study of Persian art became parallel with the historical milestones. For instance, early Islamic art historians have drawn a timeline for Persian painting by which some important historical events such as the rise and fall of ruling dynasties were taken as benchmarks for classifying different schools of painting. As a result, the evolution of form and the conventions of representation were considered mostly as the consequences of socio-political upheavals through time.

A small glimpse into the way in which the different schools of miniature paintings were labeled in Art History would shed more lights on the specific role that history plays in this method of painting. Persian schools of miniature paintings are either named after the name of the cities where scriptoriums and workshops were located, or known by a specific period of history when monarchs of a powerful dynasty sponsored different guilds of minor arts. Therefore, there are a variety of labels for different schools, such as The School of Shiraz or The School of Isfahan, as well as The Safavids and The Ilkhanids schools of painting. In other words, the first systematic way of categorizing miniature painting was mainly oriented toward non- aesthetic defining parameters such as politics, geography, and economy. No doubt these factors are important, but a study based on their influence in shaping an aesthetic language for talking about Persian painting without considering time as a variable may generate some limitations.

In the beginning of the formation of the category of Persian art, making associations between Persian painting and historical milestones was academically efficient and gestured toward a reliable methodology; this method was perhaps the best solution for categorizing a genre that had scattered artefacts and limited

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indigenous records in its background. Having a better access to the indigenous knowledge of art, the next generation of art historians in the last decades of the twentieth century improved on this approach. However, this method is for the most part inadequate with respect to offering a coherent account of the evolution of form in

Persian painting. In spite of its readily applicable formula and the broad scope of research which the taxonomy of Persian painting offers, it is also prone to

(over)generalization. If the disparate examples from the same historical era are taken into consideration, the taxonomy of “Persian painting” appears quite insufficient; almost every school of painting has examples from artists whose independent works subverted the visual conventions of their time.

Grabar believed that Western scholars, in trying to offer a systematic study of

Persian painting, have always pursued a notion of “stylistic originality” to indicate this tradition as classical (“Toward an Aesthetics of Persian Painting” 214). However, the quest for an original aesthetic in Persian/Islamic art generates a problem. In Persian painting, there exist only the highlights of miniatures, which can provide that sense of stylistic originality, mainly because these highlights can hardly represent a concrete aesthetics for the whole history of Persian painting or even a school of painting. In much of his published research, Grabar has mentioned the difficulties in finding a coherent discourse of aesthetics for Persian painting. Most of the early scholars of

Persian art appeared confident in their argumentation and even though they offered a stylish method of categorization, the results suffer from “the Oriental sin of easy generalization.” This is a failure in theorizing Islamic art that Grabar himself consciously tried to avoid in order to keep an “empirical attitude to the facts themselves” (Leaman 7).

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Even within an era represented only by highlights, some examples of miniature painting cannot succumb to any categorization. In one of his analytical arguments,

Grabar brings in a controversial example from the fifteenth century, around the time when, in the School of Herat, Persian painting was at the height of its magnificence.

Grabar‟s example (See figure 3) shows an untamed painterly characteristic that defies any modern taxonomy. This example belongs to a series of drawings signed by

Muhammad of the Black Pen, or Muhammad-e- Siah Qalam.

These drawings are scattered in four different albums, known as Murraqa, and have been kept in the Topkapy Palace Museum in Istanbul. The “grotesque” subject and their complex iconography have made their aesthetic a matter for dispute. They are in formal and conceptual contrast with what is conventionally known as miniature painting: delicate paintings adorned by eye-catching geometric and organic design that illustrate classical romance and chivalry. Exceptions such as paintings by Mohammad of the Black Pen do not conform to category and at the same time signify the limited scope of that category which cannot contain them.

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Figure 3: Muhammad of the Black Pen, Demons (1360-1375). Topkapi Saray Library, Istanbul. June 29, 2018, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/siah-qalam. Accessed 15 April 2018.

In the final decades of the seventeenth century, the number of “masterpieces” in the trajectory of the evolution of form dropped, yet Persian painting continued to exist, though the post-miniature instances of Persian painting seemed to be insignificant to Western observers. There was nothing to talk about after the peak of progress in painting flattened out, signalling the emergence of an artistic recession. So even though Persian painting was still a dynamic genre in its own cultural context, the post-miniature era could not attract the attention of its Western admirers. Orientalists whose Romantic sentimentalism always needed to be fed by exotic objects of the

Orient could not find the same alluring characteristics in the paintings that came after miniatures.

In the absence of history and under the heavy influence of Persian literature, in which context paintings can be easily seen as supplementary frills, the study of

Persian painting and its aesthetics are easily dissolved in the midst of the aestheticizing of other subjects. As was mentioned above, according to the

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theologically inspired interpretations of Islamic art, traditionalists consider different forms of arts as a visual container for the timeless message of Islam. Interestingly, this reading starts by underlining the distinct formal elements in a miniature painting, but it goes beyond aesthetics and addresses the universal language of Islamic art.

Although it suggests a universal aesthetic, the results are mostly in favour of finding one transcendental signified for Islamic art.

The formal characteristics of miniature painting – such as the lack of perspective, simplicity and flatness of the representation of human figure, perplexity in an unconventional composition, lack of shading and hatching, and more importantly, the superiority of beautification over representation are all unified to address something transcendental. When it comes to making associations between the pictorial elements of a miniature and other literary or religious subjects, in the absence of the restricting dimensions of history, it would be much easier to talk about a perennial aesthetic; however, these speculations also need the generic highlights of miniature painting to sound convincing.

In his elaboration on the aesthetic of Persian painting, Grabar coins a new term,

“optisemic,” to refer to a common way of analyzing visual arts among the early readers of Islamic art and traditionalists. Grabar defines an optisemic reading as a free association, entirely based on visual perception, between the formal elements of a work of art and a supposed – or a cluster of – meaning(s) intended by the reader. To explain an optisemic reading, Grabar states: “What I mean by this neologism is the ability to recognize a large number of represented items in generic terms, without being aware, or even needing to be aware, of their culturally directed reference” (ibid

222). Traditionalist scholars benefited considerably from making free associations between the form of art and the perennial values of Islamic belief. In doing an

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optisemic reading, it was much easier to attribute the timeless message of Islam to the idiosyncratic content and exotic form of miniature paintings. As long as the features of miniature paintings concur with an optisemic reading, no problem exists in attributing theological interpretations to these paintings; however, an optisemic reading is also inefficient in offering an aesthetic framework and can be easily debunked by the existence of anomalies. Many examples in the collective body of Persian painting defy classification and alter the reader‟s free association of visual signs or his/her visual perception.

Even in the mainstream of “classical” miniatures, many instances of controversial subjects resist an optisemic interpretation. These works cannot be situated in a desired category, unless the notion of religion is excluded from the purview of the study. For instance, the representation of eroticism in Persian painting, a rare but not unusual subject, is among those subjects that put the traditionalists‟ optisemic readings of Islamic art at stake. In some miniature paintings, the representation of eroticism is absolutely literal and direct to the extent that there would be no room for an allegorical interpretation.

A collection of these examples can be found in an out-of-print book titled

Sarv-e-Naz: An Essay on Love and the Representation of Erotic Themes in Ancient

Iran by Robert Surieu in 1967. This book does not offer an academic argument about the genealogy of the representation of eroticism or the aesthetic of love; it is more or less a personal survey of the literary and visual examples of Persian culture, showcasing a series of miniature paintings featuring controversial subjects. Surieu‟s collection of miniatures are examples from Persian and Persianate miniature paintings

(Turkish and Mughal miniatures similar in form and/or content to Persian ones) mostly depicting different types of sexual behaviour, including homosexuality,

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heterosexuality, and even bestiality. These miniatures feature the same aesthetics as classical representations in Persian miniatures and offer the exact conventional forms that an optisemic reading would require. However, the pornographic quality that these paintings showcase makes it hard to place them in the hierarchy of meaning within the tradition of Islamic art. In other words, the transcendental signified that traditionalists define as the base or structure of Islamic art cannot provide any religious meaning for these paintings. They utterly represent the mundane desires, fantasies, and perversions of human beings to have a sexual relationship with their beloved.

Thus, in most instances, the footsteps of such representations were completely wiped out, both from the domain of Islamic art studies and even from most secular art history books. Academic research in this field has recently gained some momentum and extended the boundaries of Islamic art studies.37 Therefore, when Islamic art scholars choose favourable examples, the boundaries of their observation are limited to the focal points of Persian painting, and there will be no significant offering made regarding its aesthetics. Given the lack of a proper language with which to mediate between the miniature painting and its viewer/interpreter, the trajectory of the evolution of form would be full of gaps and missing links.

If the mediocre, anomalous, and even disturbing examples of Persian painting had been taken into consideration as well as its highlights, the related discourse of aesthetics could have been better articulated in the absence of masterpieces.

Consequently, in the absence of both masterpieces and anomalies, the tradition would

37 In Eros and Sexuality in Islamic art (2013), Francesca Leoni and Mika Natif have gathered a series of essays written by a group of contemporary scholars of Islamic art on the alternative interpretations of painting in Islamic visual culture. These scholars question the authority of metaphorical and symbolic interpretations in studies of Islamic art and offer a cultural reading of pre-modern society of Islamic countries in order to include literal interpretations of Islamic art in this discourse. This book is one of the first academic inquires on the issue of the representation of sexuality in Persian and Persianate paintings.

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be considered extinct. Therefore, the early readings of Islamic art have generated a gap between the tradition of miniature painting and what succeeds it.

Apart from the methodological problems related to the study of Persian/

Islamic art, an ideological issue arises from the same dilemma of temporality in the conceptualization of the discipline of Persian/Islamic art. The inclination toward the past in reading Islamic art can be seen as the result of a happy union between

Orientalism and Romanticism when, in the discourse of aesthetics, the ever-changing state of the present is deliberately underappreciated. In other words, the romanticized elaborations on the timeless quality of Islamic art had the greatest impact on the theoretical consistency of the discourse of aesthetics. When the early interpreters of

Persian art initiated their study in relation to the significance of the past, they unknowingly bequeathed a convention by which Iranian nationalists, both at the time of the Pahlavis and after the Islamic Revolution, could easily take the art and culture of the past as the best model for constructing the future of Iranian culture. If in the past Persia was a land of power and civilization, the revival of that grandeur would be the first step toward constructing the future of modern Iran.

The perspective that saw Persian art as having distinct temporal dimensions provided a flexible discourse for different ideologies. The major constituents of

Persian, pre-Islamic and Islamic arts are accommodated in this discourse with equal significance; all of the romanticized rhetoric of the past is situated in a reliable structure offering a prescription for the future of art and culture. The remedy simply follows this motto: The path to the “glorious” art of the future is through the revival of the aesthetics of the past. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that different ideologies constructed their own desirable version of history, based on a multilayered context that Persian art could offer. Depending on which part of history, whether the

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pre- or post-Islamic era, might match the presumed future, the discourse of Persian art could support all of the essential discourses.

Standing on the shortcomings of the present and making the promise of a better future, each ruling system in the twentieth century constructed its political agenda by idealizing or demonizing a certain part of history and its artistic artefacts.

In this matter, both traditional and secular readings of Islamic art are appropriated to anticipate an ideal future. Thus, depending on how a dominant ideology defines its timeless discourse, the history of Persian/Iranian art might be viewed as a testimony to an ideal past. For instance, whereas Iranian nationalists during the early Pahlavis found it necessary to appreciate pre-Islamic history in order to debunk the religious structure of the Qajars, half a century later, during the Islamic Revolution of Iran, the

Islamic side of Persian art was employed towards helping the revolution officials debunking of the secular ideals of modernized Iran and of the cultural policies of the

Pahlavis. These upheavals generated major changes and uncertainties in the centrality of the discourse of art and identity.

The sovereignty of the past in the discourse of art has generated three centers of signification: Persian, Iranian and Islamic. The definition of Iranian art, since it was first recognized, has been subjected to different (mis)understandings and

(mis)interpretations. In other words, each political change has been significant in nurturing one specific discourse according to the desired rendition of history. Persian,

Iranian and Islamic art stand for three important ideologies of the three main periods of contemporary history: the empowerment of Pahlavis in the 1930s; the consolidation of modern Iran in the 1960s; and the post Islamic Revolution in the 1980s. The discourse of Iranian nationality has always been the motivational starting point for

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situating a center. In other words, the question of Iranian art is related to the question of Iranian identity.

Since the formation of the discipline of Persian art, the practice of modern art in Iran has been susceptible to the strong presence of traditional arts. Evidently, modern art targeted traditional conventions in order to speak through an avant-garde language.

Due to the dominance of the past, it took decades for pro-modern Iranian artists to be recognized and acknowledged. Even after the beginning of the decline of the discourse of Orientalism in the West, the practice of modern art in Iran had to struggle for acknowledgement mainly because the suggested remedy of going back to the roots was still a pertinent formula for Iranian culture. However, for artists who strived to identify themselves with modern art, the aesthetic backlash to the Persian traditions of painting seemed unsavoury. Meanwhile, contemporary art, because of its perceived non-compliance with traditions, was discarded not only from the scope of the research but also from the focus of attention by Iranian nationalists.

Aesthetic Division: Decorative or Representational

With regard to the combination of dexterity in employing decorative elements and creating beautiful forms in visual arts, especially in non-Western traditions of painting, Persian miniatures are considered as prominent examples of this aesthetic unity. As the “exotic” examples of Islamic visual culture, miniatures attracted attention and became one of the important signs of the past, with an eye-catching beauty embedded in a unique style of composition. Along with other artefacts from the non-western world, they left visitors in awe by demonstrating a new form in visual arts.

The quality of the composition and form in miniature paintings invited some

European avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century to step into the realm of

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unconventional representation in visual arts, where linear perspective and chiaroscuro have no place in the presence of geometrical and vegetal designs. The main visual characteristics of miniature painting, such as the flat and rigid representation of the human figure, hardly speak of the vivacity of the representation of human beings as perfect, as in the European tradition; instead, in a miniature painting, the intricate arabesques with their organic dynamism substitute the role that figures are supposed to play. The combination of abstraction and figurative painting in the miniature was an entirely different world for European artists to discern. In return, commentators, artists and scholars gave title, artistic identity, and scholarship to the miniatures. Since then, the history of painting in Iran has been associated solely with the history of miniature painting. No other Iranian work of art was allowed to reach the symbolic pedestal upon which miniatures were placed.

In the eyes of early commentators, any space designated for painting in

Persian illuminated manuscripts is where the ultimate level of precision and delicacy flourished. Miniature artists are also known for their devotion to pictorial precision.

When royal scriptoriums were still active in Iran, artists had enough support to create their own glorious cosmos in a painting by employing a variety of visual signs, as well as time-consuming and expensive techniques to create extraordinary frills. Thus, their works became a combination of decorative elements and representational forms, all within a rather small space.

The combination of abstract and figurative elements made many classical illustrations a visual feast for the beholder. To the habituated eyes of European scholars, miniatures represented a magical world of wonders decorated with abstract forms where an unconventional beauty made reality a matter of imagination. While decoration has a significant role in miniature painting, it was never at the expense of

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representation. The presence of these two elements is almost inseparable. Sometimes artists embellished an already completed work by adding repetitive geometrical motifs and naturalistic representations of animals, dancing around the illustrated page as if the margins are more important than the text. This gives extra value to the convention of representation in this tradition, and at the same time generates more controversy over the validity of the ban of representation in Islamic art. Does the over-presence of animal figures mean that in Persian miniature the ban of representing living beings, especially human being, may be overlooked?

In the classical tradition of Persian painting, the first thing to consider is that painting is in the service of storytelling. We need to know the literary background of each illustration beforehand in order to decipher the intricate relationship between characters and pictorial elements. Surrounded by the text and decorative elements, figures have little space in which to demonstrate emotions and character, or to have volume. However, in spite of the limitations, the interaction between the text and the image guides the viewer to see how the figures excel in their roles. Therefore, the initial question regarding the superficial manner of dealing with the prohibition of the human figure in miniature painting stays valid, since it does not seem that such a prohibition could have created any barrier for artists.

But when considering miniature paintings as one of the main branches of

Islamic art, the delicacy of classical miniatures and the artistic devotion of painters to following the rules of beautification led many early viewers/interpreters to deduce that

Persian painting successfully served as the decorative facet of the transcription industry and had little to do with figurative representation. This fact is supported by the dominance of textual signs over visual elements in Persian culture. Moreover, by reducing the function of painting to the decorative, it would be much easier to view

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the representational aspects of miniature paintings as less hostile to the ban of representation in the visual culture of Islam. To many commentators, the specific manner of human representation in miniature painting is a compromise between the artist and Islamic aniconism. In other words, when figures in a painting appear less real, they are less hostile to the ban of representation.

In this matter, then, visual signs can be understood as aids supplementing a text with complex geometric and organic forms and a rainbow of colors. In other words, within the dominance of literature in Persian culture, painting has always been in communion with literature and had little chance to stand as an independent art form. Therefore, if someone wants to categorize Persian painting outside of Islamic art, it will be recognized as being somewhere in purgatory, vacillating between the visual and minor arts while simultaneously having characteristics from both fields.

Many viewers/interpreters, by aestheticizing the formal consistency of decorative motifs throughout the history of Persian art, have cast a shadow over its other dimensions, including representation and the progress of form within an aesthetic discourse. In so doing, the representational elements in miniature painting have been placed in a secondary level of significance.

In this way, miniature painting resonates with Western art historians‟ readings of the so-called “primitive” art of non-Western cultures, though neither Persian nor

Islamic art share formal and cultural characteristics with the arts of these “less civilized” peoples. For Western readers of the early twentieth century, however,

Persian miniature painting showcased the same quality of these so-called primitive arts, in which the repetition of decorative patterns speaks of the existence of a cyclical and unchangeable tradition that governs artists and, to some extent, confines or sets limits on creativity and imagination.

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Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten explain the notion of “primitive” in relation to the positive and negative valences that European artists and critic assigned to non-

Western arts in the late nineteenth century. Accordingly, primitive art was validated for its main characteristics, such as being instinctive, timeless, and close to nature; yet, these specifications were also understood negatively as the visual characteristics of less civilized people. The binary of civilized and less civilized cultures creates a misunderstanding of Primitive Art, in which the appropriation of non-Western arts by

European artists (such as Picasso) is taken into account as modern art, whereas the same art created by non-Western artists is not modern. As Antliff and Leighten state,

“The „primitive‟ artist, supposedly governed by instinct rather than imagination, is incapable of registering a reciprocal influence” (221).

In addition, the close ties that some viewers, mostly traditionalists, saw between Islamic works of art and religion gave a spiritual tone to their interpretations.

Many of the decorative elements, with their non-figurative and geometrical specifications, have intensified the attribution of spirituality to Islamic art. The surplus of spiritual content in art has made this tradition as primitive as any other non-Western art.

If in reading miniature painting the decorative aspects are seen as its main characteristic, two important factors will be neglected: the individuality of artists and the possibility of having an aesthetic discourse for Persian painting. On the one hand, the devaluation of figurative representation only serves all the arguments, which wrongly support the loyalty of artists to a primordial tradition, specifically that of the

Islamic visual arts. Therefore, with all the (mis)conceptions that the term “loyalty” signifies, this tradition would have brought more impediments than possibilities for artists; artistic creativity could hardly be a function of individual choices made by

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artists. On the other hand, in emphasizing the decorative purposes of painting, there is no point in theorizing an aesthetic for a genre whose pictorial offering is only

“geometrical” and “arabesque” motifs for the background and a series of “soulless” templates of human figures for the foreground of a painting. Therefore, considering

Persian painting as a decorative aspect of the manuscript industry happened to be quite counterproductive to Iranian artists, as well as adverse to the formation of a comprehensive discourse of aesthetics.

The importation of the printing press put an inevitable end to the golden epoch of manuscript transcription, and Persian painting became emancipated from the restraints imposed by literature. This freedom resulted in a gradual decline in the creation of extraordinary embellishments. Artists started to augment their traditional representation techniques with other methods, mostly European. Masters of decorative elements also found other different contexts, such as handicrafts, in which to become active. Eventually, representational painting found a bigger arena to develop. But out of the cultural context of these upheavals and in the wake of the tradition of miniature painting, the discipline of Persian art was developing and its influence growing. The more Iranian artists got away from the older traditions, the more elaborate and influential the emergent discourse of Persian art came to be.

The main figure behind the formation of Persian art as a discipline, Arthur

Upham Pope, on his first visit to Iran and before compiling A Survey on Persian Art, strongly recommended that Iranian authorities and nationalists of the time provide

Iran with schools, museums, and libraries where the classical principals of Persian art could be revived and maintained. While in Europe modern art was about to overthrow previous forms of art, Pope encouraged Iranians that, rather than fill the aesthetic gap between their works and European masterpieces of painting by taking toddler strides,

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they should try to get back to their roots and revive the earlier artistic grandeur in their culture‟s works. Not surprisingly, he saw Persian art as a decorative art with great potential to become a profitable industry. Giving the promise of a better society at a time when Iran was about to fully embrace modern culture, Pope believed that the revival of the past was the only way to construct a better future:

The artist of today must once more be put in touch with the work of their own masters and the greatest examples of the past from which they formerly derived their inspiration and guidance. [...] By teaching the principles of Persian art in the schools, setting up more schools for theoretical and practical instruction of the various types of Persian art; by seeing that artists are regarded as public benefactors and accorded honour and distinction by the government; by organizing means for the exportation and sale of their modern crafts; not only can new revenues be found and more wealth brought to Persia and the standard of life raised, but many of the common people provided with opportunities and occupations that give happiness and contentment. (108)

Pope‟s audiences applied his opinion to remedy the troubled cultural framework of the time. In 1925, Pope‟s solution for the Iranian art community was not the only remedy accepted without hesitation. The whole project of modernization including the improvement of infrastructure, armed forces, public education, judicial and executive institutions, and bureaucracy was based on applying the solutions that the custodians of modernity, Western intellectuals and scholars, offered. This submission to their formula of modernity facilitated the modernization of Iran. Yet, the revival of the past in the midst of dealing with modernization was a controversial project that caused permanent harm to Iranian artists. On the one hand, the increasing inclination toward the visual culture of the past eclipsed the initial results of the practice of Western art.

On the other hand, the incontestable judgment of Western observers in validating

Iranian art became a new convention in the modernized culture of Iran.

The binary opposition of decorative/representational in the discourse of

Persian art has the capacity to solidify the form of art into a permanent cast designed to reproduce one account of art continuously throughout history. Beautification, as the

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primary task of the form, is intended to eliminate imperfection, defects, and abjection from representation. Having established a history of grandeur for Persian art, Pope even purifies Persian painting from the stains of representation:

[It] is especially tempted to surrender formal control and yield to the seduction of pure representation; but with the entire world spread before it, inviting it to a conquest which the technical mastery and subsequent achievement showed was possible, Persian painting remained true to its original inspiration, creating a unique type of decorative art. (4)

The so-called aesthetic consistency that Orientalists like to attribute to Persian art has made this discourse susceptible to many totalitarian interpretations, which suggests there is only one valid narrative of art worthy of reproduction. Pope saw this narrative reflected in the highlights of classical Persian art, and then nationalists, fascinated by the validation of Western scholars, appropriated Pope‟s opinion in constructing a new identity for Iran. Traditionalists, with their strong resentment towards modernity, subdued the validity of Persian art by the ahistorical massage of Islamic art.

