A Thousand Years of the Persian Book

from the library of congress in washington dc well good morning everybody and thank you so much for coming we're delighted to see you and to welcome you for this very special occasion celebrating the uh opening of a thousand years of the persian book and uh it is with the assistance of and the support of the whole iranian-american community that this exhibit has been made possible and today we have one of the pillars of the community dr fatima keshavarz who really has been helping us supporting us from the very beginning she's been an inspiration to us all dr fatima shawwarz is the director of the russian institute for persian studies at the university of maryland she is the author of many many different works on on literature she has her own radio program where she has and we have her actually on the website of the library where she's been reading poetry from roomie from javis and from others and she's a poet herself she has been just absolutely fabulous and so we will start with dr fatima and she will introduce the speaker unfortunately our associate librarian has been detained outside of the library and we've been trying to reach her and she has not been able to to be here i also want to recognize the person who has organized and done so much for this exhibit and this is our own hirad di navari who is the persian reference specialist today the one and only and who has been the one who has taken this initiative to to have this exhibit and now i would like to introduce dr fatima keshevars thank you i should say a special thank you dr mary jane deep the chief of the middle eastern division without her we would have not really been able to do this mary jane thank you and so please give her a round of applause it is really a great pleasure an honor to be here for this wonderful occasion i think the vibrant iranian-american community is now making his presence felt in many wonderful constructive ways in this society and for them as well as for everyone else here so we are delighted to be a part of it um you know iranians like many other ancient civilizations and multicultural civilizations produced wonderful literature they engaged these concepts of goodness and love and god and you know life and all of the big questions that we all have and they engaged it in many different ways visually intellectually artistically and textually and this building is the embodiment the concrete embodiment of that engagement and it's very fitting that this persian exhibit would be at the heart of it as you see it's actually right at the heart of it next to the jefferson collection so um you'll get a good tour of that and as a person who teaches and who's in touch with a wide variety of young and brilliant minds i think that um if they were if we were ever in need of learning about books and literature this is that time as our society goes faster and faster in the direction of technology as we make all those great strides which we need to make we also need to find ourselves to be grounded to think about issues that are important to us as human beings to our well-being and i think that our students speak loud and clear when they take take these courses that we teach about persian literature about world literature about issues that really enable us to address our own lives and our own questions so for many many reasons this is a tremendously wonderful occasion and i am delighted that roshan institute for persian studies managed to put this speaker series together we're going to have really a galaxy of stars we're going to have 15 world-class speakers coming to this building as well as to university of maryland we will try to alternate to address various aspects of persian book production persian culture knowledge transmission and all the related related topics and today i would be introducing our first speaker who's indeed fit to be the inaugural speaker for this but before i do that let me extend a special welcome to 10 iranian poets who are among us today let's give them a round of applause please christ thank you fresh from iran they're part of a cultural exchange program that puts iranian and american poets and educators in touch we really welcome you and celebrate this moment let's hope that there will be many many more both ways going to iran and coming from iran so thank you for being a pioneer in this regard also i believe that rira bossie one of the poets gave the library some wonderful books so thank you then you know we we need to get okay so without further ado and with um echoing mary jane's appreciation for what herod has done for this exhibit i would like to start here on it would have not been possible without a million things you did in the past year and a half thank you really thank you and we look forward to many many more wonderful occasions today we actually have two distinguished personalities here i'm right now introducing our speaker but in the afternoon we would also have dr amy landu who will be on our panel discussion which will be a way to have an exchange with you on the exhibit and on the presentation and so forth but for now let me introduce our inaugural speaker professor john renard um a long-time friend of mine and and my husband we've had um 20 years of roomie reading every wednesday night in my house in st louis with jack and it's been a tremendous honor to have you um jack um or john granada we refer to him as