Traditionalists‟ opinions in the 1980s, after the Islamic Revolution, were at the top of the agenda for the new generation of scholars who wanted to offer a new rendition of

Persian art imbued with Islamic ideology. In other words, this message that

Persian/Islamic is timeless makes it a perfect means of disseminating ideologies.

On the Margins of Their Fascination

The degree of fascination that Orientalists showed toward Persian art raises many questions. These questions may lead us to have a better understanding of the challenging situation of modern art in Iran. Why in the history of Persian art was the imitation of European painting underappreciated or even considered a violation of the move towards the aesthetics of Persian painting? Is it really true that artists‟ failure to obey traditional conventions was in opposition to their authentic language of painting?

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Did Iranian artists feel obligated to follow a tradition at all? And more importantly, were they aware of the discursive dimensions of that so-called tradition?

Having acknowledged the aesthetics of Persian miniatures, Western scholars in their early investigations of this genre comprehended the evolution of form as independent of time. Accordingly, the trajectory of Persian painting had moments of aesthetic fluctuations, but they were not harmful to the consistency of painting‟s traditional characteristics. This is to say that the adaptation of alien conventions, such as European representational painting, was considered a radical and destructive move rather than a mutational shift in the form of painting.

In her illuminating argument “Feeling Uncomfortable in the Nineteenth

Century,” Margaret S. Graves offers examples of nineteenth-century commentators who harshly critiqued the non-traditional arts of Iran, including oil paintings on large canvases, which appeared in the early Qajar era. Graves asserts that “nineteenth- century European reactions to Qajar oil painting were frequently hostile and notably scornful of what was seen as the failed assimilation of contemporary European forms into artistic traditions” (Graves 4). Graves refers to Robert Murdoch Smith and his negative opinion about Persian painting38 regarding the category of handicraft, where traces of miniature painting could still be found:

Murdoch Smith does not, apparently, find fault with the copying of earlier European models, but it is notable that his praise is limited to painting on a miniature scale as applied to objects of use – an artform popular with tourists visiting Iran today, and perhaps of its resemblance in scale if not style to the manuscript painting traditions of Iran that were already held in some esteem in Europe. (5)

38 According to Graves, “Robert Murdoch Smith (1835-1900) was the principal figure in the formation of the collections of Iranian art in what are now called the Victoria and Albert Museum and National Museum of Scotland.”

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From a different perspective, however, the disappearance of traditional conventions can be understood as a transitional period during the time of modernization. This transition was welcomed by Iranian artists who already knew the time of miniature painting was over. For them, successfully appropriating realistic techniques in representation was a solution that would rejuvenate a dying craft. In parallel with other structural transformations in traditional institutions such as the military, education, industry, and infrastructure, the conventions of painting were deposited in the middle of the turbulent stream of modernization.

The main reason behind the existence of these two different perspectives about the evolution of form has to do with miniatures as the object of observation. The physical presence of miniatures played an important role in the conceptualization of the tradition of miniature painting. In contrast with early viewers of Persian art, who had access to the rich collections of different miniature paintings in Europe, the high points of miniature painting were limited if not completely inaccessible to Iranian artists. If artists were intended to follow an indigenous tradition and keep the consistency of form in painting, the available instances of this tradition were very few to be observed. In the absence of miniatures, it was the collective memory of them that was drawing its last breath within the bankrupted guilds of handicrafts of the time. In other words, the sudden recognition that miniatures received in the West gave meaning to the “tradition.” Therefore, it is worth being a little suspicious or wary of these seemingly normal categorical suppositions, and so we might ask: Did such a tradition exist at all? Were artists really disobedient to their artistic heritage?

Leila S. Diba, in her historiography of Iranian modern art, claims that in the absence of any local museum, resulting in artists having no access to the masterpieces,

“the transmission of [traditional] styles” was possible only through passing the

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tradition within family dynasties of artists (48). Thus, the “disobedience” of painters to tradition was more or less an inevitable choice, if a so-called tradition was to exist anymore.

The new understanding of painting resulted in a different language quite opposed to all the characteristics attributed to miniature painting. The practice of linear perspective, realism, and figurative representation seemed to be disobeying traditional aesthetics, but the framework of this so-called tradition had been constructed outside of the cultural borders of Iran, hence quite unknown to artists.

Furthermore, if we consider this so called tradition as an invention of the West, the whole idea of making a connection between the consistency of form in miniatures and the existence of such a tradition sounds quite arbitrary.

The technical requirements that a sophisticated miniature painting has to meet before being included in a manuscript makes its steady progress dependent on the simultaneous collaboration of many non-artistic elements. Persian miniature painting was a product mainly of the dexterity of a painter and the power of a wealthy patron able to supporting a chain of traditional guilds. Among different guilds of the transcription industry, miniature painting was probably one of the last links in a manuscript‟s production chain, standing after calligraphy, papermaking, and gilding.

In the absence of each of these pivotal contributors, miniature painting would have been at risk of losing its hallmarks.

After decades of sequential declines in artistic guilds and activities, the nineteenth century was a time when artists willingly divorced from the already extinct traditions. The printing press had put an end to the tradition of book transcription and other related industries. The importation of the camera and the daguerreotype printing techniques in the mid-nineteenth century was a game changer in the relationship

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between patrons and artists. From the moment when a king took a camera into his harem, artists had to find another language with which to communicate with their royal audience. Furthermore, a photograph could teach perspective and realistic representation to painters better than any master. Artists, by painting from photographs, started to compete with the camera.39

Black and white photographs could not properly represent the colourful world, so artists still had the power of depicting the world through their colourful palettes.

When art historians in Europe were compiling knowledge of Persian art, Iranian artists were trying to incorporate foreign techniques in their works in order to fill the aesthetic void between the past and the present. While the accumulation of these factors was about to change the language of art, on another front, modern knowledge of Persian art was forming. For years, these two phenomena were growing in influence without much communication between them.

Visiting Parisian museums and galleries at the climax of the Belle Époque, a very small number of Iranian artists found themselves deeply fascinated by the powerful language of Renaissance and Baroque paintings. Although the pace of change in the visual culture of Europe was too fast for Iranian artists to discern and absorb the latest artistic movements, their encounter with the modern world made enough of an impression to let them sweep away the last residue of traditional visual culture. For Iranian artists, the representation of reality in European paintings gave testimony to the rationality and intelligence of nations whose power was not only

39 The impact of photography on Persian painting was well known. Hamid Keshmirshekan addresses this phenomenon by referring to Etemad al-Saltaneh, the minister of Publication and Distribution in the mid-nineteenth century, who believed that the importation of photography served Iranian portraiture painting. Other researchers have also proved that for some artists, Daguerreotype photos were the original models for many Qajar portraiture paintings. See: Hamid Keshmirshekan, The Contemporary Art of Iran, page 36.

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reflected in their political dominance but also in the realistic rendition of the world in visual arts.

Soon after their return to Iran, these artists started to interpret European realistic conventions into a picturesque style quite suitable for domestic subjects. The manifestation of this phenomenon was not limited to the adaptation of new techniques or in the modest imitation of European masterpieces. The most important consequence of their encounters with the Western traditions of painting was that artists acquired a new way of postulating painting as a powerful medium of communication that effortlessly resists the pressure of constraints. It must have been a revelation for artists to figure out that neither conceptual presuppositions (such as those within the domain of literature) nor intangible impediments (such as the manipulative power of a patron) could determine the destiny of a painting anymore.

Artists also discovered how to utilize the discourse of art for pedagogical purposes out of the domain of traditional guilds and the circle of master and apprentice. To this end, the first centralized school of art was founded in 1910. This school, known as Madreseh Sanaye-e-Mostazrafeh (The School of Fine Arts), was established by one of the prestigious artists of the time, Mohammad Ghaffari, whose reputation as a court painter and master in naturalistic representation was rated more highly than any other artist. As his title “Kamal al-Molk” signifies, he was the

“Excellency of the Estate.”

In Madreseh Sanaye-e-Mostazrafeh, teachers and enthusiastic students could cooperate in a modern context of art and crafts. As Rueen Pakbaz notes, Kamal al-

Molk and his fellow students paved the way for future generation of artists to examine the possibilities of becoming modern. It was only twenty years after the school‟s foundation that the first faculty of fine arts in the University of Tehran became a

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reality, a first in the modernizing of higher education in Iran. In the long list of Iranian modernists, it is very hard to find an artist who in one way or another was not a student of Madreseh or the Tehran Faculty of Fine Arts.

Kamal al-Molk is the paternal figure behind one of the Iranian trends of painting, known as the School of Kamal al-Molk. In this school, artists followed

Kamal al-Molk‟s interest in naturalistic representation and his achievements in picturesque paintings, toward trying to elevate naturalistic representation to its extreme. The result was both stunning and disappointing. While the high quality of naturalistic paintings in this school easily demonstrates that even traditional artists could overcome the insurmountable boundaries of the tradition, the belatedness of their acquiring such dexterity, when the conventions of naturalistic representation is

Europe had become a matter of dispute, was not promising.

The first generation of modern artists in Iran were quite sceptical of the aesthetic achievements of the school of Kamal al-Molk. They believed that when

Kamal al-Molk was busy practicing European painting in Paris, he must have paid more attention to the zeitgeist of the time and the power of Impressionism instead of copying works by classical masters such as Titian and Rembrandt or nineteenth- century French academy artists such as William-Adophe Bouguereau. It is undeniable that Kamal al-Molk was fascinated by the picturesque quality that Bouguereau‟s paintings have, for instance, but it is not clear how much he actually sympathized with the radical brushstroke of the Impressionists, nor how well he was able to fill all the cultural and artistic gaps between Iranian and European painting.

Although Kamal al-Molk was not a contemporary of these European artists, his knowledge of their works opened the doors to experimentation and criticism in art, as Samila Amir Ebrahimi discusses in “Qajar Painting and the Experience of

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Modernity.” Through the critique of his interest in the classical merits of realism, as well as his apathy towards modern art, the next generation of artists, those who in one way or another graduated from his school, came to be pioneers of modern art in Iran.

In other words, Kamal al-Molk indirectly provided the opportunity for art criticism within a traditional society where no apprentice had the right to question his master.

This new generation also resisted the tendencies of the time towards reviving traditional arts and imitating European masters. Amidst the sudden attention the elites and Orientalists paid to miniature painting, these new artists followed their dream of keeping up with the modern world.

As soon as Iranian artists started their journey to the realm of (natu)realistic painting, the urge to explore European aesthetics prevented them from returning to the traditions, the confining rules of which opposed their new expectations of art.

Therefore, even though their journey lagged decades, even centuries, behind their

Western counterparts, they continued to import and adapt European aesthetics in order to fill what they saw as technical and aesthetic gaps in their own traditions. A turning point in the aesthetics of Iranian painting that had a significant impact was an alteration in traditional conventions that was quite radical to the new understanding of

Islamic/Persian art. The artists‟ first attempts to imitate realistic painting based on the conventions of Western representation seemed to deprive painting of authenticity and respect. Nonetheless, though their understanding of art for art‟s sake was pushed to the margins of consideration, it did not hinder these artists from practicing as they pleased. In fact, the closing years of the nineteenth century were the peak of accomplishment for Iranian artists in their quest for finding a new language. In this matter, Kamal al-Molk‟s devotion to classical conventions of European painting sounds avant-garde in the context of pre-modern Iran.

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In the social hierarchy, Kamal al-Molk and his students were generally ranked as elite artists and representatives of the high culture of the time. Parallel to them was another group of painters who were still trying to employ painting as a means of storytelling; their works, however, were not like miniature paintings imprisoned in books and exclusive to a very limited circle of elites. These artists served the industry of public entertainment. The activity of this group was also eclipsed in the midst of the

Orientalist uproar around Persian art until the 1950s, when Iranian artists, in pursuit of an indigenous form, came to acknowledge these artists and their works. Although these artists had no interest in collaborating with their elite counterparts, their simultaneous development comprised an aspect of the vivacity and dynamism of the time.

Unlike the elite artists, the members of the second group were self-taught artists whose talent was employed primarily in the service of entertaining ordinary people in urban coffeehouses or rural public forums. This trend of popular art is known as The Coffeehouse Painting or Naqqashi-e Gahve-Khaneh. In a same way that the school of Kamal al-Molk, by introducing Western art, contributed to the importation of Western art in Iran and facilitated the progress of Iranian modernism,

Coffeehouse painters, by building a bridge between painting and popular culture with the help of traditional arts, quite indirectly played an important role in the formation of an indigenous language of modernism. In the following section, the significance of

Coffeehouse Painting is discussed.

Coffeehouse Painting

Coffeehouse Painting refers to a “primitive” style of Iranian oil painting by a group of autodidact painters. It flourished in the final years of the Qajars (circa the first two decades of the twentieth century) and gained popularity in the public sphere

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quite rapidly, but its end came quickly by the mid-twentieth century. Different accounts from pre-Islamic legends, as well as religious sagas and the chivalry of

Shi‟ite saints, known as Imams, are among the popular subjects of Coffeehouse paintings. As the word “coffeehouse” in the title of this style suggests, these paintings are associated with rural or urban coffee- or tea-houses where people, men only, would spend their leisure time. As coffee houses became popular in the nineteenth century, owners of the high-ranked coffee houses had the interior walls of their businesses decorated with murals and tile paintings. Others, instead of spending lots of money on expensive though permanent pictorial frills, preferred to commission painters to produce paintings on large canvases. These canvases also functioned as screens, as they had no hard frame and could be folded and carried around easily. In the popular culture of the time, these paintings were called “Parde,” which means screen or curtain. Parde was a functional medium and was used as a means of visual storytelling. The title “Coffeehouse Painting” was given to this genre in the 1950s, when their aesthetic value was first discovered by Marco Grigorian, an Armenian-

Iranian modern artist.

The techniques applied in Coffeehouse Painting showcase the same naivety that any self-taught painter might reflect in his/her work. The casual manner of representation in Coffeehouse Painting underlines the dedication of the painter to the whole dimensions of a complex narrative; a Coffeehouse painting has multiple stories within one plane of representation. In most cases, Coffeehouse Painting is much like a comic strip on a big canvas, with no gutters (delineated white spaces) between panels; thus, the chronological order of the narrative “panels” or images is only known to the painter and storyteller. This quality gives an idiosyncratic iconology to Coffeehouse painting. Despite the emphasis on storytelling, there is no sign of realistic

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representation in these paintings: linear perspective and the natural representation of light and shadow are absent or poorly executed. In Coffeehouse Painting, the story behind the “curtain” – the subject – matters more than composition, color, form, and the representation of reality; the painting is simply the function of narrative.

With respect to the significance of storytelling, Coffeehouse Painting has the same power of visualization as a miniature painting does: they are both in the service of Persian literature. However, there is one important difference. In the private sphere of elites and kings, miniature painting served written culture, whereas the presence of

Coffeehouse Painting in the public sphere meant that it reproduced and maintained

Persian oral culture in a community where illiteracy had predominated among ordinary people. Thus, Coffeehouse Painting added extra signification to the oral tradition of storytelling, or “Naqqali,” by employing painting.

The crude translation of the pictorial elements of miniatures on the big canvases of Coffeehouse paintings shows the metamorphosis of Persian painting in the absence of its powerful patrons. In other words, outside of the rich and elite circles of the royal courts where literary and artistic figures were able to reproduce the high arts, the medium of painting could not sustain its trademarks. What makes

Coffeehouse Painting worthy of attention is the fact that it benefits simultaneously from traditional and non-traditional conventions. Coffeehouse painters were away from the trailblazing events of the time mainly because they did not have any supporting guild or high ranking patrons. In the final decades of the Qajars, coffee houses became galleries and theatres for ordinary people. A coffee house was the best site to perform visual storytelling or “Pardeh Khani” (meaning “reciting from a curtain”). Like their patrons, Coffeehouse painters were from the lower strata of the social hierarchy. At the margins of the artistic establishment in the late nineteenth

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century, they were drifters from the already bankrupted guilds of handicrafts.

Moreover, their strong bounds with popular culture distanced them from communicating with the elite artists of the time.

In Coffeehouse Painting, one can see a great sense of humour that is unique in

Persian painting. In a cartoonish way, the representation of human figures and emotions are reminiscent of the conventions of representation in Persian miniature painting. In the absence of powerful patrons when the representation of a story is only limited to the medium of painting and the audience to common people, a Coffeehouse painter has to counterbalance all the shortcomings of the traditional conventions by hyperbolizing the representation of human figure and emotions in painting. This quality makes Coffeehouse painting an innovative medium for showcasing the authentic nature of Persian painting. With its mischievous style in representation,

Coffeehouse painting can be understood as a caricature of miniature painting.

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Figure 4: (left): Mohammad Gollar Aghasi. The White Dive Slain by Rustam,(1915), Reza Abbasi Museum Tehran. In Naqqashi Ghahve-Khane, Hadi Saif, Reza Abbasi Museum Publications, 1990. Figure 5: (Right): Unknown Artist, Rostam Slays the White Dive, (mid-to late sixteenth century). Cambridge: The Fitzwilliam Museum. www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk Accessed 04 November 2018.

The most important characteristic of Coffeehouse Painting is its ability to accommodate religious subjects in representational form. Coffeehouse artists could freely represent Shi‟ite saints and holy figures in painting. In fact, if only one happy aesthetic combination between painting and religious subjects is able to communicate successfully with its audience in the public sphere, that form of art would be

Coffeehouse Painting. They also represent the mythical figures and stories of

Shahnama (The Book of Kings) without being accused of violating the restrictions of aniconism. Coffeehouse Painting is the only Iranian school of visual arts that stands out for its major contribution: bringing figurative painting into the public.

Furthermore, by making an aesthetic reconciliation between art and religion, artists of this movement facilitated the emergence in 1960 of one of the major modern movements in visual arts, known as the School of Saqqakhaneh.

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In coffee houses, storytellers guaranteed the businesses‟ profitability by contributing to entertaining the customers. However, before the popularity of coffee house in Iran, Naqqali as a traditional craft existed and was taught through a master- apprentice relationship. A storyteller, or “Naqqal,” had to be fluent in reciting long epic poems about national legendary heroes; to have a good voice to sing mournful songs about the martyrs of Shi‟ite; and to be capable of employing active body language during his performance. After the introduction of painting into Naqqali,

Naqqals also became experts in decoding the visual language of Coffeehouse

Paintings into an intelligible story for their audiences.

Visual storytelling in Iran is the continuation of the old tradition of Naqqali.

The origins of Naqqali date back to the pre-Islamic era. The mythology/history of Iran gathered in Shahnama is among the popular accounts recited by itinerant bards. With urban development and the endorsement of Shi‟ism as the state religion in the sixteenth century, this tradition evolved into a sophisticated performance and became an important part of the annual commemoration of Shi‟ite martyrs, when the story of

Hussein, the third Shi‟a saint who was slayed in the Battle of Karbala, is retold in order to incite people to cry and mourn. Storytelling, with its great capacity to engage in the performing arts, has contributed to the formation of an indigenous religious drama, known as Ta‟zieh.

Coffeehouse Painting and Ta‟zieh are the artistic manifestations of a pivotal moment in the history of Shi‟ism: the Battle of Karbala. This historical event has to do with the martyrdom of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, in 680 CE.

In that year, when the second caliph of the Umayyads, Yazid, took power, Hussein refused to take an oath of allegiance to him. Although Hussein was aware of the grave risk of political revolt against Yazid, he chose to accept the invitation of his followers

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in Kufa and join the opposition against the usurping new caliph. Trusting his allies in

Kufa, Hussein embarked on a journey and left Mecca in the middle of the pilgrimage season, Hajj. The consequential events are the subjects of Coffeehouse Painting and of

Ta‟zieh.

The closer Hussein got to Kufa, the more he could foresee the approach of an inevitable conflict. At first Yazid appointed a new governor for Kufa whose reputation was already contaminated with overt hostility towards Hussein and his families. Two scout messengers Hussein had sent to Kufa were killed, and so they could not let him know that the citizens of Kufa were actually deal breakers and their invitation was void. Having no choice between continuing the mission or returning to Mecca,

Hussein had to camp near Kufa with a little army of seventy-two soldiers, hoping to receive help from the citizens of Kufa; however, they never fulfilled their promises and abandoned him entirely. Before the conflict started, Hussein and his army had undergone two weeks of siege. In the hot desert of Karbala, large enemy troops blocked all accessible routes to the Euphrates River. Consequently, Hussein‟s army was weakened by thirst. Trying to fetch water, Abbas, Hussein‟s young brother, confronted the enemy, who cut off his both arms. Within two days of the start of the war, Hussein‟s male relatives and faithful warriors were slayed, beheaded, and mutilated in an unequal battle with Yazid‟s powerful army, at the end of which he was murdered as well. Hussein‟s caravan was ransacked and the rest of his family was sent to Damascus and the court of Yazid as prisoners, along with his head for additional humiliation.

The Battle of Karbala was eventually received by artists and writers and became an ideal subject for Persian literature and art; its historical dimensions, in the hands of Iranian poets, writers and storytellers, were transformed into a new narrative

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with multiple layers of symbolic significance and similarities to other mythical and religious narratives. Hussein‟s plights and the tearful story of his family are the main constituents of the grand-narrative of Shi‟ism, and they reside as a testimony to the rightfulness of Shi‟ism in the memory of Shi‟ite community. This grand narrative contains the timeless trope of opposition against tyranny and injustice. The universal message is valid for every righteous act and any sacrificial mission, in which a chosen one is destined to make a holy pledge and show his submission to God‟s will.

According to Shi‟ism, Hussein saved the orthodoxy of Islam from deviance and guaranteed the salvation of Muslims by sacrificing his flesh and blood.

Although in representing the Battle of Karbala poets and artists are quite successful in creating a discourse for Shi‟ite ideology, they have pushed its historical aspects to the margins of significance. As the result, the story of Karbala has achieved ahistorical/mythical quality, which makes it open to absorbing many other narratives in its timeless contextual structure. In Shi‟ite accounts of the Battle of Karbala,

Hussein is represented as the hero whose rise against tyranny and his refusal to yield to the regime of corruption are to be followed by any free man who would want “to fight for the right without question or pause”(Joe Darion)40. Thus, “no matter how hopeless and no matter how far” the battle of Karbala had gone, when Hussein decided “to fight the unbeatable foe” he did not think of anything but “to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause” (ibid.). That heavenly cause is the timeless message that the ideology of Shi‟ism insists on maintaining and reproducing.

40As may be obvious, in writing this paragraph I am influenced by the song “To Dream the Impossible Dream,” in The Man of La Mancha, the famous musical adaptation of Don Quixote. Since hearing this song, I cannot stop thinking of Hussein as a Don Quixote-like figure whose war with the second caliph of Umayyads was only a desperate move to hold a belief, the orthodoxy of which had already started to fade away.

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The legend of Hussein is analogous to many tragic stories in which a forlorn hero chooses to accomplish an impossible metaphysical mission at the price of facing his predestined fate. There are several stories with similarities to the story of Hussein in pre-Islamic Persian literature that could successfully induce the same cathartic response that Hussein‟s sacrifice and plights generate; many of those stories are in

Shahnama (The Book of Kings). The accounts of his severed head in the court of

Yazid in Damascus draw similarities with the story of John the Baptist. Perhaps more than any other narrative, the religious mission that he accomplished at the expense of his life is similar to the Passion of Jesus Christ. In other words, the fabric of the grand narrative of Shi‟ism, like any other mythical and religious account, is actually a network of intertextual narratives contributing to the formation of a new story. The reiteration of Hussein‟s story through time has made this network more complex and multilayered and at the same time resistant to demystification. In this patchwork of myths, the patches belong to a diverse range of cultures. From pre-Islamic Persian mythology to the Passion of Christ, the footsteps of different mythical and religious characters are easily discernible in the grand narrative of Shi‟ism.

Each year, in commemorating Hussein‟s martyrdom, Shi‟ite communities orchestrate a rite of mourning within the first ten days of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar. The rite of mourning for Hussein includes a series of events, such as public processions, performing Ta‟ziyeh, and public gatherings in mosques and shrines or temporary stations where the mourners may listen to sermons.

The rite of mourning demonstrates a very important aesthetic certainty in Persian painting. In other words, with regard to representations of the human figure, especially the holy saints of Islam, the visual representation of the Battle of Karbala becomes the representation of Shi‟ite piety.

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Ta‟zieh, with the help of the drama of oral storytelling, manifests the religious message of the Battle of Karbala and emphasizes the enduring myths of martyrdom.

Ta‟zieh in its content resembles the Christian Passion Plays. Throughout time, Ta‟zieh has symbolically integrated the artistic conventions that represent the identity of

Shi‟ite Muslims. On the stage of performance where the story of Hussein‟s martyrdom is reiterated, performers employ history, literature, music and drama to revive the collective memory of a nation whose identity has a strong religious tone. The stories of Shahnama and the different accounts of the Battle of Karbala were the main literary sources for storytellers. Storytelling for centuries was confined to the oral representation of religious and pagan stories, but in the early twentieth century, storytelling became a multimedia performance in which the storyteller knew exactly how to use painting as a supplementary medium and align it with other performing tools, such as vocal music and body language.

Although Ta‟zieh draws inspiration from historical events, the history of the

Battle of Karbala in the hands of storytellers and performers is just one of the main ingredients for the composition of the final performance. Pre-Islamic narratives are involved indirectly in Ta‟zieh as well; Ta‟zieh is intertextual, layered with many other stories, in which strong religious aspects have gradually overshadowed the significance of the pre-Islamic content of storytelling. Coffeehouse Painting helped storytelling bring back those non-religious dimensions. Through the popularity of visual storytelling in coffee houses, storytellers credited Persian mythology and pagan accounts and visualized religious stories. Coffeehouse Painting occupied the middle ground, challenging the literary accounts that gave meaning to Iranian identity, while being a scene where all the conventional boundaries between pre- and post-Islamic culture would start to fade away.

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When a storyteller started his performance by reciting and singing the lines of a famous story, mostly in verse, painting became a testimony to his narration – as if by the power of the image, the audience would better accept and reflect on the stories. To facilitate this, a coffeehouse painting must contain all the details of an eventful story in one single plane of representation. The result may be a haphazard depiction of a complicated story, but this is exactly what characterizes Coffeehouse Painting. Its crude and clumsy style of representation is the trademark of this school; the art of the storyteller gave meaning and order to the different layers of painting. A good storyteller knew how to address simultaneously the visual and textual elements of a story within a one-man performance. For the ordinary audience of the time, whose eyes were less trained to understand the iconology of painting, storytellers could introduce recognizable visual elements of a painting to a wide range of people who had just started to communicate with this medium.

Visual storytelling, with the help of Persian literature, could bridge the gap between painting and the ordinary audience. Depending on the familiarity of the audience with narrated stories, a professional storyteller could intuitively provide a network of citations based on pagan and religious narratives. The art of the storyteller was to build a new story on the principles of other familiar stories. When most of the audience already knew about the climax and end of each story, storytellers needed to improvise minor changes in their narrations to create further suspense and keep the audience engaged with the adventures of the same old stories.

Through time and reiteration, storytelling, by alternating the grand narratives of Shahnama and Shi‟ite martyrdom, have transformed the authenticity of these accounts into a hybrid structure of multilayered stories in which each story finds its merits in the conceptual similarities with its pagan or Islamic counterpart. Having

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reiterated the verses of Shahnama or told the story of Shi‟ite martyrs through time, storytellers could successfully address the Persian and Islamic characteristics of national identity just as nationalist sentiment was forming, and at the beginning of modernization.

Mary Ellen Page observes how a storyteller in Shiraz could justify an account of Shahnama by citing Shi‟ite saints. Page believes that, “[I]n keeping with the role of teacher, storytellers may insert anecdotes analogous to the story in order to demonstrate values they feel are inherent within the story” (209). In other words, for a professional storyteller, fact and myth can be intertwined and a so-called original story can be altered in an intertextual recreation of a narrative. The result for the audience is a new and believable story constituted from many other anecdotes and situated at the intersection of pagan and Islamic beliefs. This may answer the question as to why, in spite of the different Islamic states that existed throughout thirteen centuries of the domination of Islam, Iranian identity has always been able to vacillate between

Islamic and pre-Islamic centers.

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Figure 6: Mohammad Moddaber, The Tragedy of Karbala (1907). Reza Abbasi Museum, Theran. In Naqqashi Ghahve-Khane, Hadi Saif, Reza Abbasi Musuem Publications, 1990.

Coffeehouse Painting has its own iconology, which demarcates the visual differences between religious and pagan accounts; in general, the language of

Coffeehouse Painting is surprisingly tolerant of the main factor that separates these two pillars of Iranian identity. Coffeehouse painters, in representing different subjects, dealt equally with religious and pagan stories. In fact, the large canvas of a

Coffeehouse Painting was a symbolic sphere where myth and history, heresy and piety, and the past and the present come to find a unified visual language. In this tradition, the only ruling system that could sustain the fragile balance between pre-

Islamic mythology and Islamic accounts of history was the grand narrative of the victory of good over evil. Thus, when it comes to the depiction of heroes and the stories of their chivalry, the army of good is always made of good-looking masculine

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figures standing behind their warlord leader. The leader is always in the middle of the painting and is significantly bigger than the others, while also being the most detailed figure of the painting. The secondary character, who confronts him, shares the same pictorial significance, but depending on his share of righteousness, his facial characteristics vacillate between the two extremes of beautiful and ugly. Apart from their religious identity and historical backgrounds, pagan and religious stories are depicted in the same way. This quality in Coffeehouse Painting makes the intertextuality of the narratives visible – the most singular specification that Iranian art has ever achieved.

Coffeehouse Painting and visual storytelling were dazzling phenomena in

Iranian art and culture. The importation of modern media was crucial to this tradition.

In spite of its short-term popularity, visual storytelling at its height was welcomed by a variety of Iranian audiences in coffee houses where entertaining customers was as important as serving them hot tea and hookah pipes. Visual storytelling came to its inevitable demise soon after the entrance of radio, the gramophone, and movie theatres in urban leisure sites. The popularity of cafes in Tehran overshadowed the social function of the traditional coffee houses, especially when the new generation of elites and intellectuals preferred to have their meetings in cafes.

In the 1950s, Marcos Grigorian (1925-2006), an Iranian-Armenian artist, drew attention to the authenticity of representation in Coffeehouse Painting. He was one of the pioneering artists whose realization of the aesthetic value of these paintings was promising with relation to the formation of a new mindset towards the possible connections between modernism and Iranian art. Collecting scattered works of the forgotten masters of Coffeehouse Painting, in 1950 Grigorian held an exhibition in

Paris and revived Coffeehouse Painting (Keshmirshekan np). This time, more so than

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Western audiences, Iranian artists started to visually elaborate on the capacities of this indigenous form of painting. The new achievement of Coffeehouse Painting – absorbing the attention of elites – made it conceivable for artist to take into account

“other popular decorative arts such as metal locks, votive objects, religious standards, tribal rugs and reverse glass paintings” as well as calligraphy, the most abstract form of art in the Islamic world, as reproducible domestic forms applicable to creating modern visual arts (Diba 46).

The artists‟ appreciation of familiar motifs made the cultural atmosphere of the late 1950s reverberate with an increasing quest to acquire a new language of visual art. The result was the consolidation of Iranian modernism in 1960s. In trying to deal with the immaturity and mediocrity manifested in practicing the techniques of

European art during the first half of the twentieth century, a group of artists found a way to bridge the gap between the memory of the past and modern forms of art. Like their predecessors, they had a close encounter with the West, but this time, as students trained in the modern European schools of art, they saw the technical gaps between themselves and their Western counterparts, and the resulting cultural shock was more amenable than before. In other words, artists, by experimenting with the aesthetics of modern art, were eventually able to further their perception of modernism beyond imitation and appropriation. This successful experiment resulted in the formation of the School of Saqqakhaneh.

The School of Saqqakhaneh

The name “School of Saqqakhaneh” speaks for itself. Saqqakhaneh is an architectural element mostly associated with a religious site. However, artists of this school did not associate themselves or their works with religion. Like Impressionism, the coinage of the name was based on a sarcastic comment that eventually became its

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trademark. The name comes from the heart of traditional society, in which religious signs still ruled. By appropriating a religious name for an avant-garde movement,

Iranian scholars could for the first time successfully examine their authority to analyze a work of art.

Karim Emami is the Iranian literary critic who coined the name of this movement. As a skilled English translator and a successful journalist in the 1960s,

Emami was in close communication with the avant-garde artists of the time. He was also a pioneering critic of the Tehran Biennale of Painting. Emami worked at “Tehran- based English-language daily, Keyhan International … [where] his numerous commentaries on novels, poems, films and works of art soon earned him prominence as a discerning and avant-garde critic” (Āzarang np). It was his comment on a group of paintings presented in the third biennial of painting in Tehran that marked the official emergence of the School of Saqqakhaneh in 1962. A decade later, Emami in trying to explain the main reason for his use of the term, says:

The first appearance of the new “calligraphic” canvases in 1962 reminded some viewers of the Saqqakhaneh phenomenon; the label was used, and it caught on. Later its use was extended to all the artists, both painters and sculptors, who drew directly on the traditional art forms of Iran […] as raw material for their work. (352)

Why did Emami describe this movement this way, and where does the name

“Saqqakhaneh” originate? “Saqqa” in Arabic means someone whose job/duty is to bring water to thirsty people, a water boy, and Khaneh in Persian means house, a place with a certain purpose. Combined, Saqqakhaneh means a place where water is provided for free drinking. In general, water has a strong symbolic meaning for

Iranians, but for Shi‟ite Muslims in particular, water is the great signifier of Hussein‟s passion and plights. Part of the ritual of drinking water is that, after quenching their

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thirst, pious Shi‟ite Muslims say: “Greetings to the thirsty lips of Hussein” (“Salam bar Lab-e Teshne-ye Hussein”).

Figure 7: Ayne Saqqakhane in Tehran, May 18 2018. (Photograph by the author).

The presence of a saqqakhaneh in any neighbourhood can be seen as a sign of devotion to the tradition of mourning for Shi‟ite martyrs. The symbolism of saqqakhaneh and water can be understood through the story of Hussein and his half- brother Abbas. Abbas is the Saqqa of Karbala, the one who sacrificed his life trying to fetch water for Hussein‟s thirsty comrades and relatives in Karbala.

Previously, the Saqqakhaneh was part of the urban architecture of cities and small towns. It is usually a room-like hollow on the exterior side of a building open to passers-by (See figure 7). As an independent element, the saqqakhaneh is still a part of mausoleums, shrines, and mosques. Nowadays the number of active saqqakhanehs in the neighbourhoods of Tehran and other big cities has dramatically decreased. Most of the old saqqakhanehs were destroyed or lost their main function during different

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stages of the urban (re)construction of big cities, whereas in the past, saqqakhaneh had a prominent presence.

For religious citizens, constructing a saqqakhaneh or ornamenting an existing one with certain decorative elements is considered an act of votive offering. Before cities were provided with a modern network of water distribution, people used to donate money to supply saqqakhanehs with fresh water. The significance of this offering lies in the notion that, by providing fresh water, the memory of the thirsty martyrs of Karbala and the ideology of Shi‟ism are perpetuated.

Any decorative element and ordinary drinking utensil has a symbolic meaning in the sacred space of saqqakhaneh. Colourful banners are another object of offering.

These standards are usually ornamented with religious statements or verses of the

Quran printed or embroidered on them. Votive standards have a simple but symbolic color pallet, mostly in black, green and red. The color green signifies the sacred presence of Imams, red is a sign of their great sacrifices, and black is the color of mourning for their martyrdom.

Tapestries are also used to decorate the interior of a saqqakhaneh. They are usually covered with lines of religious poems and prayers written in different styles of

Islamic calligraphy. Some saqqakhanehs have a rack or niche for those who want to light a votive candle. Some of them are decorated with metal lattice frame and people sometimes tie a green ribbon, or put a small lock on its crosses. Hoping their wishes will be fulfilled, some people see saqqakhaneh as a mediatory place between themselves and God, a site where their prayers can be heard. In the Saqqakhaneh, people ask for a heavenly intervention that could solve their problems and open all knots and locks preventing their wish fulfillment.

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Unlike the mosque, wherein any representation of animate beings is prohibited, in the saqqakhaneh iconoclasm is not taken seriously. The Saqqakhaneh has no aversion to figurative representation. Portraits of the prophet, Ali, Hussein, and

Abbas can be easily found there. All in all, in the accumulation of different religious signs in the saqqakhaneh over time, this place has come to have a powerful signification. So how did this traditional religious site/concept/icon find its way into the midst of Iranian avant-gardism in the 1960s?

Recent studies about the formation and characteristics of the School of

Saqqakhaneh are more or less limited to Iranian academia. Despite the great steps that

Iranian modernists took in the 1960s to decrease their distance from Western contemporary art, the School of Saqqakhaneh still is little known to its non-Iranian readers. Within this modern school of visual arts, artists, in their quest to appropriate modern aesthetics, were eventually able to acquire the global language of modernism.

The great impact of this movement on Iranian art has encouraged some Iranian scholars and graduate students to analyze the cultural circumstances in which such a different and impactful artistic trend came into being and to represent the culture of modern Iran. In terms of academic comprehensiveness, these studies were still experimental, but noteworthy mainly because the School of Saqqakhaneh remains a singular experience in the history of Iranian contemporary art. Hamid Keshmirshekan and Siamak Delzende are among Iranian scholars who have heavily invested in compiling the cultural history of the School of Saqqakhaneh. Keshmirshekan takes the notion of Neo-traditionalism as a key term to describe the dual language of aesthetics

– the combination of traditional elements in a modern context – in this school.

Delzende, by analyzing the visual evolution of form in Persian/Iranian painting in the twentieth century, sees the School of Saqqakhaneh as the continuation of the practice

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of European art in which artists became able to freely examine the aesthetics of modernism while the visual elements are borrowed from the Shi‟ite culture of morning, Persian myth-history of Pre-Islamic era, and an Iranian rendition of Western visual culture.

Delzende in his comprehensive research on Iranian contemporary art, The

Visual Evolution of Iranian Art: A Critical Review gives a thorough description of how, in the 1950s and in the midst of cultural and social changes in postwar Europe,

Iranian artists had to find a way to prove their identity as something more than the guardians of Persian art. Delzende‟s accounts shed more light on how, in contrast with

Kamal al-Molk‟s conservative disengagement with the front line of modern art and his conventional dedication to copying masterpieces, the new generation of artists decided to practice the principle of avant-gardism by being quite innovative.

Delzende tells the story of Mansoureh Husseini (1926-2012), one of Iran‟s pioneering female artists. As a successful art graduate student in Italy, in 1958,

Husseini found the chance to meet with the famous Italian art critic Lionello Venturi.

At that time, she was at the height of success in Europe. After holding a number of exhibitions in Rome and even receiving grants for higher education, Husseini expected validation and encouragement from European critics.

Venturi, unimpressed by Husseini‟s modern style of painting, encouraged her to take advantage of the rich visual culture of Persian and Islamic art and take inspiration from calligraphy instead of trying to imitate Post-Impressionist artists. This was both shocking and discouraging for Husseini, whose paintings resembled

Cezanne‟s modernist rendition of landscape painting. In trying to cope with the shock,

Husseini immediately started to appropriate calligraphy as a painterly element in

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creating abstract forms. Husseini remembers her initial shock and her subsequent feelings as follows:

I was fifty years behind the history. All the encouragements and acknowledgements that I had received were killed by … [Venturi‟s] single comment. I was dead inside. At the same night [after meeting Venturi] I took a postcard which had the names of the Five Figures [the five holy Shi‟ite saints] printed on it as a model and I used calligraphy in my work. (341)

Figure 8: Mansooreh Hosseini, Ali, circa 1959, Artist's Collection. Encyclopeadia Iranica. http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/Hosseini- Mansoureh Accessed 31 October 2018

Husseini‟s immediate reaction addressed a new characteristic of Saqqakhaneh artists:

Despite the odds, it was possible to find an aesthetic premise where the formal potentials of traditional signs could be easily employed in modern representations.

Name and words in Saqqakhaneh painting lose their symbolism and become signifiers with no signification. Calligraphy becomes a source of pure forms with organic and geometric qualities reducible to painterly elements. If, in the Western tradition, the reduction of naturalistic forms to geometrical shapes was eye-opening to avant-garde artists, the detachment of meaning from calligraphy was a revolution in Iranian art.

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This perhaps prompts us to think that Husseini did acquire a deep understanding of

Cezanne‟s work within her practice.

Moving forward from the mere imitation of European painting to the manifestation of artistic creativity within a modern framework, artists of the School of

Saqqakhaneh are the true avant-gardes of Iranian art. This movement came to being when a scholarly discontinuation happened in Islamic art studies after the outbreak of the Second World War. In the postwar era, Iranian artists became relatively free from the influence of the scholarly output of the Orientalists. Thus, they were not obliged to tailor their art to the reactionary taste of the admirers of Persian art. Instead, the new experience of modern art came to help artists find a way to bridge the present and the past.

During and after the Second World War, Islamic art studies lost its initial momentum in the West. By the outbreak of the war in 1939, the fever for Persian art had completely abated. Due to the political issues of the late 1940s in the Middle East, such as the rise of national consciousness against colonialism and imperialism, many

Western scholars in this field lost their vocation in conducting more research on

Islamic art. With the disintegration of the powerful circle of German Orientalists, the dynamism of Oriental studies began to slow down. The scholars of Persian and

Islamic art, such as Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941), Friedrich Sarre (1865-1945),

Ernst Diez (1878-1961), and Ernst Herzfeld (1879-1948), were the last generation of

German and Austrian Orientalists with no successor in postwar Germany. Other

European scholars left Iran during the war and very few of them returned afterwards.

In the postwar era, the concept of nationalism in Iran took a different turn and became part of a powerful political agenda. If the initial circle of nationalists in the early twentieth century were motivated by accepting the supremacy of the West and

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copying modernity, in the late 1940s, the next generation of nationalists believed in a new manifesto by which they could demand national authority against the whole history of cultural exploitations by the West. Elevating the discourse of nationalism from an imported concept coordinated with abstract spatial and temporal dimensions into a concrete cultural and political agenda was an evolutionary turn for Iranians. In

1951, the political move of nationalizing the Iranian oil industry had a significant impact on the modern face of Iran. During the course of international debates about this move, Iran was in the headlines and covered by different media around the globe.

As Ehsan Yarshater in “Communication” points out, this completely annulled the political implication of Persia as an exonym (63).

These political and international achievements also generated an anti-Anglo sentiment in Iran, which was indirectly targeted at British Orientalists; by the mid-

1950s, the cultural environment that had once welcomed the imported concept of

Persian art with open arms had been completely changed. Western scholars and

Iranian artists had to deal with the consequences of postwar upheavals. Therefore, the vivacity of the study of Islamic-Persian art in the West gave into a widespread academic recession.

The consequences of the postwar recession in Islamic art studies caused at least three decades of research stagnation in this field. Sheila Blair and Jonathan

Bloom, in their very famous article “The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the

Study of an Unwieldy Field,” give testimony to the poor situation of this discipline in the late 1960s. They bring examples of the beginning of their study in this field, when

Islamic art as a special field in art history could not provide a “coherent narrative”

(152). They say:

When we started studying Islamic art some thirty years ago [in the early 1970s], there was no good introductory textbook that undergraduates could

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read. When we started teaching the subject nearly a decade later, there were still none, and we had to make do with stacks of photocopied articles and chapters assigned from one book or another in an attempt to present students with a coherent narrative. So little survey material existed that even graduate students had difficulty getting a grasp on the whole field and had to resort to obscure and uneven publications …. (ibid.)

While the study of Islamic art was under the influence of an academic recession, scholars of Persian art also worked in the same lethargic atmosphere. In trying to analyse the issue, Robert Hillenbrand, in his review of the history of Persian art studies, acknowledges the impact of the political and economic issues of the postwar era. However, he believes that the unquestionable authority of Pope in this scholarship, which had cast a shadow over the work and presence of other scholars in

Iran, is the main reason for the emergence of academic recession in the postwar era.

Hillenbrand explains that in the 1940s, it was almost impossible for the majority of

Persian art scholars to continue their research without their colonial privilege or the official support of the first Pahlavis. The only scholars who could still enjoy unconditional support for research were Pope and his wife, Dr. Phyllis Ackerman.

While the golden years of Persian art scholarship in the 1930s seemed unrepeatable, the “daunting physical presence” of A Survey on Persian Art remained valid as the main reference for Persian-Islamic art studies (Hillenbrand 35). Only the turbulent years of the 1970s decreased the influence of Pope‟s survey on Islamic art. Pope‟s work was of an “impressive scale and length, entirely unprecedented in the field of

Persian art,” and according to Hillenbrand, this collection appeared quite

“disempowering” to the scholarship (ibid.).

In response to the socio-political circumstances in which the cultural climate under the second shah of the Pahlavis dynasty (1941-1979) took shape, artists sought a way to turn their version of modernism toward a national quest to introduce the visual culture of modern Iran. Out of all the efforts that initially were expended toward

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conquering the mediocrity of the imitation of European painting, artists were able to successfully use the iconology of Persian art and popular culture to improve painting and sculpture toward being a proper medium to communicate between traditional and modern aesthetics. As the result of this combination, an atmosphere of innovation emerged.

In the early 1960s, some of the visual and decorative characteristics of the

School of Saqqakhaneh, such as calligraphy and the combination of the three symbolic colors of Shi‟ism, started to appear in Iranian painting. In these types of works, Iranian artists overtly follow a modern aesthetic in style of representation, but their choice of subjects and materials is a reminder of the elements and forms of religious and traditional icons, votive ornaments, and Islamic calligraphy.

Like the Coffeehouse painters, Saqqakhaneh artists were open to appropriating both the non-Islamic and Islamic identities of Persian art, but they consciously invalidated the significance of Persian literature and the symbolism of religious signs in order to dedicate their attention to the formal capacities of

Persian/Iranian visual motifs. But, unlike their self-taught predecessors, the highly educated artists of Saqqakhaneh had an intentional plan behind the employment of the visual elements from the traditional context. Having followed the aesthetics of reduction in modern art, artists examined how to eliminate the symbolic meanings of

Persian motifs and tame them to the modern rules of minimalism, abstraction and defamiliarization. As a result, the two aspects of Iranian identity were situated equally within a modern form. In the School of Saqqakhaneh, the Persian and Islamic aspects of Iranian identity received the same share of representation in a work of art, without borrowing any literary or historical significance from either non-Islamic or Islamic narratives. It was only the aesthetics of modernism that could provide a secular

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language in Iranian visual arts. Thus, the familiar characteristics of traditional arts, such as calligraphy, miniature painting, and religious iconography, became a raw material detached from their halos and ready to be used in a new and playful context.