jack so we might as well do that um jack got his phd from harvard university and worked with the great aunt marie schimel in fact i remember the title of his thesis all king's falcons is about all the prophets in the mass navy of rumi his range of scholarship goes beyond persian and beyond literature he's a professor of theological studies actually in the in st louis university but he's been a tremendous spirit of bridge building and learning in an environment in which people really need to learn about muslims and about iran so jack is an author of many books including responses to 101 questions on islam covering areas from hinduism and buddhism and shiaism to answer questions that the society really desperately needs to deal with and he has done so without trivializing those questions without watering them down actually giving his uh audience tremendous amount of solid literature to deal with one of the characteristics of jack's work is that while he is deeply rooted in the textual tradition and in fact has translated some amazing texts from persian but at the same time he's also been very much focused on practice on experience unlived experiences of human beings today he's going to focus on persian book illustrations not as decoration but as a very important part of that whole creation of academic creation of books and his presentation is titled illustrating the persian book the happy marriage of literary and visual narrative please welcome professor john renard thank you thanks very much fatima it's a pleasure to be here i begin with this image in front of you it appears in the 13th century or the text in which it appears as a from 13th century persian book on philosophical ethics as you can imagine books like this are long on argument and very short on narrative but the image is still a kind of illustration and i'm going to use it as a jumping off point 13th century persian text everybody hear me 13th century persian text and it depicts it's an illustration of illustrators illustrating there are two people there i can't point them out to you but there are two people the man in blue on the right middle and the man in turquoise on the left middle he's drawing a horse and the one on the right is actually drawing a landscape there are calligraphers calligraphizing there's a teacher teachifying and there's even the man down in the lower right in the in the navy blue tunic burnishing paper which those other folks will soon need once they've filled up the pages they're now working on the people who did this were indians the painters the calligraphers it was done in india foreign indian patron now that in itself is enough information to suggest that the question what precisely is the illustrated persian book is not so simple and obvious so i ask you to to imagine that you are now in a very swanky restaurant ordering from a menu called the persian 8 banquet it's a very swanky place if you were to choose as your entree written in persian i your ever attentive major d would say excellent choice but we also have sides and appetizers ordinarily we ask you to choose from them but since we're having a special today you get all three appetizers and sides and i hope you're hungry the first of the sides is written by a persian not necessarily but many of course have been written by a persian written in persia well you've already seen an example something else created for a persian patron very often not as in the case of this particular picture now the appetizers include such things as translated into another language originally persian and then translated occasionally it's still a persian book translated from another language such as arabic or turkish sometimes produced in contemporaneous arabic or turkish or other languages along with the original persian version that sometimes happens too and i'm going to show you examples of texts of manuscripts that fit in all these categories and won't have time to talk about the whys and wherefores but i'm just going to give you a brief breezy tour that i hope will leave you walking away with a toolbox that will allow you to go to the freer or the or the walters pick up a magnifying glass and say oh looky there i know what that is the key concept here is like the concept persianate banquet is the notion of a persianate sphere or realm over half a millennium at least and then some beginning about 1250 and going on into 1750 and continuing can you hear me still okay um the persian the persian ate spheres stretches from turkey down through the central middle east eastward through iran northward into central asia and then take a right turn and you're in pakistan and india and even beyond that into southeast asia so that's the key and we've heard several people refer to persian as the lingua franca of medieval and early modern islamdum but i always like to level the cultural playing field so i'm going to say that modern french was the lingua persica of colonialism let's get that straight now ladies and gentlemen for the first time ever before a live audience i will attempt to describe this rich and complex topic by using four words that begin with the letter m today the library of congress tomorrow sesame street i hope you enjoy the dress rehearsal there will be manuscript a little sample of five key literary forms that have been frequently illustrated miniature m number two i'll give you a very brief sample of how a single scene can be