The formation of the School of Saqqakhaneh was in fact an intellectual reaction to the aesthetic belatedness that has always been the major problem of Iranian artists. The vanguard attitude of Saqqakhaneh artists has roots in their experience of modernism in European art schools, where they were considered in one way or another as the inheritors of Persian visual culture. Even though in postwar Europe

Iranian artists were more prepared for their close encounter with modernism, they felt decades behind the art mainstream. The most disappointing fact was that, once again, their practice of modern art seemed invisible to the judges who still had memories of the golden days of Islamic and Persian art exhibitions in Europe.

The end point: Panje

Under the umbrella term Saqqakhaneh are many contemporary Iranian artists who presented noteworthy works of art. Among them, Hussein Charles Zenderoudi stands as one of the pioneering figures whose early paintings in this school are quintessential to the identity of Iranian modernism. Zenderoudi has been always admired by critics for his witty language of painting and his use of innovative techniques that specifically deprived meaning from calligraphy the most meaningful form of Islamic art the Islamic. With this avant-garde move, Zenderoudi desacralizes religious signs by reducing them to pure forms. Zenderoudi‟s creativity in playing with calligraphy made it possible for other artists to take Persian and Arabic letters and words from their familiar contexts and transform them into purely pictorial forms.

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Figure 9: Hussein Zenderoudi, The Hand (Panje), 1959, New York University Collection Grey Art Gallery, June 29, 2018, www.zenderoudi.com/english/THE%20HAND.html.

Karim Emami pays special attention to the way that Zenderoudi has taken these traditional motifs “beyond … parody or satire” (335).Delzende considers

Zenderoudi‟s The Hand or Panje (see Figure 5) as one of the most prominent examples of painting in this school. Panje can be understood as a kind of parody of

Iranian painting, the same characteristic that Karimi underlines in Zenderoudi‟s works. As an object, a “panje” is a votive offering made of metal that is meant to address the five holy figures of Shi‟ism. These figures are the prophet Muhammad, his only daughter Fatima, his son-in-law Ali, and his grandsons, Hasan and Hussein. It is also seen as a reminder of the severed hands of Abbas. The latter signification has made panje a notable sign in mourning rituals, and the most appropriate ornament for saqqakhanehs. The symbolism of panje is not limited to Shi‟ite tradition, since this object has a history of use as a talisman in many different pre-Islamic Mesopotamian civilizations.

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Despite the religious significance that Panje carries in the Shi‟ite tradition,

Zenderoudi‟s painting addresses the other layers of its meaning in having the flat representation covered with words, letters and numbers. These signs offer a mystic alphabetical and numerical order, as if the object is an actual countercharm. In fact, the whole painting – including the background and the frame – are decorated with an ambiguous order of signs. Zenderoudi reflects on that ambiguity and makes his audience reach no certainty in the perception and interpretation of the painting by mystifying the way he has represented the familiar objects. From the beginning,

Zenderoudi decided not to make a meaningful combination of signs and shapes, but rather to use them as the raw materials in creating a modern representation.

In Panje, Zenderoudi aims to show the flexibility of Persian art, its ability to become something beyond its rudimentary and conventional definitions. Panje combines words and image, the two main representational signs of Persian culture.

The painting offers a minimalist color palette consisting of three shades, black, gold, and silver, on paper. Meanwhile, the elegant depiction of words and numbers contrasts with this minimalism by ornamenting the whole painting. In Panje, Zenderoudi rediscovers the capacities of painterly forms in Persian painting; the work contains some of the formal elements of a traditional miniature painting, and at the same time resembles no conventional example of Persian painting.

Panje‟s composition comprises a series of enclosed rectangular frames. In the middle of the painting the main subject, the eponymous hand is depicted as a simple drawing with no intention of having a realistic resemblance to the real object. Its flat representation and sharp outlines, and the contrast between its color and that of the background make the painting similar to a collage, in which the silvery drawing is perhaps simply pasted to the golden surface. The arrangement of the nested rectangles

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and circles is clearly a reminder of minimalism and the reduction of form. In Panje,

Zenderoudi examines the modern representation of form in painting. In this instance, he furthers the aesthetics of reduction through minimalizing the conventions of miniature painting. Having stripped away all the presuppositions that define the aesthetic of the Persian miniature, Zenderoudi puts words and image into a flat plane of representation, desacralizing them by lending them a modern/secular signification.

He parodies the tradition of illuminated manuscripts by dominating the meaningless textual signs in the frame of a painting, written in ink and covered with silver and gold paint. With this random combination of paint and materials in an artwork that loosely moves between representational and abstract painting,

Zenderoudi‟s work becomes an arena of clashing aesthetics in which traditional conventions are placed into a crucible of a modernist experimentation.

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Chapter Four

The Signification Fallacy: Meaning as a Mirage

A century after the discursive formation of Islamic art studies in Europe, academic debates over what Islamic art means and represents are still ongoing.

Islamic art is also the most popular subject of research among Iranian scholars; however, Iranian scholarship in this area only goes back three decades. The belated response of Iranian scholars to the formation of Islamic art as a discipline speaks of a gap between them and their counterparts in Europe and North America where trailblazing researchers constantly extend the horizon of Islamic art studies. Nowadays the study of Islamic art is an interdisciplinary field whose multilayered discourse of aesthetics and historiography accommodates the latest achievements of the humanities and critical theory, whereas in Iranian academia scholars hardly offer anything beyond the reiteration of the early theorizations in this field. In this regard, the methodological preference of Iranian scholars in reading Islamic art makes this gap more apparent.

The academic study of Islamic art in Iranian art schools started in 1993 with the foundation of a new program known as Pazhoohesh-e Honar or Research in Art.

The consolidation of Pazhoohesh-e Honar is the fruit of the cultural revolution in Iran that happened shortly after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This radical phenomenon involved widespread activity aiming to purify the cultural and intellectual outcomes of the modernization of Iran from the influence of Western culture. The first target of the cultural revolution was the universities. From there, it quickly permeated other areas of the public sphere and turned all the educational and cultural institutions into active agencies for maintaining and reproducing the dominant ideology of the post- revolutionary regime.

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Iranian academics focus on two important aspects in the discipline of Islamic art studies. The first is that Islamic art should be considered an important constituent of Iranian visual culture and the second that Islamic art, as an intrinsically religious concept, mediates between theology and aesthetics. The program of Research in Art came into being as an ideological response to the necessities of providing an academic field for art studies in the post cultural revolution era. The development of this program aimed to improve the quality of higher art education, and to achieve eventually an indigenous, non-Western aesthetic language for Islamic art. Thus far, however, the academic results of Islamic art studies are not strong enough to justify claims of a new approach in this field, or to open a new horizon to the discipline of

Islamic art.

Between 1980 and 1983, Iranian art schools along with other higher educational institutions went through many fundamental and irreversible changes.

Right after the Revolution, a wholesale cultural turn against the manifestations of non- religious culture occurred. Within this radical movement, any social and cultural institution that used to represent and contain the secular signs of the Pahlavis era became the subject of ideological scrutiny. This movement also helped the ideology of the Revolution to spread exponentially. However, the durability of this ideology needed precise cultural engineering that could sustain the cultural objectives of the

Islamic Revolution. The replacement of the secular system of signs, developed and popularized during the Pahlavis, with Islamic symbolism altered the way in which

Iranian modern culture was viewed. It was necessary, then, to secure the culture‟s new

Islamic framework by providing a mechanism which could guarantee the reproduction of the dominant ideology and prevent any undesired alteration being made in the new system. This mechanism can be understood in terms of what Althusser called “the

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State ideological Apparatuses”. In Iran, the successful functioning of the reformed

ISA‟S in repressing undesirable counter- tendencies and reproducing the dominant ideology was achieved only after the cultural revolution. Before the Islamic

Revolution, universities were the strongest ideological state apparatus for the former state. Thus, challenges and opposition were most likely to come from these institutions.

The cultural revolution officially started in the spring of 1980 with the shutting down of all the universities at the end of the academic year. This was done in the name of cleansing the climate of the educational system of the influence of modern culture; however, the cultural revolution also had a political basis that gave it urgency and accelerated its development. In this regard, the cultural revolution was a reaction by religious and intellectual authorities under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini towards the disunited political fabric of society in the beginning of the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

After the downfall of the Pahlavis in early 1979, for a short period of time, there was an open political space in society, where the secular and religious participants of the Revolution were given freedom of speech. This momentary opportunity enabled many of the modern institutions to start to provide a base for a variety of political activities. From Islamism to Marxism, there was a rainbow of political parties with a wide spectrum of sympathizers, mostly comprising university students and the new generation of young revolutionaries. Grigor describes this unique political phenomenon as “one of the few instances in Iran‟s modern history when uninhibited expression was freely exercised in the streets” (Contemporary Iranian Art

28). This political exercise, according to Grigor, had a strong visual expression in the

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form of revolutionary murals and posters which showcased both the Islamic and

Marxist dimensions of the revolution in the public sphere.

After the triumph of the Revolution, students, as one of the pivotal contributors to this victory, wanted to continue their active political role even at the expense of abandoning their academic activities. As Reza Razavi remarks: “Between 1979 to

1981, the universities were not so much an environment for education as a forum for political and ideological debates […]”(3).Therefore, universities as the hotspot of ideological clashes manifested an undesirable political disunity more prominently than any other institutions. In fact, universities were the first sites where the new opposition could speak out and act against the new totality and dominance of the religious agencies. When the turbulent ambience of the universities resulted in a series of chaotic conflicts between secular and religious students, the authorities started to counteract by showing no tolerance for the growing radical opposition in the universities. The Hostage Crisis of 1979 and the consolidation of the constitution of the Islamic Republic, which guaranteed the authority of religious elites over the executive, legislative, and judiciary systems, are among the restraining factors that shut down the opportunity for free speech, as well as the new opposition against the cultural and political policies of the new religious regime.

Amidst the vivid political atmosphere of the universities, the religious authorities had one major objective on their agenda: to retrieve their former power and utilize it in politics, the economy and education. The history of modern education in

Iran is in fact the story of the great failure of the clerical establishment to sustain the traditional system of education and training. The gradual decline in the authoritative influence of the clerics over the traditional society of Iran started after the discourse of modernity was imported in the late nineteenth century. The beginning of the Pahlavis

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era in the 1920s seemed to be an irreversible end to the power of the clerical establishment; however, it took only half a century for the clerics to regain their authority through the inauguration and triumph of the Islamic Republic.

Among all the policies of the clerical establishment toward cultural institutions, their (re)definition, in terms of a religious center of meaning, was the most far-reaching. This practice was undoubtedly successful in drawing lines between the two sides of Iranian culture, the pre and post Revolution, inasmuch as the boundaries that it set are still acknowledged. Following this policy, the cultural entities and concepts of the pre-Revolution were either absorbed into the new regime of signs by being characterized with Islamic keywords or were excluded if they could not be compatible with the new Islamic adjectives. Therefore, from replacing “the generic concept of „shah‟ by the equally generic concept of „imam‟” to re-designating the name of The Ministry of Culture and Art as The Ministry of Culture and Islamic

Guidance, (Grigor, Contemporary Iranian Art 41)„the battle of signifiers‟ started right after the Revolution. The replacement of the word “Art” with “Islamic Guidance” in the title of the respective ministry was only a prelude to the roar of change in the nation‟s visual culture and an alarming incident for artists whose works mirrored the aesthetics of modern art. The situation that artists went through in the early 1980s in the lights of Grigor‟s description is only a glimpse of what they really experienced:

“Accused of mindless formalism and lack of commitment to social justice by the revolutionary state, the work of the diverse groups of avant-garde artists, including painters, sculptors, architects, film-makers, poets and musicians of the late 1960s and

70s was tossed to one side.”(ibid. 95) According to Grigor "[t]he accusations serves the political end.”(Ibid.). Therefore, many artists took refuge either in the private

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space of studios or relinquished their artistic activities in Iran and acquiesced to a voluntary exile.

Ayatollah Khomeini has a famous statement about the condition of an Islamic country where “[e]verything ought to be Islamic.”41 Apart from the fact that the main implication of this statement has nothing directly to do with art, some of the artworks produced in the first decade of the Islamic Revolution reflect a unity between the form and the content in order to showcase how a revolutionary Islamic art should be. A group of these artworks are reminiscent of Mexican mural painting.

Figure 10: Niloufar Ghaderi-nezhad conducting murlas in Tehran streets 1979 https://nooriato.com/ Accessed 06 November 2018.

In these works artists by paying homage to this movement followed the same revolutionary activities and anti-Imperialist tendencies that the Latin American artists had employed in mural painting decades before Iranians, but as an artistic reaction to the Revolution, this movement could not maintain any Islamic definition for art. In circumstances where the direction of Iranian art was obscured by the random

41 Imam Khomeini Comprehensive Site, “Everything about and Islamic Country Ought to be Islamic” http://emam.com/posts/view/20579 Accessed 03 August 2018.

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emergence and vanishing of different artistic movements, the cultural revolution provided an opportunity for the religious authorities to overpower the new and old systems of signs so they could gradually supersede other political parties.

It soon turned out, however, that to apply any major change to the center of signification and to construct more malleable signifiers for the discourse of

Revolution, much stronger action would be needed. In other words, there should be an effective mechanism by which the ruling ideology of the Revolution would be perpetuated regardless of the influence of other ideologies. Thus, all the ideological state apparatuses of pre-Revolution Iran went under scrutiny to control their future outcome.

Many of the religious elites believed that by modernizing education in the early Pahlavis, the secular intellectuals conspired against the seminaries in order to open the gates towards Western cultural colonizers. They came to the conclusion that from the very beginning of the foundation of universities in the 1930s they “were serving the interest of the imperialists [the West] and the enemies of Islam.” (Razavi

2) The first output of yielding to Western culture was that the cleric establishment became limited to religious seminaries. Therefore, universities became the main conduit of Western culture by maintaining and reproducing the discourse of modernity. After the Revolution, religious authorities aimed to counterbalance and antagonize the educational power of the universities in order to make it tamed to their control.

This standpoint jeopardized the institution of the university as the most important representative of modern Iranian culture; however, a few intellectual figures heralded by Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush tried to draw attention toward a possible solution for safeguarding universities. Their solution was based on the most important

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ambition of Muslim intellectuals to have a religious discourse that can offer a secure epistemological ground for knowledge. Such reconciliation between the traditional centers of knowledge, the seminaries, and the modern universities could be lifesaving for both religion and knowledge. If these two poles of education in Iran came together in solidarity in order to have an authentic discourse of knowledge, the unwanted frictions between the modern and traditional institutions would be more manageable.

Through this authentic discourse then, the quarrel between faith and science, intuition and reasoning, and tradition and modernity would cease. Hence, it would be possible to have a middle ground where “education can correspond to Islamic ideology”

(Sobhe 271) and sustain the Islamic accounts of knowledge.

In the beginning of the cultural revolution it was hoped that after the

Islamization of universities, there would be no sign of corrupted westernized contents or academics in the educational system. Thus, the middle ground of exchanging knowledge between universities and seminaries would become the habitat of the

„religious intellectuals‟. However, there was a problem with this hypothetical reconciliation between seminaries and universities. In the context of religious intellectuality, knowledge is preserved from the corruption of secular thoughts with the help of religion. According to Hamid Dabashi‟s view of the duty of a religious intellectual “an extraordinary diligent observance [is demanded] from religious intellectuals who ought to be both aware of nonreligious knowledge and able to actively read it against the principality of their „Religion Itself‟ and the form of religious knowledge pertinent to it.” (102) but, the control that religion‟s vigilant eyes exert has a limited purview, and since the empirical sciences can hardly be contained in this observation, the project of Islamization of knowledge would be doomed to failure.

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In the initial political ferment, the equilibrium between the intellectuals and the religious elites could maintain the dynamism of universities; however, there was still an urge among religious authorities to entirely destabilize the existing construction and once again establish a religion- based system for education. Like any other form of cultural cleansing, the purification of Iranian universities was based on excluding undesired entities on the basis of an ideological scale of academic qualification.

Taking into account a series of dichotomies, the executives of the cultural revolution established a system for weeding out unwanted content and non-committed professors and students from the committees, both revolutionary and religious. Therefore, binary oppositions such as religious and secular, Islamic and non-Islamic, and loyalists and traitors to the revolutionary cause entered the lexicon of the cultural revolution and set a new regime of signs for the visual and textual culture of the Islamic Revolution.

In the event, in the first step of the Islamization of society, all of the universities were officially shut down in May 1980, and for at least two years very limited academic activities were recorded. There are no official statistics on the number of expelled academics, but it is said that “some 700 out of the total of 12,000 university lecturers and assistants” were dismissed and about 200,000 students were suspended for the duration of the cultural revolution (Razavi 6).

After the reopening of the universities, a considerable number of faculty and students were forbidden to go back to their former academic lives. Instead, in the new system of education, premised on excluding manifestations of Western culture, religious faculty could freely engineer the content of different curricula. This gave them a unique opportunity to actualize their great ambition of constructing a religious framework to accommodate the humanities, social science, literature and art. In parallel with cleansing universities of ideologically inadmissible individuals, there

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was a movement to revise academic curricula, text books, and the inventory of libraries. Among different academic disciplines, the humanities underwent the most radical changes.

The impact of the cleansing of universities showed itself drastically and rapidly in the context of art education in the subsequent decade. In one account Habib

Ayatollahi, the first president of the College of Fine Arts after the Islamic Revolution, recollects the first years of art schools after the reopening of universities when, in the absence of professional instructors and distinguished artists, the upper-year students took charge of preparing syllabi for and teaching art courses. According to Ayatollahi, the quality and practicality of the newly designed courses were of much lower standards and quite dismissive of the initial purpose of the art programs, to the extent that the College of Fine Arts in Tehran, which had been one of the best art colleges in the Middle East or even Asia, suddenly lost its reputation altogether (37). After the cultural revolution, the foundation of a theory-based program such as Research in Art seemed to accomplish the initial purpose of the art institutions by offering two sides of the knowledge of art. It was also a soothing offering for the community of artists and students of the time, who still had to deal with the post traumatic circumstances of the

1980s and the cultural revolution.

Retrieving the Past, Dismissing the Present

The summer of 2005 was a turning point in the history of modern art in Iran.

Alireza Sami Azar, then director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art

(TMoCA), in the last days of his successful administration (1997-2005) decided to set up an exhibition comprised of works that the basement of the museum had kept hidden for years. This event was the greatest step in the ongoing process of cultural reconciliation between Iranian audiences and modern art. The ice that had

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accumulated since the uprising of the cultural revolution in 1980 had finally begun to thaw.

To bare this heart of the museum without doing any artistic collateral damage, the museum went through a series of preliminary artistic and cultural manoeuvres.

Precautions seemed necessary because, for some of the older employees of the museum, the memory of cutting one of Andy Warhol‟s silkscreens during the revolution was vivid.42 Therefore, museum executives held a few events to prepare the audience. First, TMoCA hosted the first series of biennials for contemporary Iranian artists who had a strong inclination towards modern art; then, a couple of exclusive art exhibitions of famous western artists were held. For instance, in 1999, under the rubric of Pop Art, a collection of the works of postwar American artists such as Roy

Lichtenstein, David Hockney and Andy Warhol filled the halls of the museum.

Three years later, the museum hosted an international conference featuring foreign invitees, such as the art critic Edward Lucie-Smith and artist Joyce Kozloff.43

But the final act surprised everybody. For the first time in the post-revolutionary period, the masterpieces of modernism were exhibited and invaluable works of art were taken out of the basement and placed at the very center of public attention. Most of these works had been purchased in the last decade of the Pahlavis in the 1970s, and a few had been presented as gifts to Farah Diba, the former queen of Iran. Farah Diba was the main patron, especially of modern art. By invitation of her office (Daftare-

Makhsoos), many modern Western artists in the 1970s visited Iran in order to attend in art festivals or judge Tehran‟s biennials of modern art.

42 Peter Waldman and Golnar Motevalli. “Iran Has Been Hiding One of The World‟s Great Collections of Modern Art: We Went to Tehran to See the Secret Warhols.” Bloomberg Businessweek, November 17, 2015. http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-tehran-museum-of-contemporary-art/. 43 BBC Persian, “Modern Art, the Victim of Ideological Standpoint: An Interview with Alireza Sami Azar,” BBC Persian, www.bbc.com/persian.

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There are still a few Iranian artists who recollect and lament the good old days of the late 1960s and 70s when their exploration of modern art was fully supported.

For the first time, critics too had the opportunity to practice art criticism. In Iran, the cultural atmosphere of those years was influenced by the collective predilection of elites to Western culture; therefore, for artists, it became possible to challenge the conventional understanding of art or bring modernism into their interpretation of traditional art.

Before the summer of 1978, it was possible to see avant-garde and modern shows in the big cities of Iran during cultural festivals and art events. From one of the most controversial public performances by Karlheinz Stockhausen during the annual

Shiraz Festival of Arts, to Andy Warhol making a silkscreen of the Shah and the royal family, Iranian artists felt that the aesthetic mainstream of art would soon be in their backyard (Figure 11). The surplus income from oil was spent not only to quench the

Shah‟s hunger for weaponry but also to buy artworks and initiate massive cultural projects, such as establishing the first formal institution for contemporary art.

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Figure 11: Farah Diba and Andy Warhol, 1977. http://www.collectortribune.com/2012/12/29/ farah-diba-pahlavi-on-assembling-tehrans-art-collection Accessed 16 August 2016.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) was intended to be a center for artistic interaction between the West and East (an optimistic perspective that may be fulfilled someday), but the odds were not in the museum‟s favor. It was only a year after the official opening in 1977 that the first steps toward revolution were taken by the angry mass that rose in opposition to the government and anything that was supported by the king and queen, including modern art.

For years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, these exemplary works of modern art took refuge in the basement of the museum and were eclipsed from public view as well as poorly restored. During the unstable years of the1980s, when the widespread disregard of modernism and modern culture became some sort of revolutionary gesture, there was no physical evidence of these invaluable treasures, except for the presence of a few modern statues in the courtyard of the museum, and a few others that were carelessly left inside.

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Standing in the museum court and surrounding the unique architecture of the main building, Henry Moore‟s Two Piece Reclining Figures (Figure 12), Alberto

Giacometti‟s Walking Man, Rene Magritte‟s The Healer, Eduardo Chiliad‟s Estela a

Pablo

Figure 12: Henry Moore, Two Piece Reclining Figure, Arched Leg Bronze (1969-1970) Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Tehran.

Neruda and Max Ernst‟s Capricorn could barely draw a pedestrian‟s attention toward the hidden secret of the museum. Donald Judd‟s minimal array of brass cubes in a dead-end corridor and Calder‟s Mobile in the main entrance hall kept their abstract silence and presence, too. Despite their solid presence, those sculptures were unsuccessful in reminding audiences that the museum was meant to be a gate to the spectacular artworks of Modernism era. This, the primary mission of the museum, failed very shortly after the first opening in the summer of 1977.

Throughout the comatose years of the 1980s, the alienated sculptures bore witness to great events such as the cultural revolution and war in the 1980s. During those years, the first wave of the cultural revolution incessantly threatened artists and intellectuals who had oriented themselves towards Western culture. In those

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circumstances, artists had to either put their brushes down or follow the new trend of imitating Chinese or Cuban anti-imperialist art or practice how to use art to mediate efficiently between the transcendental message of the Revolution and the people.

Although the experience of modernism for a short period of time in the past had made the concept of artistic expressivity more tangible for artists, the first ten years after the revolution taught them how to repress it in order to avoid being excluded.

The deterioration of artistic expression was a consequence of the new political upheavals. As a result, a collective identity for Iranian culture was formed, which echoed an unconcealed hostility and deprecation towards the West. Whenever the name of the country arose in global media, audiences remarked upon the anti-modern attitude of Iranians authorities. Eventually, this isolated the cultural and aesthetic fields of Iran. A few observers felt sorrow at seeing how a modern institution such as the TMoCA, despite its pretentious title, functioned more as a home to revolutionary propaganda than as a site of interaction with the contemporary world.

Among its kind in Asia, the collection of the TMoCA stands as the greatest treasure trove of modern art outside of Europe and North America.44 Before 2005, not only was the sole opportunity to interact with modern art almost taken away from

Iranian artists and art students, but very few in Iran were able to estimate the true value of these artworks. Some of the works were neglected and depreciated solely due to their conceptual subjects, such as nudes, and most were wrongly misunderstood as valueless works. Moreover, there was a very small minority of art dealers, curators and academics in the West who knew about the existence of such an invaluable collection, and those who were aware of its real value were in constant fear of

44 Robert Tait. “The Art No One Sees: A Basement that Symbolises Cultural Isolation.” The Guardian, October 29, 2007. Accessed 25 August 2016 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/29/artnews.iran.

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domestic mishandling, which might end as a total failure for the museum.45 In those circumstances, when the extremist executives were about to purify the new face of revolutionary culture from any sign of the modern past, any awareness of the real value of the collection could possibly cause irreversible harm to it.

In contrast to the initial purpose of the museum, after the revolution a gap of unfamiliarity was created between the West and East instead of a productive interaction. Quite interestingly, one of the most important artwork exchanges in the

1990s was conducted based on this contradiction. However, over the course of ten years, starting with the reconstruction movement after the war and the proceeding years of political reformation, several mode-changing events happened. These events, to a considerable degree, gentrified the hostile cultural manifestation of Iran. Ten years before the public exhibition and during the postwar social and cultural recovery in the early 1990s, a surreptitious artwork swap occurred. Through an adventurous art trade, a dismembered classical Persian manuscript known as The Shahnama of Shah

Tahmasp, including the illuminated pages and two-thirds of its miniature illustrations, was exchanged with a work in the TMoCA‟s collection. Woman III by Willem de

Kooning was one of those paintings that would never be removed from the category of censored items. Simply because the painting is an unconventional representation of a half-naked woman, it was potentially doomed to cultural/aesthetic oblivion.

At first, the deal sounded quite satisfactory to both sides, and even more so for

Iranians. The authorities were glad to have the manuscript, a series of genuine examples of Islamic visual arts, repatriated to its homeland. Was it not worth getting

45 One of those anguished people at the time was Kamran Diba. He was the queen‟s cosine, the architect of the museum and the executive figure of the formation of such a collection. He claims, after the revolution whenever he was asked for the collection by art dealers he avoided to address the collection in order to prevent it from looting. See: Kamran Diba in discussion with Reza Daneshvar, A Garden Between Two Streets (Paris: 2010), 18.

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rid of a “grotesque” and “vulgar” Western painting, in exchange for one of the lost treasures of Persian/Islamic art? The swap was immensely beneficial to the newly formed discourse of Islamic art in Iran, as its academic supporters were looking for a concrete example that would ground a new trend in the analysis of Islamic art.

However, more than being concerned with retrieving an object of research for Islamic art studies, the Iranian side of the swap was motivated by the potential to revive the symbolic value of Islamic painting, which happened to be at the expense of a modern piece of art. Therefore, the return of the manuscript was seen as a lucky break: instead of a painting that seriously contradicted the domestic and patriarchal exhibition codes of the time, and that was also perceived to have no meaning or aesthetic signification, now, the museum had two thirds of The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, which belonged to “The Rich Time” of Tahmasp, the well-known second ruler of the Safavids whose reign was a lengthy fifty-two years. The manuscript has at least 118 stunning and beautiful illuminated miniature paintings replete with of “meaningful” and “symbolic” signs, all of them still capable of echoing the prosperous time of a powerful Shi‟ite ruler.

However, it turned out soon that the swap cost the TMoCA collection a fortune, and resulted in the loss of one of its Western “stars.” In the midst of celebrating that The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp was back home again, only a few

Iranian art critics felt the twinge of deception. Quite ironically, while the swap actually recycled de Kooning‟s painting from the so-called garbage can of modern culture in post-Revolutionary Iran,46 in return, it brought a fragmentary and

46 In 2006 Steven A. Cohen bought Woman III for “roughly $137.5 million, so it became the last painting in de Kooning‟s Women series still in private hands.” See: Carol Voge, “Landmark de Kooning Crowns Collection,” The New York Times, Nov

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dismembered version of the original manuscript and left an unrecoverable lacuna, like a fallen tooth, in the bright order of the artistic and historical value of the TMoCA‟s collection.47 What was offered in exchange for Woman III was only the remnants of an artefact that had been circulated hand to hand and torn apart over the course of a century by antiquarians and art dealers.

As with many other Persian illuminated manuscripts that were destined to be dismembered and dispersed, The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp went through several episodes of unbinding during the twentieth century. Eventually, the most precious illustrations of the manuscript, including what is known as the masterpiece of Persian miniature painting, The Court of Kayumars, was not included in the deal; this miniature had been sold years before the swap. In other words, the presence of this manuscript in the TMoCA has created more aesthetic absence than presence in the new system of reading Islamic art in post-Revolutionary Iran.

In the following argument, I have tried to unfold the historical and literary backgrounds of this famous miniature in order to emphasize the significance of form in the study of Persian miniature painting. The story of the transcription industry in medieval Iran can be read through the analysis of The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp and its jewel miniature, The Court of Kayumars.

Subsequent to its recognition in the early twentieth century, The Court of

Kayumars has received much scholarly attention, mostly in the form of eulogies. For a majority of scholars, the unique delicacy of its painterly techniques and its exotic formal traits have been worthy of thorough studies. For many others including Iranian

18, 2006, www.nytimes.com/2006/11/18/arts/design/18pain.html.Accessed 17 August 2016. 47 Woman III and Pollock‟s Mural on Indian Red Ground were two of the most valuable works of art that belonged to the TMoCA. Pollock‟s painting is on display sporadically.

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scholars, this miniature has been viewed as more than an artwork. It has been understood as the manifestation of a collective dream, a precious remnant of a golden epoch when Islamic art reached a distinct identity in form and wielded a robust language in artistic expressivity. Following this approach, The Court of Kayumars would consist of expressive, first-hand mediating signs by which those who ponder the work can reach the unknown realm of metaphysical significations where the

“Truth” resides. This latter opinion has developed into a dominant epistemology of

Persian miniature painting in the current field of Islamic art studies in Iran. I argue that via this epistemology, the significance of the pictorial signs has been decreased to the level of derivative and supplementary elements; in other words, Persian miniature painting is dealt with critically as is a written text in which a transcendental center of meaning exists a priori and dictates its rules through the artists. Art as a form versus writing is seen as secondary and derivative, much like the linguistic binary of speech and writing.

As Derrida in his argument of the “metaphysics of presence” shows, throughout the history of philosophy the immediacy of meaning has always been privileged by the supremacy of speech over writing. Thus, if a miniature painting is considered one step behind the presence of meaning, its value would be determined according to its connection with the meaning: “There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of body” (Derrida, OG 17). A good pictorial sign, then, would be one that carries a certain meaning; or, according to the way in which Husserl demarcates between expressive and indicative signs, we can deduce that a good painting is one that keeps the inherent connection between its expressive signs and its content. If the priority of meaning is the prerequisite of

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reading the artworks of Muslims, pictorial signs will be always susceptible to the way in which they are interpreted. Now, we might have a clearer conceptualization of the swap between The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp and Woman III while also understanding how the sovereignty of a content-oriented analysis of Islamic art has continued to orchestrate the evaluation of form, though some scholars have tried to change the mode and reconcile between modernism and its critics.

Thus, while I try to avoid repeating what has been already done, my argument will pass through statements and theories that have already been uttered and accepted as the facts about Persian miniatures. Hoping to find moments of contradiction, I will argue that canonizing the content of miniatures and attributing metaphysical meaning to its painted signs prevent the reader from adopting a true critical reading of Persian miniature painting. In order to do make this argument, I am going to take advantage of a concept, which for those readers of Islamic art who invest in the content-oriented analysis of miniature painting, is usually overlooked. Thus, in the following argument,

I will try to disclose the interrelations between the pictorial signs in order to probe into the historical background of miniatures; then, I will try to find moments of contradiction within the official structure of the study of miniature painting. I hope my attempt to explain functions more efficiently is more illuminating, compared to the usual reductionist attitude of scholars who invest heavily in the phenomenology of

Islamic art. Whereas for them, history is considered as an extra presupposition, for my argument, knowing history is a necessity. In other words, in the following argument I want to explore the possibilities of de-canonizing the center of meaning around which all the allegorical interpretations of Persian miniature painting revolve.

The key point of my argument is in questioning the necessity of having an essential center for the analysis of miniature painting. Why is it that, for many

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viewers/interpreters of Islamic art, revealing the hidden meaning matters more than explaining the interrelationships between the pictorial signs with those of other similar artworks? Is meaning transcendental or immanent? With regard to the former, by moving toward a transcendental center, the reductionist attitude of a phenomenological reading aligns all similar signs in one direction in order to form a meta-signifier or a myth that retains its message regardless of the progress of history.

All variables that are the function of time should thus be excluded so the signifier would warrant being understood as the entity that carries meaning and addresses the transcendental signified. One way of disturbing the logic of this kind of analysis is to include all those variables that call into question the ahistorical aspects of the signifier and consider the pictorial signs not as the conveyors of meaning but as signifiers that refer to the possibilities of constructing meaning through the “freeplay” of signs.

Therefore, for my argument, history is the key point.

The Shahnama and its Multifunctional Literary Form

The complete version of The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp was an exquisite manuscript produced in the sixteenth century, primarily during the first decade of the long reign of Shah Tahmasp. As the crown prince of Shah Ismail the First, the founding father of the Safavids, Tahmasp grew up firstly in Herat before being sent to

Tabriz, the first capital of the Safavids. It was in Tabriz where he had the opportunity to sit as an apprentice in the presence of miniature masters such as Bihzad and Sultan

Muhammad, and was inspired by other elites of the literary and art worlds. As a result, his royal artistic taste was influenced by a Turko-Iranian tradition in calligraphy, painting, and poetry.

Named after one of the legendary characters of the Shahnama, Tahmasp, benefited immensely from the artistic inheritance of the Timurids (1370-1405), started

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practicing painting and calligraphy from a very young age. When Tahmasp ascended to the throne in 1524, he was handed a massive and incomplete royal project. Two years before Tahmasp took power, a group of miniaturist masters commissioned by

Shah Ismail the First had started to transcribe a luxurious copy of the Shahnama for the crown prince. Under the supervision of the three main figures in miniature painting of the time, and during fifteen years of intense teamwork, The Shahnama of

Shah Tahmasp was completed.

The integrated and original copy of The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp had 759 folios, including 258 luminous illustrations plus a lavishly ornamented colophon. The text and illustrations all together likely held almost 50,000 rhymed couplets. In creating such a huge collection of poetry describing the epic history of Iran over the course of 30 years, Ferdowsi- e-Tousi, the composer of the Shahnama and one of the pioneering figures of Persian poetry after Islam, achieved two main goals: on the one hand, he accomplished what his fellow poets before him had attempted to do but failed to fulfill and that was gather the dispersed oral history of ancient Iran in one compendium. On the other hand, Ferdowsi established a prototype for the tradition of historiography based on poetry, the most sophisticated form in Persian literature. He also aimed to collect scattered Persian vocabulary in one cohesive work. In the epilogue of the Shahnama, Ferdowsi prophesied that his name would remain in the collective memory of Persian-language speakers. The fact is that Ferdowsi‟s attempt to collect the oral history of Iran and at the same time to glean instances of Persian vocabulary from dispersed sources helped consolidate a lexical framework for the

Persian language.48 Therefore, according to Ferdowsi, as long as Persian linguistic

48 Ferdowsi‟s significant work presented a collection of Persian vocabulary in a poetical work right after the final stage of the evolution of the Persian language. The language that is known as Farsi (New Persian) was born in the post-Islamic era through the establishment of the

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signs continued to be disseminated when the couplets of the Shahnama were recited, he would be immortal.

The fulfillment of these two goals has manifested in the consistency and duration of the Persian language over the course of a millennium. More importantly, by bringing history and language together in an easy-to-recite poetic form, the

Shahnama has always played an important role in the formation of Iranian identity, and Iran as an integrated nation. Not surprisingly, from the very early attempts to achieve political stability after the domestication of the Ilkhanids49 (1266-1335) until now in modern Iran, after each major political upheaval formed a new era, whether due to a ruler being overthrown or enthroned, or even the contemporary Islamic

Revolution, the first thing that new successors have almost always done in one way or another, has been to patronize the reproduction of the Shahnama under the name of the main political figure in power and according to the most acceptable form of media at the time, which would best suit the symbolic values of the Shahnama. For instance, whereas in pre-modern Iran, the possession of an illuminated manuscript of the modern Persian language, which kept the grammatical structure of middle Farsi, adopted Arabic script, and borrowed a considerable number of Arabic words. The result is known as the Modern Farsi language. It was shaped during the first two centuries of Islam and eventually took over the middle Persian language (Dari), and at the same time put an end to the Arabic language, the lingua franca of the post-Islamic Iran. Persian literature as an afterword of this linguistic revolution was consolidated in the tenth century. See: G. Lazard, “The Rise of the New Persian Language,” in The Cambridge History of Iran Volume Four: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs. Edit by R.N. Frye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1975), 595-633. 49 Some scholars, such as Oleg Grabar, prefer to underline the significance of the three first centuries of the second millennium, which coincides with the composition of the Shahnama and the downfall of the Ilkhanids as the time of the renaissance of art and literature in Iran. Grabar states: “If it is perhaps too adventurous to call it a renaissance in the sense that it does not seem to be in continuous but in revolutionary relationship to what preceded, it is not too far-fetched to talk of an artistic explosion, for, regardless of its complexity in details, the period which produced the mosque of Isfahan, the minaret of Jam, the mausoleum of Sanjar in Marv, … the Demotte Shahnama and the manuscripts of the Rabi Rashidi can by any account be considered as one of the most productive and most brilliant periods.” See: Oleg Grabar, “The Visual Arts,” in The Cambridge History of Iran Volume 5. Edited by J.A. Boyle Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 626.

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Shahnama for each royal court would have been regarded as a sign of cultural privilege, in the time of the digital and “mechanical reproducibility” of any grand works of literature or art, retrieving an original copy of the Shahnama would perhaps be a huge cultural achievement. Thus, one may come to a conclusion as to why the presence of the dismembered copy of The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp in the Tehran

Museum of Contemporary Art was so valuable for Iranian authorities after the Islamic

Revolution.

The Shahnama consists of a network of stories featuring legendary kings, mythical heroes who were invulnerable and unbeatable alongside real historical characters, such as key figures of the Sassanid kings (for instance, Bahram-e Gur,

Parviz and Yazdgerd), and even the non-Iranian historical figures such as Alexander the Great. As a comprehensive anthology of the history of greater Persia, the

Shahnama starts with the coronation of Kayumars, the first legendary king of all times, whose domination over humans and animals was graced by divinity.

The stories of the Shahnama are entertaining. The meter of the poems throughout the whole collection is the same, enabling the stories to be easily recalled.

Apart from its entertainment function, the Shahnama is a grand narrative of morality, in which the inevitable logic of the superiority of good rules over the destiny of all characters. The core of each story has an ethical maxim that underlines the unquestionable presence of the universal truth. Within a network of interrelated stories, different protagonists and antagonists take part in their predestined roles.

Rostam, the superhuman hero, accomplishes seven undoable labours aimed at defeating evil, and one grand task that, according to the Shahnama, no one could ever do. Soodabeh the beautiful but maleficent queen deceives friends and foes to achieve her ambitious and lustful desires, but she pays the price with a brutal death at the end.

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Many lovelorn princes and princesses get into tragic adventures and finally end up in sadness and despair, and other heroes, such as Siyavush the innocent prince, willingly meet their tragic destiny with open arms after proving their honesty and candour by passing successfully through many arduous judgments.

In terms of drawing analogies with other myths, many of characters in the

Shahnama rub shoulders with figures in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and more importantly, just like in the Odyssey, the Shahnama‟s finale is marked by the end of an unrepeatable golden era which, in this case, is the downfall of the Sassanids when the newly Muslim Arabs conquered greater Persia. This is the concluding point of the glorious time of these legendary kings. Overall, the Shahnama as a condensed multipurpose book portrays the high values of morality and constantly pinpoints the triumph of truth over dishonesty.

Over the course of a millennium, Iranian readers in a variety of social statuses, ranging from powerful kings to simple itinerant storytellers who recited the

Shahnama‟s stories in different coffee houses, associated their own current time with the timeless stories of the Shahnama. Moreover, even before the popularity of the transcription industry in the royal courts, the pictorial representations of the stories of the Shahnama can be traced back to other platforms of visual representation, such as murals and lustre ceramic paintings. It would not be unreasonable to suppose that in the past, whenever patronage for the transcription of books such as Shahnama became a political and cultural gesture, Iranian craftsmen returned to the prototypes of heroism and nationalism to associate their current patron with those legendary protagonists in Shahnama.

Nowadays, a classical manuscript or even a remnant of it can be seen as a reliable historical document that draws attention to the various cultural aspects of its

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own time. In many instances, an illuminated manuscript‟s beauty could potentially underline the symbolic accounts of its original context and hence serve as a political gift for its royal owners, as well as a warning to their political rivals. Safavid kings and princes used to send political messages in the form of lavish manuscripts of literary works, such as compilations of the works of prominent Iranian poets, historical chronicles, and illuminated Qurans to their allies or potential foes; among them, the Shahnama had a clear political agenda in tacitly stating: “We are the successors of those legendary kings of the past.”

This generous but pretentious gesture usually manifested itself in the midst of a political collusion, or sometimes other occasions, such as coronation ceremonies.

Perhaps the reason that nowadays, the library of the Topkapy Museum in Istanbul has one of the richest collections of Persian illuminated manuscripts is because of at least three centuries of political rivalry and conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the successive Iranian dynasties. As a result, Ottoman miniatures are inspired and influenced by a wide range of Persian-style illustrations produced during the reign of the Safavids.50

For better or worse, the Shahnama can be reckoned a great literary triumph for

Ferdowsi. By virtue of his work serving as a primordial source and an adaptable model, anybody in power wanting to establish his legitimacy or acquire prestige by

50 The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, too, can be considered one of those so-called cultural gifts. According to one narration, The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp started its long journey when, in 1576, Shah Tahmasp sent it to the court of the Ottomans as a special gift for the accession of Sultan Murad III; it was thought that it had been in the library of the Topkapy palace since then, but in 1903, the complete manuscript was exhibited in Paris at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs as the property of Baron Edmond James de Rothschild‟s family. Then it disappeared and never was exhibited in any other early Muhammadan art exhibition until 1959, when Arthur A. Houghton claimed possession of it and started lending it to a series of Islamic art exhibitions. See: Stuart Cary Welch, A King‟s Book of Kings: The Shah-Nameh of Shah Tahmasp, (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976), 17. Houghton, the last individual owner of this book, decided to dismember its pages in order to sell the most exquisite ones.

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paying homage to his predecessors would prefer to be associated with the most revered figures in the Shahnama. It was not just through copying the Shahnama that many political figures attempted to enhance their legitimacy. For centuries after

Ferdowsi, the conceptual and formal emulation of the Shahnama continued to exist as a style in historiographical literature serving powerful kings of different dynasties.

Other historical books, with titles such as Changeez-nama (The Book of Genghiz

Khan), Shahanshah-nama (The Book of the Kings of the Kings), Khavaran-nama (The

Book of the Orient), Iskandar-nama (The Book of Alexander), and so on, were completely under the imitative influence of Ferdowsi and the Shahnama.51

Concurrently with the reproduction of the Shahnama during the reign of the first dynasty after the Mongol invasion, a new style in historiography flourished out of various adaptations of the Shahnama in both prose and verse. Feeling the need to leave a respected name behind, some of the later Ilkhanid kings, such as Ghazan

Khan, generously supported their scholar viziers to produce a kind of history that, in literary form and content, would resemble familiar patterns in the tradition of historiography. Probably what mattered the most for Ghazan Khan was to ensure that his reputation as a respected Mongol leader was represented and consolidated in the form of a written history, one that had the potential to efface all memory of the invasion and plunder of his ancestors and that would eventually juxtapose two different cultures in one new political structure.

In order to do so, after converting to Islam and making it the official religion of his reign, Ghazan Khan commissioned his Iranian vizier and consultant, Rashid al

51 Julia Rubanovich brings many examples of the popularity of the interpretation of the verses of Shahnama in order to show how the Shahnama was received formally and conceptually by many Iranian literary figures. See: Julia Rubanovich, “Tracking the Shahnama: Tradition in Medieval Persian Prose,” in Shahnama Studies II: The Reception of Firdausi‟s Shahnama. Edited by Charles Melville and Gabrielle Van Der Berg (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2012), 11-35.

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Din Fazl ol Allah, to establish a multipurpose educational center, known as Rabi

Rashidi, and which can be considered the first scriptorium in Iran after Islam. After assimilating the culture of the defeated peoples, Ghazan Khan aimed to end the interregnum years of instability during his transition to power, and to reintegrate Iran under the authority of a central power that would be known as the Ilkhanids.52

The political attempt to integrate into a new culture was facilitated by the immense efforts of Rashid al Din. The compilation of Jami‟ al-Tawarikh (The

Compendium of Chronicles) during the short time of his chancellery for two Ilkhanid kings shows the importance of his work. Jami‟ al-Tawarikh is respected by many other historians as one of the major historical works about the medieval era: “This book was completed between 1306 and 1311 AD and consists of four volumes, the first dealing with the history of the Mongols, the second with world history, the third

… with the genealogies of Arabs, Jews, Mongols, Franks and Chinese, and the forth

… with Geography” (121).

It was in the political urge to obtain knowledge and culture that the reproduction of other literary works including the Shahnama became popular. Jami‟ al-Tawarikh was translated into the Arabic and Mongol languages in order to be distributed throughout the vast territory of Mongols. Ghazan Khan‟s patronage of literature and art had another important impact on Persian painting as well. Due to the significance of Jami‟ al-Tawarikh as a handbook of history, from the very first copies, this book was accompanied by a series of paintings that strengthened the didactic purpose and supplemented the content of the text. The transcription industry accommodated a variety of arts and crafts, such as calligraphy, bookbinding,

52 Eleanor Sims, Boris I. Marshak, and Ernst J. Grube. Peerless Images: Persian Painting and Its Sources, (New York and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 41.