depicted across centuries in one culture and then across centuries in yet another culture outside iran method we're talking here about modes of visual interpretation how does a painter insert his or her own way of reading the literary narratives and because these illustrations are not just decorations painters have often inserted themselves into the narrative in very very interesting ways and then finally motif many diverse themes and i will weave some of those into the first three m's and i've also stashed at the end of the powerpoint five of my favorite motifs we may not get time to talk about them here but if we don't we can come back and look at the pictures again during the discussion session and then we can talk about them in the panel i'll be also giving a slight nod to three major figures one folk hero named rostam one royal hero iskandar alexander the great who also becomes a religious hero and one major religious hero the prophet joseph youssef and the result of all this is that when you begin to find yourself entering into the world of the persian miniature paintings you will realize we are not in kansas anymore do you notice the tornado that gets you elsewhere okay first of all there are a series of literary genre and i just want to give you a brief overview some pros some poetry and some hybrid combination of prose and poetry i'm going to give you samples of a genre called the universal history and a a related genre called tales of the prophets tales of the prophets often are tucked away in the universal histories and even form a very major part of them hagiography stories of holy personages and a subcategory of that called martyrology poetry beginning with epic both primary and secondary primary being the shaname and secondary i'll surprise you mystical and didactic poetry is of course one of the most important pre-modern literary forms frequently illustrated and usually religious although sometimes ambiguously so and then finally hybrid prose and poetry general under the general heading of wisdom literature and i'm going to give you one example the prime wisdom guy sadie of shiraz universal histories are wonderful texts that that as the name implies tells stories of not only religious figures but of rulers and dynasties and here i show you images on the left two pictures from the one from the 14th and one from the 15th century from two different universal histories written in persian of of the story of noah's ark and the one on the left there is is from northwestern iran and the one below that is you can see a very different style it's becoming a little more ornate you don't have the menagerie of animals in the first one and you could go down for the next several centuries and look at dozens and dozens of images of that famous story and see how the painters have interpreted the same text in very different ways on the right you have the prophet abraham who has been tossed into a bonfire by his evil nemesis nimrod who was told by iblis the devil he's the guy with the horns in the upper left there he's been given he's given nimrod the advice that if you want to get rid of the prophet you've got to catapult him into the bonfire well he has a catapult there but there is abraham sitting in the fire which has been turned into a garden for him god's taking care of him and there are lots of different images of that it's a wonderful story this is a very very spectacular example of from the safavid dynasty hagiography is a very large literary form and i'm just giving you examples of two two illustrations of the same persian text was written by jamie in the 15th century in herat in what is now northwestern afghanistan and these are two illus two different manuscripts of that same text the one on the left from about 1595 the one on the right about 10 15 years later the one on the left in baghdad the one on the right in india and the one on the left was done in what had been for centuries an arabic capital this is a persian text copied and illustrated in an arabic capital for an ottoman patron talk about cosmopolitan and the one on the right is from india same manuscript done in a very very different style very indian style of painting and we'll perhaps come back and talk about these stories later on another branch of hagiography is the life of individual people individual people like rumi the great poet the one on the left is a really spectacular also from baghdad late 16th century um a biography and a biography of rumi in pictures just threw me and it's it's an example of a text that began in persian 14th century was written in an abbreviated persian text a century later and a century after that was translated into turkish and that's what you see here that text was illustrated but it's really a persian book the one on the right is an example of the sub-genre of hagiography called martyrology and you can see there the imam hussein at the deathbed of his brother shiite imam hassan spectacular images these are these are just amazing uh rich colorful texts and you notice that there are flame halos and veils on the right the character on the left the very left side of the left painting with the flame halo is a wonderful figure called ghezr whose name in arabic and persian means the green one and that's because he's associated with life he's a fertility figure and he appears whenever necessary in this case he appears because he hears that rumi is preaching and