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papermaking and gilding, but on top of everything else, the tradition of illustrating the manuscripts was nourished by the systematic transcription of Jami‟ al-Tawarikh.

Rabi Rashidi was home to many different art and crafts traditions. From works influenced by Christian illuminated illustrations to the presence of Chinese techniques in painting, the collaboration of foreign techniques alongside traces of domestic pre-

Islamic painting resulted in the emergence of a new tradition in Persian painting.

Identified as a hybrid of various conventions, Persian painting found a new haven within the pages of literary books, and was able to hide successfully from the vigilant eyes of religious authorities with keen tendencies toward aniconism.

Many of the borrowed conventions were transmitted through centuries of commercial and cultural interactions with China via the Silk Road; later, the vivid multicultural court of the Ilkhanids provided a proper context in which additional foreign elements could be absorbed, thus nurturing the new Ilkhanid culture, which was meant to echo the vast and diverse territory of the Mongols. The prominent contribution of Chinese techniques in the early examples of Persian miniatures left an everlasting trace in the aesthetics of figurative representation in the miniature painting.

The second inspirational source for the craftsmen of Rabi Rashidi was the

Christian codices. Whereas early on, the popularity of employing foreign techniques in Persian miniatures to represent rocks, mythological animals such as dragon and phoenix, trees and clouds, and human figures demonstrate the traces of Chinese painting, methods of illumination that include the use of gold and silver, and the dedication of pictorial space to decorative elements are inspired by Christian sources.

The influence of the medieval Christian tradition in religious paintings on the reproduction of secular books in Iranian scriptoriums reflects the cultural and political interactions between the Ilkhanids and Europe. Ilkhanid kings were on the whole

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tolerant towards other religions, and Christianity had entered Iran as a result of their political intention to build an alliance with Europe. More importantly, in Rabi Rashidi, the Christian codices came to have more pedagogical considerations with respect to

Persian miniatures, through the didactical dimensions of the codices‟ religious illustrations.

As a practical model for showing the possible ways of creating a strong bond between text and image, the long tradition of reproducing manuscripts in the medieval

Christian scriptoria was handed down to Iranian craftsmen and from them to miniaturists, who, along with bookbinders and calligraphers, followed their Christian brothers; nonetheless, technical and conceptual parameters made their job different.

Whereas in the Christian codices, the transcription was done on parchment and vellum, Iranian craftsmen benefited greatly from the Chinese techniques in papermaking; hence, their manuscripts pages are primarily made of paper. More importantly, while the transcription of secular books had less significance and sometimes was depreciated as a sign of the infidelity of monks to the sacred commitment of reproducing the word of God, Persian manuscripts mainly served the secular content of Persian literature.53

Although for the developing industry of manuscript transcription in Rabi

Rashidi, the influence of borrowed techniques played an important role in the formation of the Persian miniature, the technical appropriation of the foreign sources remained at a level of experimentation and never achieved the delicacy and beauty of its two main counterparts. For instance, the similarities and differences between Rabi

53 According to Julia de Wolf Addison, in medieval scriptoriums a vow of silence was mandatory, so whenever monks wanted to refer to a book they used sign language. The sign for referring to a secular book was scratching the ears, “as dogs are supposed to do, to imply that the infidel who wrote such a book was no better than a dog!” See: Julia de Wolf Addison, Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages, (Boston: L.C Page & Company, 1989), E-book edition, 330.

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Rashid miniatures and Chinese painting show that for Iranian miniaturists, the realistic representation of landscape was not a matter of priority as it was for the Chinese watercolour painters. In other words, an early miniature painting can be more or less understood as an experimental effort to juxtapose domestic and foreign elements in order to have a better visualization of the important parts of a literary text. What this means is that the priority was always the narrative and painting was subdued by the authority of literature over other the elements. The subordination of painting to literature generated a series of conventions that Persian miniaturists followed as far as they could resist against the influence of other exogenous elements. The aesthetic trajectory of miniatures shows a slow-paced development in painting and reflects the conformity of a tradition as Rabi Rashidi founded it.

However hard it might be to believe, even in the short but intense time in which miniature paintings were produced, few miniaturists dared to make changes even while conforming to tradition. In the following argument, by choosing one specific illustration from the collection of miniatures in The Shahnama of Shah

Tahmasp and expounding its formal specifications and conceptual background, I will argue how, through over-emphasizing the concept of Persian miniature paintings, a popular trend in reading Islamic art, the structure of the analysis or critique loses its credibility due to the controversies that the form of art represents.

The Court of Kayumars: Its Zenith and Nadir

Probably the best example to consider when talking about Persian miniature painting can be found among the illustrations of The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp.

When this illustrated manuscript was produced, Persian art in many fields, from architecture to calligraphy, was about to reach the hitherto unachievable epoch of creativity and innovation; consequently, choosing one example from many might

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sound unjust. Although not all of the illustrations in The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp share the same level of formal beauty and compositional perfection, they are exceptional for their formal characteristics. Many scholars have chosen this collection to expound the aesthetic values of painting in Islamic art, yet the standpoints are diverse. Whereas early scholarly approaches towards these miniatures, under the influence of European orientalists, were mingled with a literary fascination with the mystical content of the miniatures, many contemporary researchers tend to view the miniatures as historical evidence.

However, only one miniature, known as The Court of Kayumars (See figure

13), attributed to Sultan Muhammad the Painter, in contrast to many Persian miniatures manifests a uniquely different formal visualization of the stories of the

Shahnama. In this miniature, while Sultan Muhammad follows the conventional aesthetics of his time, he also shows high level of dexterity in painting. Even now, his work stands as exemplary for its own kind. More importantly, this miniature marks the last school of miniature painting that was faithful to the Rabi Rashidi tradition; in other words, it identifies the moment when miniature painting started to push its conventional boundaries forward.

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Figure 13: Sultan Muhammad, The Court of Kayumars (1522). Agha Khan Museum, Toronto. https://www.agakhanmuseum.org/collection/artifact/court-gayumars-folio-shahnameh-book- kings-shah-tahmasp. Accessed 11 October 2016.

Sultan Muhammad‟s illustration of the story of Kayumars and his divinely ordained authority to rule is an important example of the illuminated paintings whose artistic characteristics have successfully absorbed much attention since the early twentieth century. The scholarly responses to its characteristics follow the same pattern of almost any remarkable work of Islamic art: they view it as the quintessential

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painting of Islamic art or admire it immensely for the manifestation of the multilateral and allegorical concepts within its form.

In this miniature, viewers can find the heights of the traditional techniques in miniature painting in their best collaboration with the story of the first legendary king of Iran. Perhaps the first character that draws attention is Kayumars, who is sitting cross-legged on his throne in the centre of the frame. This part of the painting represents the first royal court on a mountaintop where Kayumars keeps company with his son, Siamak, and his grandson Housh-hang. Beneath his throne, there is gentle movement, suggesting that everything and everyone is ready to submit to

Kayumars – even the inanimate objects of nature, such as rocks. In creating this effect,

Sultan Muhammad and his artist colleagues, through a painful procedure and within the utmost precision, anthropomorphized the rocks in order to accentuate the surreal dimensions of the mythical story or add extra-painterly elements to address the prominent style of the scene.

Kayumars is an “extraordinary” human graced by divine splendour who holds the halo of a deity, so perhaps in his presence not only men and animals are in an ecstatic dynamism, but so too is the whole mountain in motion. Thus, Kayumars is surrounded by colourful animated rocks and blossomed trees to inaugurate his reign over the first civilized community of Persians. This is also implied in the taming of nature and the peaceful company of predators and preys. The tranquility represented in the painting is intended to testify to the domain of Persia as the heavenly habitat of all creatures, including human beings.

Due to the lack of perspective in Persian miniature paintings, the representation of people who are climbing the mountain was depicted through a circular composition. As a result, the sense of climbing the mountain is rendered

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through the depiction of two curling lines of marching people on the both sides of the frame, which suggests how Kayumars‟ subjects are gradually and reverently approaching his throne on the peak of the mountain. Although Sultan Muhammad and his fellow artists were unfamiliar with the rules of linear perspective, they recruited all of the traditional techniques to visualize the complicated layers of the story. The viewer can see that the rocky mountain is still depicted according to the old tradition of imitating Chinese painting with the minimum of realistic representation, but at the same time, it reflects a very genuine style of anthropomorphism, which shows that

Sultan Muhammad as a distinguished artist might have felt free to introduce his own ideas into the painting in order to demonstrate his dexterity and individuality, rather than blindly follow conventions like a simple apprentice, as the master-apprentice schools of painting had traditionally ruled over Iranian scriptoria for centuries.

In The Court of Kayumars, all the characters following the new decree of the king are dressed the same as he is, in a leopard-skin robe, to show their submission to a new cultural trend. This is a very literal illustration of something Ferdowsi attributes to Kayumars: he was the first person to bring to people the discipline and culture of wearing clothing. Leaning to his left Siamak, his beloved son, Kayumars is depicted contemplating the saddest moment of revelation. The inevitable destiny of Siamak is approaching; thus, he is supposed to go and fight with the son of the devil and eventually be killed. On his left, Housh-hang the son of Siamak is standing and lessening the burden of sorrow by his promising presence.

In Shahnama, Ferdowsi lets us know the rest of the story right after the description of Kayumars‟ glorious court. Before lamenting too much for the death of

Siamak, the reader feels the sweetness of the truth which will be revealed at the end of the grand narrative of good and evil: the good always wins. This time Housh-hang is

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the one who will avenge his father‟s blood by defeating the devil‟s son, the black demon, in another battle. Therefore, in the whole painting, despite having the bitterness of the loss of the protagonist in the content, the luminosity of the triumph of the good is thoroughly manifested through a flat and shadow-less representation of the imaginary world of the story.

The Court of the Kayumars is a multi-narrative painting in which several stories have been depicted simultaneously in one frame, and so the prospect of the near future is discernable without breaking the circular form of the composition in the painting. In fact, this conventional composition serves to unfold a multi-layer story with less distraction for the viewer while covering more verses of the poem. Here, the different aspects of the story smoothly unfold when viewers‟ eyes follow one of the two curving lines of the people approaching the throne.

The sudden change in the size of the figures is significant: the three main characters, appropriate to their superior narrative status, appear bigger; Kayumars and

Siamak stare at each other, while Housh-hang witnesses the moment of Kayumars‟ revelation. The other crescent shaped array of people on the left causes the eyes to turn back to the starting point and smoothly sway between Siamak and Housh-hang, with the balancing presence of Kayumars in the middle of the royal gathering.

Nowhere in the whole painting is there any sign of shading and hatching techniques; as well, the colours are monotone, and an all-over light is distributed equally across the whole scene, such that if the few clouds drifting across the golden sky near the top of the frame did not exist, no one would be able distinguish the sky from the earth.

The work defies the modern understanding of landscape painting, which sets up the expectation of a realistic representation of nature. Here, everything is deliberately flat. Animate and inanimate objects are separated from the background

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mostly with a thick black outline. Not even a single spot in the painting has been left empty, and the accentuated decorative patterns lead us to think that this painting ignores realism at the expense of ornamentation. Any element intended to address nature functions as no more than a floral decorative texture, and the same goes for the stylized human figures, which share a minimum level of individuality.

The whole painting presents the common aesthetics of figural representation in

Islamic painting by which the human subject is stereotypically represented as a flat volumeless shape with unrealistic proportions. The figures are usually either standing or sitting with their torso confronting the viewer.54 Faces are round and outlined, with almond-shaped eyes and on-point arched eyebrows representing the sort of beauty that conventionally prevailed in most Persian paintings, probably as a way of acknowledging the Chinese aesthetics of ideal beauty.55

With different degrees of dexterity, many other Iranian miniaturists followed these pictorial traits, inasmuch as the artistic devotion to visual conventions put miniature painting closer to where the category of Islamic handicrafts is defined. In other words, when it comes to miniaturists‟ subordination to the tradition, innovation and creativity would have the least significance. Therefore, from a speculative standpoint, it is possible that one would take the strong resemblance between the

54 It wouldn‟t be far-fetched to hypothesize that this way of representing the human figure can be traced back to the convention of the composite pose created by the Egyptians and later adapted by the Sumerians and Babylonians. Especially if we remember that in the pre-Islamic era, Archimedeans and Sassanids following the footsteps of their predecessors continued to adapt this tradition. 55 In Persian literature, the simile of “Mahruy” (Moon-face) is a common poetic way of associating a beautiful face with the beauty of the moon. Kadoi believes that “This [simile] reflects the fashion for the East-Asian type of face in Anatolia and northwest of Iran of the period, where the so-called moon-face or Mahruy was gradually associated with ideal beauty in the course of the spread of Buddhism and became highly regarded as Bot-i Mahruy (The moon face Buddha). The notion of „Bot‟ (idol) gradually became a metaphor for referring to a beloved.” See: Yuka Kadoi, Islamic Chinoserie: The Art of Mongol Iran, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 126.

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pictorial elements of the miniatures and traditional motifs in Islamic handicrafts as a sign of immaturity in painting. Thus, it might happen that the different language of painting in the Islamic tradition receives both cursory comments as well as infatuated eulogies for the works‟ prominent differences from Western art. Entangled less with the different perceptual aspects of miniature painting, commentators sometimes came to the conclusion that what Persian miniatures offer is no more than a crude attempt at visualization in order to supplement the narrative in a decorative manner. At their best, miniatures have been viewed as extra pictorial frills. The painting techniques are to shelter the decorative and abstract dimensions of painting.

Examples of these types of standpoints are numerous. From random speculations recorded in seventeenth-century European travelogues about Iranian culture to professional reports on Muhammadan Arts at the beginning of the last century, one can follow the tracks of these speculations. In his book on Muslim art,

Alexandre Papadopoulo refers to Jean Chardin‟s comments on Persian painting.

Chardin was a French jeweller who visited Iran during the thriving time of the mid

Safavids. As one of the first commentators on Persian painting, Chardin apparently

“was dismayed by what he took to be ignorance of the most elementary rules of drawing and painting” (Papadopoulo 52). That Muslim painters, in Chardin‟s understanding, didn‟t know how to represent depth and volume, signified to Chardin that they were “incapable of individualization” (54).

In 1903, when The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp was exhibited in Paris for the first time, French Orientalist E. Blochet, in his detailed report on the exhibition of

Musalman art at the Pavillon de Marsan, posits that the formal traits of miniature paintings are as a result of artistic confinement to sheer imagination and the relative unwillingness of the miniaturists to push the boundaries of figurative paintings

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forward. He believed that the consequence of the aesthetic isolation of miniature artists was a series of identical miniatures that “offer hardly the smallest version in detail” (Blochet 288). Blochet saw no more than a blind devotion to convention as a trend among artists, and the only thing that might have changed it would have been the power of patronage. “It is thus that, in all „books of the kings‟ illustrated in Persia during the time of Safavid kings, we find the same scenes treated in identical fashion, with more or less finish, according to the price of the book” (ibid).

Although numerous examples in the whole history of Persian painting rather match this viewpoint, in the case the Court of Kayumars, the formal characteristics of

Sultan Muhammad‟s painting challenges many hasty judgments and it can be hardly misunderstood as the sign of naivety in painting. The style of Sultan Muhammad also showcases a visual convention that is beyond decoration. It is a representational painting with all the characteristics that an indigenous style can convey. Probably

Sultan Muhammad had put extraordinary effort into taking advantage over the traditions in order to mark the emergence of a more indigenous trend in Persian painting. Simply put, with this miniature, Sultan Muhammad stands as an innovative artist who aimed to take painting beyond its time and visual culture.

In the early days of academic investigations into Persian miniature painting, for many European observers with the perceptual experience of realistic representation, the lack of depth of the field in the miniatures was synonymous with

Oriental primitivism with respect to technique. The different language of form in

Islamic art and miniature painting was in harmony with the model of visual

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expressivity that the enthusiastic modernists sought in order to challenge the conventional form of painting in the Western canon.56

As a result of being understood as a primitive form of devotion to the traditional conventions, paintings such as The Court of Kayumars were admired for their decorative merits and not their representational innovation. Centuries after their time, and under the Western navigation of the conventions of Islamic art, miniatures were viewed either as a simplistic version of figurative painting or as a pristine language of decoration. The traditional schools of visual arts became structural impediments by which artists had to keep harmony with visual conventions in order to keep the tradition on going. However, miniatures such as The Court of Kayumars indicate the moment when artists within the seamless prison of tradition could find opportunities for some sort of avant-gardism in miniature painting and thus alter its aesthetic confinements.

Allegedly the most important confining convention in Islamic painting is the religious ban of figurative representation. From the very beginning of the theorization of Islamic art, scholars wanted to adjust the presence of figurative painting within the prohibitory conventions that the ban of representation supposedly exposes on the visual culture of Islam. Scholars in one way or another had to deal with the controversies that the rich collection of figurative painting in the visual culture of

Islam would generate.

56 Fereshteh Daftari in The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse, and Kandinsky provides several possible ways to examine the challenging form of modern art in the early twentieth century through a different hypothesis. She believes that the inspirational influence of Persian miniature painting on Parisian modernists is undeniable; she also addresses the echoes of the aesthetics of Islamic art in the work of artists such as Matisse. One important point for her argument is the exhibition of Muhammadan art in Paris which opened a new window to the mystic art of the Orient. Fereshteh Daftari, The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse, and Kandinsky, (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc.: 1991).

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There are two main ways of dealing with this controversy. As previously mentioned, the first theoretical adjustment is to view painting as a form as a decorative aspect of the transcription industry. With the second solution, scholars would argue that the content of a representational painting is prior to its form; hence, form is just a medium communicating between the transcendental content of a painting and the audience. In the latter speculative adjustment, some scholars canonize the content of painting over its form, which means that the form of painting has to go through an artistic transformation in order to simultaneously satisfy the demands of content and obey the supposed guidelines. Although the latter does not seem to be the best solution, “the aesthetic of concept” is how a group of theorists have heavily invested in it (Papadopoulo 55). The prioritization of content may seem to be an adequate way of explaining why the practice of painting had been accepted in the first place, but the consequent tendency of such an analysis in terms of understanding the content as a meta-narrative is crucial to understanding Islamic art as a construct.

Owing to the authority of the content, form is reduced to abstraction and figures to types. More importantly, form is deprived of any historical value.

Interestingly, the holy book of Islam, the Quran, has little to offer with respect to art. For the most part, in contrast with Judaism, the history of instituting such a ban in Islam shows no straightforward connection to the holy script.57 Whenever the notion of proscription is argued, scholars rely more on the quotations attributed to the

57 If the Quran is considered as the reliable source that grounds Islamic laws, scrutinizing its verses in order to find any direct opposition against the representation of living beings will be ineffective, unless the interpretation of one verse of the Quran is to be considered more imperative than the original text. In regard to using the Quran as the foundation of the ban on painting and sculpture in Islam, theologians usually refer to this verse: “O Believers, wine and games of chance, and status and (divining) arrows are an abomination of Satan‟s handiwork; then avoid it” (1908). See: T.W Arnold “The Influence of Poetry and Theology on Painting,” in A Survey of Persian Art, Islamic Period: Painting, Art of the Book, the Textile Arts, Costume. Edited by Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman (London and New York: Oxford University Press), 1967, 1908.

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prophet, known as hadiths, whose accuracy is confirmed by Islamic theologians.58

Some even believe that the so-called “ban” was constructed and developed during the first centuries of Islam, as a result of acquiring religious rules through interactions with Judaism and Christianity.

Another hypothesis, one offered by Papadopoulo, considers the creation of the ban as the result of the establishment of an official religious school for the evaluation of hadiths by Iranian theologians. Thus, if religious scholars admit the authenticity of a hadith, it can be taken as a premise for setting a rule. If the “impropriety” of creating a visual manifestation of living beings had been acknowledged and followed by

Muslim craftsmen, why, then at the very beginning of producing visual artworks, was figurative painting widely appreciated by Muslims? While the history of early Muslim art offers a handful of examples of the presence of the human figure, an exploration of the trajectory of the technical evolution of the art leads the viewer to the moment when, in the seventeenth century, the human figure was emancipated from the manuscripts‟ pages and miniature painting gained its visual sovereignty in the form of portraits and independent paintings. Does this mean that Persian miniature painting was simply indifferent about the most important aesthetic proscription?

However, even if the majority of Muslim craftsmen had acknowledged the ban on the representation of living beings, what an observer can see in the artworks, especially in miniatures, has no correspondence whatsoever with theologians‟ serious assertion regarding the ban of figurative painting. Therefore, questions stemming from

58 There are many quotations attributed to the prophet Muhammad which have strongly implications on the sinful act of painting: “Whoever fashioned a figure [i.e., paints the figure] of any living beings, God will punish him until he breathes into life, but he never will be able to breathe life into it.” See: T.W. Arnold, “The Influence of Poetry and Theology on Painting” 1908. Also, “On the day of resurrection [judgement day], the most terrible punishment will be inflicted on the painter who has imitated the beings created by God. He will say to that painter then, „Give life to these creations.‟” Papadopoulo, Islam and Muslim Art, 53.

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the discernible contradictions between Islamic figurative painting and the ban on representation in the same tradition would be left unanswered.

In his theorizations on the aesthetics of Islamic art, Papadopoulo ironically cites T.W. Arnold to show the insignificance of the ban among Iranian illustrators.

While “the total absence of depiction of living beings in mosques” and the lack of paintings of Muhammad or any of his companions and even angels demonstrates some degree of acknowledgement of the religious restriction, in regard to miniature painting, the “sacrilegious brush of the Persian painters” left no holy figure undone

(Papadopoulo 49).

Did the power of the Muslim rulers, who would presumably be less committed to religion, provide more opportunities for miniaturists to overcome the iconoclastic zeal of the clerics? This hypothesis sounds convincing mainly because there had been no religious agency or institution to support Persian miniaturists. The fact is that the transcription industry was relatively far from the vigilant eyes of the theologians of its time. Grabar underlines the underground quality of miniature painting by calling it “a private art” (MM 126). 59 Figurative painting could take refuge between the pages of secular manuscripts and hide in secular sites, such as royal libraries, while architecture, the public art, stayed obedient to the ban by following the aesthetic of abstract decoration and geometry. This hypothesis seems convincing; however,

Islamic architecture does not completely represent an Islamic aesthetic, if such a concept could exist in the first place.

59 By “private art,” Grabar refers to the great influence of non-religious agencies such as aristocratic feudalism, and local rulers or kings, on book transcription. So Persian painting in the service of literature is a private art, “in a sense that its images could not be seen, and thus not appreciated [or denounced] by more than one person at the time.” See: Oleg Grabar, Mostly Miniatures, 126.

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The construction and ornamentation of many congregation mosques in different Iranian cities was, in one way or another, conducted mainly by architects who were commissioned by a king or a wealthy local ruler. Once again, while the interior and exterior design of mosques reflect the veneration for the prohibition of figurative representation by excluding figurative decorations and statues, the lavish ornamentation of them potentially marked the power of the patron, not the humility of a religion that is venerated primarily for the modesty and simplicity of its prophet

Muhammad. Apparently what is at stake here is the legitimacy of calling such an art

“Islamic” or “religious.”