rumi is such a great character that even kezer has to go hear him and then one final example of hagiography which is an unusual one because this is the first work of christian literature written in persian in india by a jesuit from portugal and in the middle you see a picture of two jesuits at the court of the emperor akbar the man who did the paint who did the the story of jesus in persian he traded learning persian for teaching somebody else a little portuguese apparently and this the images on the left and the right are done by indian painters for an indian patron but a text written by a jesuit and this man his name was his name was jerome xavier he's the great nephew of one of the probably the most famous of the jesuit missionaries saint francis xavier his great-grandnephew did this on the far left you see a picture of jesus healing a person with a with a wounded hand and in the right ascending into heaven dressed like a jesuit is anybody here from georgetown this is a oh yeah the very it's a very entertaining the whole manuscript is is done in this indian style now the epics of course the epic of epochs is the sha name the book of kings so here i show you three pictures of one large scenario series of episodes in the life and quest of iskandar alexander the great up the upper left you see him entering into the land of darkness and about to consult with the brahmanas those cute little characters in the cave there down below he's he's talking to the talking tree or perhaps just listening the talking trees female faces talk by night and it's male faces talk by day and their message to him is i'm sorry to tell you this your kingship but you're going to die like everybody else on the planet and that's every all the messages that iskandar got in his quest for the fountain of life which you see on the right were that i'm sorry you are mortal i'll show you a picture of his death in a few minutes so on the right side you have this magnificent uh late 16th century shiraz manuscript which shows alexander in the upper tier there within the orange with his hand outstretched he's asking the angel of death if one trumpet isn't enough seven ought to do it and he's also giving them the same message sorry alexander you're going to die meanwhile his his troops are winding through the mountains following him and he's gotten lost because he was originally following the two little characters in the lower left and a character he's often paired with and that's elias the prophet elijah because both of them did not die that's how they're connected also wasn't exactly born like elijah was but the key thing is that they were both deathless and therefore associated with the source of life now here's one of my favorite characters this is um rostam and this image lives here at the library of congress and you'll see a huge blow up of it over in the the books display it's a magnificent wall size mural size image of this rastam for those of you who remember the tv show 24 rastam is the jack bauer of medieval persian lore here's here's what i see the two of them they both work alone they both work for a succession of apex leaders presidents kings they're both strong resourceful loyal practically indestructible they're both incorruptible they will never swerve from their mission they both have disastrous family lives and neither one has a shred of self-knowledge or insight but but i love this guy because he and i are so alike really so in this image you see the result of three days of a stalemate battle between rostam and akhvan div who usually goes around disguised as a wild jackass spreading mayhem well after three days of stalemate the hero needed to take a nap and while he was sleeping the div the demon re recovered or returned to his demonic form and by the way uh fair does he says you should understand that demons are just human beings who have gone over to the dark side that's an interesting comment so the demon says okay i have my chance so he scoops up all the earth on which rastam is sleeping and he gives him a chance a choice of two ways to die he says i can either throw you against that mountain and if you survive you will be eaten by honors and leopards or i can throw you into the sea and rastam knows that demons never give you what you ask for so he says throw me against the mountain oh please because i understand that the chinese say if you get if you drown you won't go to heaven well of course that meant he was going into the sea a hero can swim he comes back and he dispatches the demon now there are some derivative epics as well and i show you here two kinds of derivative epochs and in this case in both instances they are they feature heroes who are from the family of the prophet on the left the hamza name which that image also lives here and and the library of congress and it's one of the biggest of all the images we're looking at the average size of these images that you're that are you're seeing there is about the size of a piece of typing paper this one on the left is considerably bigger but it's very unusual it's the story of hamza the prophet's uncle and obviously this is a battle scene and very indian kind of style on the right is a persian image an image from iran of a book called the khavaran name which is the book of glory and the hero is ali and he is the rastam of shiite tradition he has a wonderful horse rastam has roche roy rogers head trigger and ali has not a