Attempting to elucidate these contradictions, Priscilla Soucek addresses two different conclusions regarding the different renditions of abstraction and stylization in Islamic painting as offered by T.W. Arnold and Alexandre Papadopoulo. While

Arnold refers to the old tradition of representational painting in the Islamic world,

“particularly in princely courts” and he believes that in many instances the subject of painting, whether in an illustration or even in a few frescos, might refer to specific individuals, Papadopoulo rejects any possibility for sheer representation in Islamic visual arts and sees the possibility of realistic representation in Islamic visual arts as being in contrast to its aesthetics (Papadopoulo 49).

According to Papadopoulo, the separation between Muslim painters and all the techniques of realism in painting, such as perspective, chiaroscuro, and modeling, had been made deliberately for the sake of religious restrictions, and at the same time, to find a solution to make painting legitimate in the vigilant eyes of theologians. So, one should not take the simplicity of representation and the lavish usage of ornamentation in the miniatures as a sign of technical immaturity; quite the contrary, it

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had been always a conscious decision made in order to avoid trespassing against the ban on modeling reality. Papadopoulo‟s assertion in this sense is clear:60

[T]he only real way to understand Muslim art is by proceeding from the idea that all of its characteristics were voluntary, that they were aspects of a new aesthetic, which had deliberately broken with the Byzantine tradition in order to render painting licit in Muslim eyes by conforming to the ban against representation of living beings not by ceasing to paint them but, rather, by getting around that ban. (56)

Having deep faith in the accuracy of the “principle of inverisimilitude” in the Islamic context, Papadopoulo pinpoints one important condition for art, and that is a practice in which the artist would be in no contest with the “Creator” (57). Hence, Islamic art does not represent anything that has been already represented by God; it signifies a certain concept to address the priority of the idea behind the form. Aesthetically speaking, the art of the Muslims serves the content of the art at the expense of form, which is diminished to a supplementary device used to convey the signification of an ideal concept. This depreciation of form deprives all the painterly elements of their representational and material values; as a result, the individuality of the subject fades into a shadowy realm in which everything is understood as symbol. It is not surprising that, from this standpoint, the analysis of Islamic art should be allegorical and content oriented.

The “principle of inverisimilitude” has an inherent capacity to normalize and thus control all the possibilities for alteration in the form of visual arts, and miniatures in particular. Inviting the viewer to step into the subjective realm of a painting,

60 Despite the fact that Papadopoulo‟s view underlines the rejection of the Byzantine tradition in painting, looking at the similarities between Persian miniatures and the illustrations of Byzantine codices leads us to doubt the accuracy of his claim. Julia De Wolf Addison refers to a book called A Byzantine Guide to Painting, “which contains accurate recipes to be followed in painting the pictures of each saint.” Reading through Wolf‟s enumeration of what a religious painting should look like, one sees no formal difference in the representations of human figures, nature, and architecture between an Islamic miniature painting and a Christian one. See: Julia de Wolf Addison, Art and Crafts in the Middle Ages, 343.

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Papadopoulo is not alone in refuting miniaturists‟ efforts to create a resemblance between the real world and illustrations. In fact, for many critics who tend to seek allegorical interpretation of miniatures rather than to read them literally, a true Muslim artist, on top of his pathological desire for realistic representation, seeks to address more latent meanings or showcase the notion of ideal beauty. However, the form of miniatures themselves says something different.

Sheila R. Canby, in her comprehensive study of The Shahnama of Shah

Tahmasp, has meticulously conducted a detailed study comparing some of the representational objects in the miniatures with the real objects of the time of the

Safavids. Among many regularly day-to-day objects that miniaturists have chosen to put in the middle of their imaginary scenes are drinking utensils, musical instruments, swords and armour, various tools, garden ornaments, and characters‟ garments. The real-life objects that serve as inspiration actually existed at the time the painting was created, and now they are dispersed in different museums all around the world and labeled as Islamic artefacts. Grabar believes that this kind of material connection between the objects depicted in miniatures and their contemporary real worlds can be seen as a way in which the patronage of the kings started to transform “the classical themes of Persian literature into a vision of the life and activities of the court”

(Grabar, MM 125).

More importantly, through these actual resemblances, one can observe some sort of representational trend in Persian painting that prevailed among the miniaturists of the time, which shows that despite the alleged symbolic connotations of Persian miniatures, they illustrated the story in a quite literal way. In other words, the choice to depict the real objects of the time highlights the validity of the “material world” as

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being as inspirational and significant as the imaginary world of the painting‟s subject/content.

For Persian miniaturists, one way of appropriating the stories of The

Shahnama was to illustrate the climactic moments of the stories by emblazoning them with details inspired by their patron‟s lifestyle. Details from his court, battles and banquets, entourage and attendants, hunting, and triumphant conquests, etc. were applied widely in order to bridge between myth and reality, as if the legendary kings of the past were conjured up in a familiar contemporary context. Although there is no evidence of what Shah Tahmasp might have looked like, we can make a rough guess that he could have resembled the young and righteous kings of The Shahnama.

Among the mythical figures in The Shahnama, Kayumars and his supernatural coronation is valued more than that of others. Artists might prefer to pay homage to their king and acknowledge his political legitimacy by appropriating the court in order to illustrate Kayumars‟ story. To some extent, this way of addressing the life and the political significance of patron kings has been conducted through an anachronism to accentuate the powerful reign of Shah Tahmasp, but whereas in the jewel miniature of this manuscript, The Court of Kayumars, the subordination of human beings and animals to the king‟s legitimate position are the main themes, in many other instances the miniatures can be considered as a visual document that may be used to estimate the quality of the court of Shah Tahmasp, his battles and banquets, and leisure activities.

Throughout the history of miniature painting, there are few remarkable moments of artistic innovation when the quiet surface of tradition has been disturbed.

Sometimes the emergence of painters‟ signatures shows some dim sparkle of the development of individuality in miniature painting; though the painters‟ humility to

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their patrons would likely have allowed them to include their name as no more than a hidden sign between ornamental flora and fauna, this small effort on the part of a few painters to express their individuality gradually brought about a sufficient achievement and a prominent change in the normative representation of the human figure. In terms of the analysis and critique of Islamic art, The Court of the Kayumars, along with other miniatures attributed to Sultan Muhammad, can be viewed as proper examples of a different level of Persianate figurative representation in Islamic painting, obtained after the first wave of the systematic reproduction of manuscripts in the early Mongolian era.

Through an inquiry into human representation in miniature painting, one can see how the mere imitation of alien conventions gradually evolved into a domestic and sophisticated style. If, in the early stages of copying the human figure, the lack of proper appropriation of figurative painting had resulted in an improper layout of disproportionate figures in a simple composition, later on, at the climax of artistic innovation, miniaturists had the chance to employ their own understanding of figurative representation. Therefore, they started to defy the conventions of portraiture painting.

Subjecting Sultan Muhammad‟s painting to further analytic scrutiny, one can discern how he problematizes the concept of the ban of the representation of living beings in Islam. Sultan Muhammad‟s works not only challenge the normative standards of his time but they also draw attention towards the early disputes among scholars regarding the reasons for representing living beings. Human figures in later miniatures reflect the artists‟ maturity in drawing; thus, figures are not stylized exactly the way they used to be. In regard to the early disputes among Western scholars, in

Islamic visual arts, the presence of human figures in different media, including

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miniature paintings, can be understood as either symbolic or representational depictions. The clash between these two different standpoints would be inevitable, if

Sultan Muhammad‟s miniatures were taken as exemplary. The figures still echo the identical characteristics of early miniatures, but the artist‟s effort to create a sense of verisimilitude is quite obvious.

For Sultan Muhammad, overcoming the boundaries of tradition became possible by following the footsteps of his masters Bihzad and Agha Mirak, who had brought new understandings of individuality within the conventional format of miniature painting. As long as the significance of painting in manuscripts was normally viewed as a decorative supplement, the presence of the painter would seem not to be valid as such. Even a representation of individuality in the miniature would be limited to a level of importance designated by either the narrative or the patron.

However, it is possible to track the way in which the individuality of both artists and subjects became more prominent, and eventually, in the late seventeenth-century, the stereotypical but humble human figures that were the subjects of miniatures stepped out of the margins of these paintings and became the new subject for independent paintings of the late Safavid era, which are known as single-figure pictures (See figure

14).

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Figure 14: Muhammad Yusef Hussein Khani, Young Man in Blue (late 17th century). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. November 27, 2016. http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/young-man-standing-in-blue-gown-13917. Accessed 10 October 2016.

Having departed from the boundaries of the borrowed techniques, Sultan

Muhammad, in The Court of Kayumars, creates a new understanding of the form of art that stands a few steps ahead of what Persian miniatures used to be. In the past, if a miniature demonstrated an unvarying collage of conventional motifs stuffed with super-delicate decorative patterns, and looked like a naïve imitation of other painterly styles within a flat layout, Sultan Muhammad manifests his mastery not only by occasionally putting his name on his miniatures but also by avoiding the banality of replicating conventions.

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Sultan Muhammad‟s works maintain the tradition but keep his own artistic identity as well. By utilizing all the traditional techniques in order to expand miniature painting, Sultan Muhammad influenced his apprentices and successors. The

Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp testifies to the compelling presence of a genuine trend and demonstrates one of the most sophisticated techniques in Islamic visual arts.

However, Sultan Mohammad‟s achievement in painting was a temporary triumph.

Almost a century later, due to social and political upheavals, when Iranian artists found an opportunity to lift their heads and start seeking for greater change, they found themselves lost in the unknown territory of Western art. In this context, their own tradition of painting, with all of its technical and aesthetic achievements, could not remain faithful to its essential framework.

This part of the history of Persian miniatures plays a significant role in the destiny of the transcription industry. Once more, the impact of alien aesthetics and the power of patronage changed the dominant mode of visual arts; however, this time in contrast with the earlier trajectory, things started to fall apart. If the upsurge of the manuscript industry corresponded with the political and cultural empowerment of the

Ilkhanids, its downfall was in accordance with the critical decision-making of Safavid kings in regard to their patronage policies. Towards the second half of the sixteenth century, the middle-aged Shah Tahmasp, no longer the young art-lover prince he once was, had a sudden pious urge to become a true Muslim and so decided to turn his back on the secular world of art. As stated by Eleanor Sims, Shah Tahmasp‟s decision can be described as the “Edict of Sincere Repentance” (65). As a direct result of this decision, miniaturists and calligraphers were the first groups of artists who struck out on their own to continue practicing their art.

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Knowing that illuminated manuscripts reflect the patron‟s grand scale of prosperity and power, viewers can observe how the first aesthetic division in miniature painting happened due to a crucial shift in patronage. The first offspring of this shift was the emergence of the tradition of single-figure pictures. This phenomenon underlines the greater influence of patronage on the aesthetics of miniature paintings, as compared to the artists‟ own will to change. Therefore, when there was no support for the production of illuminated illustrations, artists would have no choice but to “[extract] figures from a typical manuscript composition and repeat them, perhaps on a slightly larger scale, as a single figure on a single page” (Sims,

Marshak, and Grube, Peerless Images, 65).

The relationship between art and patronage in the Safavid era allows us to make a rough guess that, when the last and the weakest king of the Safavids, Shah

Sultan Hussein, was defeated by Afghans in the late seventeenth century, there would probably be nothing left from that era that could be compared to the heights of artistic creativity in painting. While this deduction seems reasonable, it is not the only cause of the important aesthetic turn in Persian painting and the decline of the transcription industry.

In the seventeenth century, the emulation of European painting had an impact on the aesthetics of miniatures in the same way that the shift in patronage changed the direction of Persian painting. Patrons‟ waning interest in keeping the expensive industry of illuminated manuscript running, hand in hand with artists‟ inclination towards single-figure painting, opened a new window to the less luxurious world of independent artistic activity. Through this window European visual culture entered and changed the native conventions. The aesthetic confrontation was the direct result

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of cultural and social interactions between the Safavids and European nations.61 Due to the circulation of European imported goods and artists and artisans encountering some of the achievements of early modernity in Europe, such as the printing press and oil painting techniques, Iranian artists started to develop a European style in painting called Farangi-Sazi.

Farangi-Sazi (“Europeanizing”) in the art of books can be understood as an avant-garde phenomenon in which painters quite abruptly gave up all of the old conventions and started to appreciate and imitate European techniques in order to experiment with the visual techniques of shading, linear perspective, and realistic representation (Sims, Marshak, and Grube 77). “It was a revolutionary but quickly confined manner” by which artist found that they could explore other media such as murals and canvas painting, as well as experience a different principle of representation (76). Farangi-Sazi does not simply refer to the appropriation of

European techniques in painting because, in this case, miniature painting was already indebted to the visual culture of Medieval Europe. With Farangi-Sazi, Iranian artists started to comprehend the different visual language of European imported artworks and reflect their new perception in their own media. However, their comprehension could hardly have resulted in a significant language. Whereas the techniques borrowed from Christian illuminated manuscripts had been applied for a similar purpose in the

61 The main reason for the interaction between Iran and Europe was mutual enmity against the Ottoman Empire. From the dawn of the Safavids, the newly formed Ottoman Empire had always been considered a potential threat for Iran. Shah Ismail met the end of his glorious days as the unbeatable king, when he was soundly defeated by the Ottomans in 1516 during the battle of Chaldiran. The animosity between the two countries was not only political but religious, since the two sides represented the all-time confrontation of the Sunni and Shi‟ite. The relative hospitality of the powerful Safavids kings, such as Shah Abbas, was the first such experience for western travellers, tradesmen, and politicians, and provided an opportunity for Iranian craftsmen to encounter the new achievements of early modernity in Europe. Shah Abbas was highly tolerant of Europeans. Meanwhile Christian missionaries were allowed to settle in Isfahan, the capital city during his reign. As a consequence of these interactions, European arts and crafts started to circulate in Iran.

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fourteenth century, the new aspects of perspective and realistic representation that were practiced on larger-scale media could not have been juxtaposed within the small pages of manuscripts. Furthermore, in response to the new social and cultural circumstances, miniaturists felt no strings attached to the traditions, and so they would not show any negative reaction against Farangi-Sazi.

Scholars of Islamic art might never come to a concrete conclusion regarding the right moment and reasons for the decline in miniature painting. The acknowledged tradition of miniature painting has a halo of atemporality which does not allow the reader to see any moment of demise amongst the examples of the tradition.

Nonetheless, there is an aesthetic failure in the way in which artists attempted to make the formal characteristics of miniature compatible with the visual conventions of

European painting. Miniature artists could not easily accommodate the techniques of realistic representation within the small framework of miniature painting. For these artists, the discovery of perspective and chiaroscuro without practicing sculpture ended up as a crude mockery of European painting. More importantly, the lack of patronage forced miniaturist to relinquish the old traditions. When miniature painting started to lose ground, artists were almost lost in the liminal moment as the visual conventions transitioned. In other words, in the absence of powerful patrons, artists could not establish a strong tendency in painting simply on the basis of Farangi-Sazi.

This liminal moment as the classical conventions shifted is reflected in the mid-seventeenth-century illustrations that Muhammad Zaman added to a famous incomplete manuscript of Shah Tahmasp‟s era called Khamseh (Quintet, or Five

Fables of Lovers).62 Prior to Mohammad Zaman, this book had been illustrated by the

62 Pricilla Soucek and Muhammad Isa Waley in “The Nizāmī manuscript of Shāh Tahmāsp: A Reconstructed History.” have argued that Mohammad Zaman in the seventeenth century added three illustrations to The Khamsa of Shah Tahmasp that was initially completed in the

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courtly miniaturists of Shah Tahmasp who followed the usual style of classical painting, but Muhammad Zaman, completely fascinated by his own understanding of chiaroscuro and perspective, added five new Europeanised miniatures to this collection without caring about the inconsistencies between the first and second series of illustrations (Figure 15).63 Though he had examples from the past in hand, in terms of refurbishing the incomplete manuscript, he decided to never look back to the past and paint like his close ancestors. In other words, he retired a tradition that for centuries had been the dominant mode of painting in favour of practicing art as an individual artist.

sixteenth century and contained fourteen illustrations reminiscing the same characteristics of Persian miniatures such as that of the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp. Mohammad Zaman illustrations create a formal inconsistency that addresses his inclination toward a new language of aesthetics. See: Priscilla Soucek and Muhammad Isa Waley, “The Nizāmī manuscript of Shāh Tahmāsp: A Reconstructed History.” in A Key to the Treasure of the Hakim: artistic and humanistic aspects of Nizāmī Ganjavī‟s Khamsa Bürgel and C. van Ruymbeke (eds.), (Leiden 2011), pp. 195-210. 63 Muhammad Zaman was “the foremost Iranian practitioner of the „Europeanizing‟ style” and “undoubtedly the most productive, as well as the most influential, of later seventeenth century Iranian painters of the eclectic style”. He would probably get acquainted with European painting through imported Western images, which “were in circulation in Isfahan from the time the city became the Safavid capital in 1598. For instance the effects left by Nicholas Wilford (a British painter and merchant who was commissioned by Charles I to open a cultural and economic trade line between Britain and Iran in the early seventeenth century) at his death in Iran, December 1637, included books on architecture, perspective, and flowers” …. (Sims, Marshak and Grube, Peerless images, 77).

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Figure 15: Muhammad Zaman, King Turktazi‟s visit to the magical garden of Turktaz, Queen of the Faeries, 1675, British Library, London, https://www.bl.uk/manuscripts November 27, 2016.

What Do These Miniatures Mean?

Robert Laurence Binyon‟s eloquent essay on Persian miniature painting “The

Qualities of Beauty in Persian Painting” is his original contribution to the completion of Pope‟s survey of Persian art. As a pioneering figure in the studies on Persian painting, Binyon is known for his infatuation for the unconventional form of representation offered in classical Persian painting. He shows a strong poetical leaning in considering all the inherent technical differences in miniature painting as the signs of an authentic beauty which stands at the blurry border of symbolic and realistic representation – something that, according to Binyon, a Western observer with his/her

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“inherited western preconceptions” would probably have a hard time contemplating

(1913). In his rhetorical description of miniature painting, he never stops reflecting his impression of symbolism in Persian painting, as if the only way to approach them would be via an allegorical interpretation.

In his interpretation of Persian painting, Binyon never mentions the influence of foreign techniques or the possibility that Iranian artists lacked the ability to represent reality in a realistic manner. Perhaps Persian miniatures, to the bored eyes of European scholars who were looking for new understandings of art during the boom of Modernism in Europe, seemed closer to what “real” art was supposed to be: a decorative form of art capable of conveying meta-narratives of its content, with spiritual, mystical and abstract connotations. His beliefs are made clear in this passage:

And the Persians, with their bent to mystical feelings, the sense of all things partaking of the glory of God, from whom who they came and to which will be reunited, import to their vision on an ecstasy which springing from the senses, yet transcends them. They are not interested in the effects of light; these depend on the opposition which the light encounters; they are absorbed in the glory of light and in their pages it illuminates all things alike. (1913)

Many other scholars, in keeping with Binyon, have preferred to prioritize an allegorical reading of the pictorial signs in the miniatures and utilize their own interpretation for talking about miniatures as the surreal representation of a permanent beauty mingled with sheer imagination and manifested in a dreamlike world. Decades after Binyon‟s interpretation of the beauty of Persian painting, scholars such as Grabar chose to have a less subjective standpoint and started considering Persian paintings as more tangible artefacts. Grabar describes the previous approach as „libertarian‟: a mode of romanticizing about a painting when other non-painterly prerequisites for understanding it are not a matter of concern. Libertarianism is “an attitude towards the

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arts in which each one is relatively free to find his or her own interpretation, his or her own pleasure” (“Towards an Aesthetic” 223). The allegorical standpoint comes from this, and “optisemic” specification of the miniatures to which is linked. Without knowing the intended content of a miniature, the reader may pursue the meaning through its optical elements regardless of their historical or cultural reference. In other words, it is the viewer who, in a phenomenological manner, decides to choose the direction of his/her act of knowing towards a miniature.

Libertarianism in reading miniature paintings has been the main colonizer of the discipline of Islamic art in the academic field of Iran. Since the engagement of

Iranian scholars in studying Islamic art, in the majority of instances, the primary way of approaching miniature paintings has been from a libertarian and content-oriented standpoint. At first glance, this means that the trend of reading Persian painting in Iran has been frozen in time and has not changed since the infatuated Orientalists freed their minds to produce eloquent pieces about the mystic Orient; notwithstanding, there is a huge difference between the painterly infatuation of these early scholars and the theologically imbued discussions that contemporary Iranian scholars are still keen to produce.

The first result of the way the libertarian attitude exploits the discipline of

Islamic art is in the lack of interest among Iranian scholars in having an alternative reading of miniature painting. Through a literature review of the analysis of Persian miniatures, readers can follow an unusual conceptual consistency that compels us to make a comparison between the publications of Iranian academics and those of non-

Iranians about the same subject in order to see if there is a consistency with others as well. Regardless of the incomparable amount of research that has been done outside of

Iranian academia, the most important result of this comparison is that in the Western

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sphere of research, reading miniatures has been a dynamic field of study that has developed from an Orientalist standpoint into a radical investigation of the accuracy of attributing the descriptor “Islamic” to these artworks. In contrast, in the literature of

Islamic art in Iran, the muffled sound of Orientalists such as Pope, Binyon and many others still echo. But to what is this consistent mode of rendering miniatures oriented, exactly? This question addresses both the dominant atmosphere of the academic and scholarly sphere, but also and more importantly, a set of issues surrounding what in this argument will be referred to as the signification fallacy.

Signification Fallacy: A Template for Academic Research

The signification fallacy refers to the methodological preference of Iranian contemporary scholars in reading the visual signs of Islamic art, and the problems that this produces. The most important problem is that thereby the language of analysis is kept rigidly consistent, as if scholars follow a template in their argumentations that has already provided a readymade formula for reading and investigating Islamic art. An argument based on this template offers a calculated framework in which the fixity of meaning attributed to the visual signs in Islamic art is safeguarded. In other words, the template demands its users to conduct the same semiological investigation even though the final results seem quite predictable. The traces of a Husserlian descriptive phenomenology are quite discernable in these types of analyses. The study of Islamic art in Iranian academia can be described as descriptive rather than explanatory, self- referential rather than outward-looking, and intuitional rather than empirical.

Although the popularity of phenomenology in analyzing Islamic art does not signify any fallacy per se and the existence of such a framework would guarantee the integration of academic argument, the absence of other methodologies and the dominance of the arguments based on the template over the academic field Research

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in Art are questionable. The formation of this template was completed in the cultural circumstances that Iranian academia experienced after the cultural revolution of 1980.

After the academic stagnation of the post-cultural revolution, in the early

1990s the number of newly founded postgraduate programs suddenly increased. In

1993, Tehran University of Art was the first university to establish the discipline of

“Research in Art”. Soon after, the College of Fine Arts along with other newly established institutions such as Tarbiyat Modares and Alzahra University added this new discipline to their postgraduate programs. Not surprisingly, in the program of

“Research in Art” Islamic art is the focal point of academic investigations. One can enumerate many reasons for the popularity of this subject matter and at the same time the difficulties and obstacles in doing such an investigation. In general, Islamic art as a young category in the discourse of Art History with hardly a century of academic activity behind it is a controversial topic to explore. The celebrated reputation of

Persian art comes from its strong bonds with the visual culture of Islam, and Islamic art has its exquisite language of form mainly constructed on the basis of Persian visual vocabulary of ornamentation and beatification. The long history of interaction between Iran and other Islamic territories has made Persian and Islamic visual cultures almost indivisible. All these parameters highlight the significance of this category in the discipline of “Research in Art”. Moreover, the cultural revolution in Iran could be considered as a crucial moment when the Iranian intelligentsia, feeling the urge to contribute in this discipline, embarked on studying and researching in this field.