horse but a wonder mule called duldul and there he is dispatching one of the enemies mystical and didactic poetry are really the most important from the from the point of view of illustrations apart from the epic that that you find in in pre-modern uh iranian illustrated books and on the left you see a picture of both of these images are from the story of yusuf our featured religious hero of the day and yusuf is on the left he's shown in the well where his brothers his jealous brothers threw him to get rid of him and this is a camp of the midianites the story goes that the midianites came along were fishing or were hoping for some water and they found a lad what a lad look we look below he's full of flame halo gabriel is there tending to him and the man up above the painter has removed the earth so you can see inside the with the cistern the well and the midianite trader is pulling up a bucket and he's about to find out that what's in the bucket is yusuf on the right another aspect of the story is that the woman who becomes a very key figure in the story of joseph who is named in the muslim sources but not in the bible in the bible she's called potiphar's wife and potiphar is the minister of pharaoh in the islamic sources the minister is called the aziz and in the muslim sources zulekha who's not named in the bible thinks that she has fallen in love with the aziz and she's arriving in town for what she thinks will be her wedding to aziz well it turns out they do get together but she discovers she doesn't really love him at all the dream that she had was about somebody else and that somebody else was the prophet yusuf and these by the way are are images that are right down the mall at the freyr gallery and the so-called freer jammie now there's a another interesting feature a literary form that appears in didactic poetry and it is the fable fables are stories that use animals as the main characters and on the left you see an image from the walters gallery manuscript of rumi his spiritual couplets tamas navi and it's a wonderful story about how a tyrant a lion had this nasty habit of having his subjects for dinner not over for dinner just for dinner and all the kingdoms of the animals were getting a little bit tired of this because it was very stressful they wondered who was going to be next so they proposed to him that he should set it up so that each night a particular animal or group of animals would appear voluntarily and they would restore they would keep him from being anxious and that would keep them from being anxious well he wasn't convinced he said i like to be independent and so the animals especially the hare who turns out to be a good sufi shake they try to convince them you know trust in god is really important so he goes along with it and comes along the turn of the hair and he says to his animal friends i think i know how we can get rid of this king so he says but you'll have to be patient with me because i'm going to be late for dinner and he won't be happy but it's part of my plan so they say oh okay if you have to so he the hair shows up at the lion's den puffing ham panting and and he's saying oh your majesty i'm awfully sorry i know you're really annoyed that i'm late but i was on my way here with a very plump juicy friend of mine you would have really liked this one but we ran into another lion who said i'm taking over the realm you can send this news to your to the guy you usually get eaten by and he said i'm sorry my plump juicy friend went to that other person and the lion was no longer angry at the hair for being late he says take me to this interloper person who claims he's going to take over my realm so the hair does and he leads him to a well and he says i saw your enemy in there of course the lion looks in sees his reflection and charges in after him and never to be heard from again now in this im this picture this is a good example of how a painter adds his own twist to it the fox does not appear as an individual character in the story but rumi does say and i think the painter is alluding to this rumi does make a point of saying the hair outfoxed the lion now in the middle of the story rumi who has this fabulously wonderful power of association he thinks of another animal figure who has the qualities of a shake like the hair or maybe even a prophet and he's thinking about the story on the right which was told by atar who was from northeastern iran and it's called the conference of the birds and there the shake figure is that little bird on the lower on the central right with the little crest that's the huppo and the huppo used to work for solomon he was solomon's flying divining rod he went out ahead of the army and when he was over water his beak went down and they knew where water was and so the birds all say we need a king their situation is kind of the opposite of the others we need a king all the other animal kingdoms have kings why don't we have one and hoopo stood up and said well i know about kings i used to work for one and i know where our king is he's called the sea morgue and he lives in the far distant mountains but it's really hard to get there so he said we must go through these seven valleys and the seven valleys are the seven phases of the mystical quest one by one they stand up and say the duck says my feet are obviously not made for walking i surely can't go on this and the peacock says well i'll mess up my feathers and blah blah blah so he berates them all for not having the courage and they set off and going through the seven valleys by the end they lose a few more but by the end they have 30 of them and 30 in persian is c and bird is morg and it turns out that the name of their deity the name of this deity symbol is seymourg so they get to a castle and they knock on the door peck i guess and the chamberlain comes and says what do you want they say we want to come we want to see the sea morgue he ushers them in draws back a veil and behind that veil is a large mirror so the 30 birds find themselves looking at the seymourg the sea morgue see the seymourg it's one of the most elaborate puns in all of world literature and and uh really a book worth reading and so this this image here is one of the most spectacular paintings of the subject that you'll ever find and when you look at it you'll see there's a little snake going up the tree and he sees lunch the eggs in that bird's nest and the detail is extraordinary okay wisdom literature a couple of quick samples and we'll be able to talk about these later because we have here one of the sadie experts on the planet fatima keshavars and she loves to tell the story of the picture on the left which is a story in which sadie visits a hindu temple he sees well i'll wait for later for that but it's it's a spectacular image it's at harvard you can see it in the sackler gallery at harvard and on the right that's that's by that's in the boston which is totally uh poetry the one on the right is a series of scenes from this hybrid prose poetry combination called the golestan the rose garden and it's in a an album ordered to be put together by a mogul shah a mogul king and these are three separate scenes which were originally associated with the text that tell the story of that scene and the moguls loved albums and they they loved the text of saudi of course but they said it's more fun to look at pictures we already know the story so he ordered his staff his studio to cut out some of the best pictures stitch them together so he could just kind of look through and say oh there's a story about so-and-so and i remember that one so it's an album of visuals that were once attached directly to the text also created in india by indian calligraphers and indian painters for an indian patron now as for miniatures i'm just going to give you two examples of the different different styles this we could go on forever on this and other members of the the group will be giving lectures here over the next six months we'll be talking about these things and amy landau who's here is somebody who could and maybe later on this afternoon we'll talk more about these things here's an example of three miniatures of the same scene all persian from the 13th century upper left 16th century lower left and then the granddaddy of them all the the a lot of which is some of which is here and some of which is in new york city at the met and this is the scene of the primal king gaiu mars and it gives you an example of how the basic image can be conveyed basic information can be conveyed in a very small one on the upper left is from one of their so-called small sean amis very basic he's in the mountains he's showing people how to how to attain the arts of civilization which include things like wearing leopard skin not too shabby in the lower left you find one that's a little more complicated and in the right side absolutely spectacular image you have got to have a magnifying glass to appreciate all that's in there and what i mean is this is what i mean by not in kansas anymore this is a totally different world it is not the world that we inhabit gold sky purple rocks rocks with faces in the animated nature spectacular now here's an example of the same scene all done by indians for indian patrons in india but for persian text and this is the story of joseph and zuleika i mentioned zeleka earlier as the love interest in the story of joseph and zeleka but it's it's an unrequited love very interestingly uh and the scene uh in which she makes a play for him i'll show you in a minute but she decides that the people of egypt are starting to suspect that it was her fault she you just don't go after a prophet like that you know you don't go even if he is really spectacular even if he's dropped that gorgeous but the point she says is that's right she is drop dead gorgeous he's an image of the beauty of god so on the left an image from south india but still in a very persian style from the 17th century in the middle 18th centuries also south indian and the right 19th century south indian and you notice there that there's a very very a very a definite progression in changes in the body style the complexion the clothing and when you get to the far right you see people wearing south asian garb and even on the far left you see an indication of the painter's touch the story is that just when the ladies of egypt were about to eat their dessert oranges the painter puts mangoes in there because if you can get a good mango who wants an orange and south india you know so you see those little fruits there they're about to cut their dessert fruit and she says oh ladies i want you to meet somebody yusuf walks in dazzles them they are beside themselves some of them pass out and they cut their hands instead of their dessert fruit and so the persian poets from then on use the term to cut one's