However, as an intellectual product of the cultural revolution, the Iranian rendition of

Islamic art happens to be an ideologically-charged concept indifferent/resistant to the influence of other theories and opinions that may challenge its core concept or question its theoretical vigour.

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One of the important after-effects of the foundation of a research based program in the post cultural revolution academia was a sudden surge in the number of art-related journals and periodicals. The publication of the first art journal dates back to 1995 when the College of Fine Arts issued the first volume of Honarhay-e Ziba or

The Journal of Fine Arts. Between 1995 and the present time, more than ten new journals have been launched. Reflecting on the latest academic concerns in the domestic field of art studies, the content of many of these articles perfectly correspond with the ideologically-set concepts that came into being during and after the cultural revolution. Based on the academics‟ inclination towards these subject matters, a systematic way of reading Islamic art came into being. In this reading, the visual art of

Muslims is mainly re-evaluated on the basis of its Iranian cultural context and the centrality of religion.

The new re-examination of Islamic art in Iran is conducted according to the theories that a group of European traditionalists, known as the Perennialists, brought into this field. In the early twentieth century Perennialists‟ observation of Islamic art was contemporaneous with Orientalists‟ surveys in Islamic visual culture. The

Perennialists had strong conservative tendencies and were hostile towards the dominance of relativism and historicism in the discourse of Islamic art. Among the perennialists, René Guénon (1886-1951), Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998), Titus

Burckhardt (1908-1984), and Seyyed Hussein Nasr (1933- ) are scholars whose opinions are welcomed in Iranian academia.

Nasr elaborates on the origins of Islamic art in relation to the “world view of

Islam itself” (Islamic Art and Spirituality,4) and considers Islamic art as a concept

“borne out of the organic rapport between …art and Islamic worship, between the contemplation of God as recommended in the Quran and the contemplative nature of

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the art, between the remembrance of God which is the final goal of all Islamic worship, and the role played by Islamic art of both plastic and [sonic] nature in the life of individual Muslims and the community as a whole”(ibid.).

He believes that those scholars who “seek the origin of Islamic art in the socio- political conditions” by reducing the immanent power of sacred art into the outward results of modern sciences, desacralize spiritual entities and concepts that are not inherently reducible to any mundane framework. These materialist ideas, Nasr says:“ can be easily rejected from the point of view of Islamic metaphysics and theology which see the origin of all forms in God, for He is the Knower of all things, and therefore the essence of all forms of all things have their reality in the Divine

Intellects” (ibid.).

The metaphysical association that Nasr makes between the form and content of Islamic art serves the ideological aspects of Islamic art the best. It rejects the necessities of modern knowledge in reading Islamic art, appreciates the centrality of the center in giving meaning and purpose to the form, and takes beauty and divinity as the same. Thus, for understanding Islamic art one needs no systematic empirical method, one needs to believe in divinity, and then the intuitional understanding of art would suffice for the purpose of critical investigation.

An interesting fact about the study of Islamic art in Iran is that the literature review of this discipline demonstrates an argumentative and conceptual consistency in both theoretical and descriptive investigations. This consistency is mostly reflected in two major approaches popular among academics. In the first approach, researchers invest in furthering the conceptualization and aesthetics of Islamic art by addressing its possible theological and spiritual dimensions. In so doing, they intend to form a certain language of aesthetics which can accommodate the most important tenet of

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Islam, “Tawhid”, or the oneness of God, in the core of its argument. Tawhid is regarded as the main center of signification for the symbolism of Islamic art. By this approach, scholars acknowledge the two practices of art and religion equally. Thus, if a pious prayer pursues the unmediated nearness of God through praying, a true artist should pursue the same purpose through mediating between the intelligible and sensible aspects of divine beauty. Since the language of this art is symbolic, when it comes to encountering art, the beholder is asked to keep the centrality of the religion as the key concept in mind and thus the material manifestations of divine beauty that varies from one religion to another will not distract him or her from the unity of signification in the religious forms of art.

Researchers of the second group expound on the artistic values of the artefacts of Islamic civilization through descriptive analysis, enriched by the theoretical output of the first group. In this approach, only the prominent instances of Persian miniature painting and architecture from the post Islamic era are taken into consideration as case studies. In both approaches, researchers explicate their arguments in support of the reciprocal relationship between Iranian and Islamic cultures. This presumed reciprocity brings any argument towards a supposedly “true” conclusion. In order to reach that conclusion though, it is important to find an aesthetically crucial moment in the analysis of Islamic art when the influence of Iranian culture on the formation and evolution of Islamic art is undoubtedly ascertained. In this regard, the pre and post

Islamic culture of Iran before the importation of modernity are credited as instrumental in shaping the visual culture of Islam. Scholars in this approach stand on the shoulders of the last generation of German and American Orientalists who in the first half of the twentieth century heavily invested in gathering the scattered information and compiling the knowledge of Persian art.

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These two approaches hand in hand have constructed a specific literature for elaborating on Islamic art in which the visual culture of pre modern Iran becomes an important part of the discourse of aesthetics for Islamic art. By this literature, the level of ambiguity in the state of „art‟, resulting from the ferment associated with the anti- modern(ism) tendencies of the time, would be reduced. With the new characterization of Iranian visual culture as inherently Islamic, it becomes possible for artists to speak through different media without being accused of disobeying Islamic regulations.

Thus, the ideological reading of Islamic art serves multiple purposes in one act. First, the centrality of Islamic ideology for every aspect of Iranian visual culture would be maintained within the study of art in Iranian academia. It means that even though there are other voices in this field, by presuming that they are not strong enough or even flawed in substantiating the truth about Islamic art, they will be excluded from the scope of research. Second, by reinforcing religious readings of art, secular investigations are considered invalid and annulled. This annulment is also a critical rejection of any form of art which is not considered Islamic. The third is when the practice of art in Islamic visual culture is considered equal to a religious act, those instances in this field that do not address any religious signification, would also be excluded. Therefore, by disfavouring mediocrity and insignificance as well as excluding anomalies in Islamic art, its study could be limited to the masterpieces of

Islamic art and safeguarded from any types of critique. This is the main reason behind the popularity of phenomenology in Iranian academia. It provides a reliable theoretical ground for the study of art by which the religious significance of Islamic art would be safe-guarded and at the same time the influence of secular studies of Islamic art would be limited.

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Among scholars in Iranian academia, Seyyed Razi Mousavi in his important article “Methodologies in Islamic Art” elaborates thoroughly on the methodological preference of Iranian scholars in the post cultural revolution academia. Having enumerated the advantages of phenomenology and the pitfalls of other methodologies such as historicism in Islamic art, Mousavi tries to convince the reader that the reductionist aspects of a phenomenological approach would help researchers to get the true essence of Islamic art whereas the unnecessary and outward presuppositions only hinder scholars from achieving the same goal. In trying to justify the exclusion of history, Mousavi claims that “the essence of Islamic art is not a function of its historical variables[…]” (78) and “it is only in the absence of the confining impact of history, economy, and psychology that the true essence of Islamic art can be appeared to the reader through an eidetic intuition” (Ibid.). He considers historicism as an incompetent methodology that does not lead the reader to the essence of Islamic art and its spiritual and atemporal qualities which defy time and geography. Therefore, a network of readers would perceive Islamic art and form a collective consciousness of its signification and aesthetics.

This methodological achievement is valued by many scholars because it presents a solution for the conceptualization of a category whose prominent characteristics are diversity and complexity in form and content. Therefore, through other methodologies such as historicism, Western scholars would never reach an empathic understanding of the aesthetics of Islamic art hence they would never comprehend the signification of its visual elements. In their analysis of Islamic art, scholars by emphasizing the priority of the religious essence over the form try to prove that there is a metaphysical center that bestows meaning on the visual signs of

Islamic art. Thus, regardless of the shifting influence of time and history or even the

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results of other critical methodologies, Islamic visual signs are held to collectively address the Transcendental Signified. Through this reading, Islamic art is credited as the genuine narrative that echoes the timeless message of the divine beauty.

As mentioned before, a study of Islamic art studies in Iran readily raises the suspicions that there is an invisible template of this kind in the argumentation of researchers. The use is evident from the way that in many of these articles the reiteration of a single argument substantiates the same dominance of a desired ideology that tacitly dictates what kind of approach must be taken when Islamic art is brought into the spotlight of research. To pinpoint what is problematic but hidden in the methodological consistency, one needs to keep track of a few suspicious indicators. These indicators are mainly self-referential statements recurring in the text and containing acclamatory descriptions of Persian/Islamic art. Sometimes one can find statements in which researchers reproach European and American scholars for being ignorant of the true essence of Islamic art and trapped in the rigid framework of materialistic sciences and history. More importantly, in the hands of Iranian scholars, the critique of Orientalism functions as a rhetorical device. It gives them an opportunity to blame the West for its reputation of exploitation, regardless of the impact of recent field-altering theories on the scholarship of Islamic art that have come from the same field of research such as post-colonial studies64.

64 In order to have a better understanding of the significance of field-altering theories in extending the scope of research in Islamic art, the reader should recollect the fact that the outbreak of the Islamic Revolution in 1978 and the first publication of Edward Said‟s ground- breaking book Orientalism in 1977 had an incidental concurrency. It seems that in order to reproach the monopoly of the West over Islamic art studies no other theory than Orientalism could have been applicable to the cultural agenda of the Revolution. Nonetheless, Said‟s radical scrutiny of the West‟s representation of the Orient found no resonance among Iranian scholars. The critique could have been potentially the most applicable theory to modify in order to rationalize the harsh reaction of the cultural revolution against the Western culture.

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Despite its official legitimacy as a transformative approach that challenges the monopoly of Western scholars in Islamic art studies, the template-based study of

Islamic art in Iranian academia offers no actual reason for invalidating contributions from the empirical and human sciences. Another suspicious sign is that researchers inspired by the Perennialists usually wrap up their argument with indisputable conclusions. Apparently, when the major effort in reading Islamic art is to prove that this art is the visual continuation of the grand narrative of Islam, there will be no chance to put an Islamic concept in question.

By making statements such as: “Islamic art has been nourished by mysticism and spirituality” (Pazooki 57) or “The constitutive elements of Persian miniature paintings have roots in the glorious civilization of Iran where religion, philosophy and literature has always nourished this art” (Jafari 12) researchers tend to guarantee the reader that Islamic art has spiritual dimensions which defy Western epistemology and that it finds its theoretical premises and aesthetics within Persian culture. Meanwhile, the loaded religious meaning that the template imposes on Islamic visual culture is not actually arrived at through a logical investigation into the aesthetics of art, but a circular rhetorical journey of reiterating the previous arguments.

Accordingly, most of the discussions would consist of constative statements, descriptive eulogies, and repetitive quotations with the least intellectual impetus to further the scope of research. If someone follows the template step by step, he/she will eventually find that making conclusions is easier than any other parts of the analysis. In one way or other, writers come to the conclusion that the Islamic-Iranian miniature paintings for instance are the sacred signifiers of the transcendental signified. Depending on which of the two sides of the hyphen (Islam or Iran) weighs more in the initial proposition, the conclusion shows flexibility in the final

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articulations towards one of them. Within this template, there would be little room for comparative studies, historical analysis of the miniatures, or critical revisions of the domestic literature review of Islamic art.

With the existence of such a template, researchers may face a methodological dilemma in encountering Islamic art. If Islamic art could be identified by an ahistorical framework so to speak, its implication would easily be associated with the rules that a dominant ideology defines. The result is a deceptive simplicity in the study of Islamic art by which the inherent perplexities that this category conveys would be concealed. However, if a researcher wants to delve into other areas of the study of the same subject that are not colonized by the Perennialists, Islamic art could be the most controversial subject matter to investigate. Not only does it accommodate secular readings in its study but it included a spectrum of contradictory propositions that usually come to inharmonious conclusions.

In general, the signification fallacy or the scholarly obsession with finding in pictorial signs an absolute unitary meaning is rooted in the way in which the metaphysics of presence, in a Derridean sense, shows its power in the discourse of

Islamic art. By accepting the presence of a spiritual center before the creation of an artwork, the main argument would be directed towards prioritization of concept over form, meaning over the textual structure, and the transcendental signified over pictorial signifiers in miniature paintings.

The metaphysics of presence can also be understood as the conceptual unity that all the instances of Islamic art are supposed to have in common. In the unifying system of Islamic art, the work of art manifests the “Truth,” and the fixity of the meaning will be protected by bracing the boundaries in the binary opposition. Islamic art as an overarching term bestows unity and significance to its signs and by virtue of

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the critics‟ signification fallacy, all of the ways to question the validity of the ostensible unity between the signifiers and the signified is blocked.

Although it seems that with the help of rhetorical elaborations the argument would preserve the authority of the center of meaning, and hence the signification fallacy would be nothing more than a different way of talking about Islamic art, the critical consequences of this would be crucial to the analysis and critique of any form of art. The inevitable surrender to the pre-planned destiny of the argument is the end of art criticism. The problem, therefore, is not just that of what constitutes Islamic art.

To put it simply, the signification fallacy is a mechanism in which the one who exercises it will eventually be the authoritative figure who decides which sign is worthy of elaboration and which sign should be excluded. When pictorial signs are associated with sacred values, whatever “sacred” means, no one would dare look for anomalies; no one would dare try to make the analysis an academic practice by which challenging traditional aspects is acceptable or thinking about the possibilities of having an “event” are legitimate.

Derrida defines the “event” as a moment when the very structurality of the structure is questioned by doubting the fixity of its center, by challenging the way in which a so-called center makes the presence of meaning related to a fixed origin, and by pushing the boundaries that are set between signifier and signified. When it comes to thinking about the structurality of the structure, Derrida believes that “the function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure, but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of structure” (“Structure, Sign and Play” 352). So in our case, which entity manifests the play of structure in Islamic artworks? Scholars who believe in the existence of such a fixed center, in one way or, another have to deal with the fact that

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the diversity of form, the playful specification of visual signs in Islamic art, can potentially provide a moment of slippage from any certitude of signification. The moment of slippage is the beginning of deconstruction. It means the centrality of the center in Islamic art studies can be questioned with the help of the theoretical defects a phenomenological investigation of visual signs carries.

Present and Absent

When Perennialists placed the first brick in the construction of theological reading of Islamic arts, they may have wanted to solve the problem of the diversity of form within the unity of content. The conceptual unity of visual signs in Islamic art is considered as a key concept for reaching the essence or the transcendental signified of the all signs. The signs of Islamic art are aligned towards an exterior source of meaning, as if each one of them is a small compass showing the only and the right direction of the concept, even though they do not necessarily share the same unified shape. Visual signs do share an inherent specification, which proves the presence of a magnetic pole; it resists alteration and defies the ephemerality of form. In this regard,

Burckhardt considers Tawhid as the unifying center of signification.

Nasr justifies the multiplicity of form by claiming that, “Islamic art is the result of the manifestation of unity upon the plane of multiplicity” (10). To create such a calculated multiplicity in form, the other important figure of Perennialism in Islamic art, Titus

Burckhardt, believes that Muslim artists should benefit from the universal language of the “intellectual vision … a faculty far more comprehensive than reason and thought, a faculty involving the intuition of timeless realities” (“Perennial Values” 1). While, the determinism of these utterances leaves no room to consider the singularity of the form, it reinforces the meaning of signs by mythologizing the art as the timeless representation of a timeless truth; hence, Islamic art becomes a meta-narrative in

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which the diversity of form and the playful narration of its history, the way it has been contaminated constantly by foreign elements, and the traces of its evolutionary path have to be somehow repressed.

In their argument, both Burckhardt and Nasr rely on the power of representational immediacy that traditionally has been attributed to the entities that are supposedly closer to the present, such as speech in relation to writing. Thus, when in regard to expounding such immediacy with the logos, they would definitely acknowledge the supremacy of content rather than bestow equal significance on the form; rather, the form is considered supplementary and derivative.

Husserl‟s proclamation of depriving philosophy of all empirical presuppositions has at least two important results. First, the intentional act of knowing would not be a function of empirical science, and second, the road to philosophy as a

“rigorous science” will pass through a logical structure in which language takes charge of addressing the immediate presence of being. For Husserl, the ultimate goal of a phenomenological investigation is to find a logical way to address presence via signs. The theoretical premise that Husserl established is a refuge for anti-modernist readers of Islamic art to expound art as an entity that addresses the immediate presence of God, or the transcendental signified, or even a certain ideology that holds the structurality of the structure.

Doubting the credibility of being as presence, Derrida believes that the metaphysics of presence needs a series of conceptual oppositions settled in the structure of language, where the priority of idea over the matter, soul over body, and signifier over signified would adjust the logic of being as presence. Therefore,

Husserl‟s elaborations on the “essential distinctions” in Logical Investigations are conducted in order to demarcate signs that mean (expression) from signs that point

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(indication). Through this distinction, while signs are not necessarily introduced as entities that “stand for something,” expressive signs are presented as meaningful entities that are always capable of conveying signification, even when they are used in a non-communicational context such as soliloquy. In other words, expressive signs do not need any contextual prerequisites to show their conceptual connection with the meaning. As for indication, while “[T]o mean is not a particular way of being a sign in the sense of indicating something,” we need to summon up segments of the network of intertwined connections that have shaped an indication” (Husserl 183). This means that the immediacy by which expressive signs address the meaning cannot be seen within indicative signs.

Respecting this essential distinction, Burckhardt supports his main argument by considering signs in Islamic art as those of expression and as not entangled in an empirical network of variables, such as the historical, cultural, political, and other mundane and temporal presuppositions, wherein indicative signs have been trapped and alienated from presence. If we consider the pivotal rule of language in the phenomenological investigation of Islamic art, the essential difference between signifier and signified will be a theoretical necessity.

In his critique of Husserl‟s theory of the sign, Derrida posits:

We know already in fact that the discursive sign, and consequently the meaning, is always involved, always caught up in an indicative system. Caught up is the same as contaminated: Husserl wants to grasp the expressive and logical purity of meaning as the possibility of logos. (“Sign and Signs” 20)

Indeed, the dichotomy of expression versus indication that Husserl brings into pre-

Saussurean linguistics is the most prominent theory serving the theological interpretation of signs in Islamic art. By making a “radical distinction” between signs that express ideas and “carr[y] a meaning content” and those “empty signifiers” that

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indicate a sensible, interrelated connection among other linguistic or non-linguistic signs, Husserl emphasizes the pivotal rule of expressive signs in the phenomenology of language (Derrida 21). For scholars who are in phenomenological ecstasy about the aesthetics of Islamic art, a miniature, as a collection of expressive pictorial signs, appears to be the pure and immediate representation of the logos.

Therefore, when Derrida starts his method of deconstruction by questioning the essential distinction between expression and indication, he leads us to question the latent distinction that is made within the analysis of Islamic art between the signs that support the logos and signs that signify the intertwined connection of indicative signs.

By embarking on a theory that brings reasonable doubt to the absolute certitude of the center, we can consider the possibility of finding the meaning of a miniature painting in relation to the presuppositions that a phenomenological investigation usually sets aside. What this means is that, instead of a transcendental reduction in order to eliminate variables that stand between the reader and the transcendental signified, an immanent exploration of signifiers provides the possibility of constructing meaning according to an endless interaction of presuppositions. The only theoretical problem is that the latter possibility of reading Islamic art not only radically decentralizes the authority of religion over the discourse of Islamic art; it also gradually demonstrates the annulment of all the binary oppositions that are confirmed by those scholars who habitually imply the signification fallacy.

When the academic entanglement that emerges in finding the transcendental signified starts to lose its ground as the result of doubting the certitude of the center, we can easily construe the arbitrariness of any attribution to the center, and consequently meaning becomes a mirage of all the desires that are woven within the structure. Therefore, the structure that is supposed to give refuge to all essential

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distinctions, binary oppositions, and transcendental concepts starts to lose its structurality in favour of accepting the fluidity of a de-canonized network of signifiers.

The End Point

This chapter has been a long (and, I hope, a comprehensive) answer to the initial question of given the aesthetic and ideological preferences of Iranian scholars in the Islamised academy, we can understand more fully the reasons behind the swap of de Kooning‟s Woman III for “the lacuna of a masterpiece.” It was not only a matter of the totemic value of the latter as an esteemed expression of Persian/Islamic art and their exemplary fusion. De Kooning‟s work was outside the realm of religious aesthetic value altogether. The initial argument demands more theoretical investigations, and it subsequently raises another important question: Which parameters have been involved in the formation of this aesthetic preference? The coincidental parallelism between the art swap and the formation of the ideological reading of Islamic art in Iran has grounded a theoretical impetus for this argument.

For a painting such as Woman III, which manifests the sovereignty of form in the visual arts and defies the conventions of painting through its controversial representation of the human body, the notion that this work might be considered within the transcendental framework of meaning perhaps sounds absurd or even impossible. For critics, the problem of Woman III was not limited only to its nude subject; as well, the form of Woman III meant that it could not revolve around the essential center in the same way that other artworks usually performed their meaningful circumambulation. Moreover, its subversive formal traits demonstrated the aesthetics of ambiguity and abjection. For these critics, Woman III moved between the blurry lines of conventional categories of figurative and abstraction representation.

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It stood in a purgatory-like phase of uncertainty of meaning, when the form of an artwork addresses no signification outside of its text. Its nude subject represents the unconventional beauty of a female body; meanwhile, with its honest form, it does not pretend to be a masterpiece or a beautiful painting.

If Woman III was fully and completely an abstract painting, one that represented the movement of Abstract Expressionism in a way similar to Pollock‟s

Mural on Indian Red Ground, it might have remained in the basement of the TMoCA, or possibly it might have had the chance to be seen by an enthusiastic audience.

However, its bewildering meaning made it vulnerable and at the same time distasteful in the eyes of those who suffered the consequences of having unquestionable belief in the existence of a transcendental connection between artworks and the center of meaning.

To have any sort of signification, Woman III needs another type of center, not an essential one, but a supposedly conventional center that includes the possibility of implying all cultural and historical presuppositions; it needs a contextual center that has gained its authority as a result of internal interactions among the constituent signifiers of its pictorial text. In other words, there can be a center that does not stand outside of the text, but emerges from within it. Not knowing how to approach a constructed center of meaning, some audiences of modern art would raise the big question of “What does this painting mean?” There is no convincing answer to this question. Eventually, when there is no answer but the work of art still retains its gravity, the authority of the transcendental center of meaning starts to lose its legitimacy. That is why Woman III had no destiny better than to be excluded from the art scene of Iran.

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In post-revolutionary Iran, the new dichotomy of Western and Islamic culture has defined a new criterion for aesthetics, and Woman III stands as the representative of the artworks that are polar opposites of Islamic art: a non-traditional, non-religious, and non-transcendental art of the West. Thus, the negation of such an artwork was crucial, even essential, to the ideological ontology of Islamic art. As mentioned before, the irony in the art swap is that the significance of the absence of The Court of

Kayumars mattered less than the presence of Woman III, even in the dungeon of the

TMoCA. This is a sad moment in the history of any kind of ideological reading of a work of art: when the first brick of an artistic construction is placed into a void, when exclusion is the most important entity involved in producing an artistic identity, when censorship finds authority to represent the mirage of meaning as the eternal truth.

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