hands as a metaphor for going into mystical ecstasy okay now method this is in in many ways the most interesting aspect of looking at these images from the from the perspective of how they interpret the text so i'm going to talk about structural devices and devices that embellish the content among structural devices there are those that seem to be a literal interpretation of the text and they can be either simple or complex there are multi-scene interpretations in which a painter can put several moments of the same episode or several episodes in the same frame and there is this wonderful technique that i'm calling here hiding the narrative focus you will look and look at these images and if you don't know the story you won't know where the generation where the energy of that story is actually generated in the picture i'll explain content embellishment can be by metaphor and symbolism in a general way specifically natural or architectural symbolism and visual allegory and then artistic license which involves either supplementing by adding information in a picture that is not included in the text and substitution using something in the text that is more iconic or more socially acceptable than what the text actually says so here are some examples here is the moment at which zuleika tries to make a play for yusuf on the left side you see first of all you notice that the the pair yusuf and zuleika are obviously a standard kind of visual pair one is almost identical with the other except that on the right joseph is veiled and not on the left so the story is in sadis bustan which is a book of poetry and there is a poem that's a very short about 12 or 13 lines which is called the story of yusuf with zeleka and he simply says there that um zulejka was smitten by the demon of desire and fell upon joseph like a wolf and that's an allusion to the story that his brothers told their father jacob oh our your your youngest son your beloved the apple of your eye was was eaten by a wolf so that's an interesting little metaphor so that's a very simple thing because saudi doesn't tell you anything about the background the context the architectural setting now on the right an image from an illustrated version of the same manuscript of the same text rather boston of saudi from late 15th century herrat in northwestern afghanistan it's the same central figures but and he's illustrating and you see those little little bubbles there those panels with the text there there he has three or four of the lines of this poem that that is sadie's original text but sadie doesn't say anything about the context so how do you explain what the pope the painter one of the all-time great persian painters named bezzad whose name means well-born great one he was from herat what baazad is doing here is he's including in his interpretation a text which appears around the central doorway you see that central doorway which is brown with a white wall behind it and around there you notice that there is some blue panels with calligraphy now that text is from a text of a fellow countryman of his a contemporary fellow citizen of herat named jamie whose masterpieces live down at one of whose masterpieces live right down the street on the mall at the freer jamie wrote a story of yusuf and zuleika in which he describes in that text that's hidden away there in the architectural decoration in which she describes how she had her architect build her a palace of seven rooms each with a stout door and so basad has showed shows you the seven doors and the seven rooms all in an aggressively two-dimensional image and he says johnny says she lures him behind one door throws the bolt and lures him behind another door and finally in the seventh room she throws the bolt and makes her play for him and at that point of course joseph prays to god and all the bolts are opened that's a spectacularly complex way of interpreting an image but he's using two texts to do it i meant to show you this slightly bigger image of it here it's a wonderful wonderful painting you can see all around the architectural the cornice is there there are there are verses from the poetry absolutely amazing okay now structural in addition to complex and simple there are images that contain more than one scene or moment of a scene or more than one episode and on the left you have another one of these incredible images that is the story of sadi he is he is that cute little guy bending over with his pen in hand and the story is that one of his disciples has a dream in which he sees angels descending upon the roof this is another one of those buildings that is that's the whole universe it's not just this world but paradise above and he runs to the door that's him knocking at the door over there because he's concerned about what might be going on with his with his friend and master sadie and he goes and finds out that as the text says right before this that there was a line of poetry and i need to tell you this line that was so pleasing to god that god sent down this bevy of angels to to pour down coins of light and the light the poem says every leaf on every green tree is in the view of the wise a volume of intimate knowledge of the creator and over the door it says gardens of eden whose doors are open for them other lines say the retreat of dervishes is the garden of paradise above to serve dervishes is meritorious okay these are multiple scenes from the same episode all in one frame and you really have to look hard to find out what's going on when the one on the right is from the the hegeography of the life story of rumi and the scene above happens just before the scene below and when rumi is seen in the mausoleum of his father baha'u deen valade and down below is the scene that is actually the focus of the the narrative and that's that a a bull escapes from the butchers and you can see the guy there on the left and the yellow has as a as a knife and they're they're about to carve this this poor creature up the bull bows at rumi's feet and asks to be helped and rumi of course asks the butchers to set it free they comply and the bull disappears never to be heard from again the moral of the story according to aflocky the one who wrote this this hagiography is that those who follow and take refuge with men of god will escape the butchers and demons of hell so you have these two different scenes in one frame now disguising the narrative focus is some of the most fun that you can have looking at persian paintings on the left also from the freer jammie just down the mall pardon me you would never know from looking at this that the focus of the story is this little ragamuffin of a character on the far left edge little bitty guy who just dressed in rags his name is majnoon his real name is kais but he's called majnun because he is star struck he's fallen in love with laily and somewhere he has heard from a group of travelers that laylee's his party has made camp nearby and he wants to go see her so the painter has decided he not only wants you to guess who the searcher is he wants you to guess who the search he is so you look and you find there are several young women amidst these spectacular tents and you don't know exactly which one is lei lee which adds to the mystery of the whole thing on the right i'm going to give you a bigger image of this this is one of my favorites pardon me this is from uh the nazami hamsa the quintet of the port nezami now you wouldn't know from looking at this that the the the characters who are generating the narrative energy are not these two in the center of the image the one in in an orange tunic and a crown is king neushavon and he and his minister is right behind him riding a mule not a horse um they're out in the countryside and going through this once gorgeous little village and the energy of this narrative is generated by at the far upper left two tiny little great horned owls and the king notices that they're hooting no surprise but he's somehow concerned about it and he thinks that maybe they're talking about him lo and behold they are and he says to his minister what are they saying and of course like any minister worthless portfolio he was fluent in owl and and he said oh he said your majesty one saying to the other since i've given you my daughter in marriage i want you to promise me this village and two or three others like it where she might choose to set up house the other one says if then this king keeps up his disastrous management of the rome i promise her a hundred thousand and of course the king was duly mortified but that's a really good example of hiding the narrative focus um here's another one that is also from the freer jammy and in the interest of having a few minutes for questions i'm going to leave this one go we can come back later on it's the story of the ducks carrying the tortoise up up on top their friends tortoise doesn't want them to leave when they go south and they say well we have this plan we'll we'll put a stick there and you bite onto it they fly over and the people down below say look at that amazing thing and the tortoise says yeah let me tell you how it happened that's the way it happens now embellishment can also take a number of different forms content embellishment and on the left you see the death the death moment of alexander the great when he finds out that he has been stricken mortally he writes a letter to his mother in which he says that a great landowner a wealthy person his mother has planted a tree which grew to a tremendous height but has been stricken and of course the tree is himself and so the painter has decided that in order to show that all of nature and you can see the the grief on the faces of these these other characters uncharacteristically emotive usually what you see is biting the finger of astonishment oh and that that expresses all emotion but here you actually see some some tearing of hair and taking off clothing and so forth and the painter has decided by showing that the tree is bursting into flames this is nature mourning and on the right a similar thing this is on the left rostam killing his lifelong friend esfandiar because he found out that esfandiar was protected by the blood of the semorg that c-morg except that the blood didn't touch his eyes because he closed them when the blood was flowing over him and so he gets a two-pointed arrow aims it right at he's faded by destiny to kill his friend and it's a tragic scene so this very early shauname the great mongol shonabi of early 14th century the painter shows you a kind of a visual chiasmus a sort of an x up above you have a living tree on the left a dead tree on the right down below a dead bush on the left a living bush on the right who's alive who is dead where's the tragedy this is another one of my favorite modes of embellishment and that's using architecture and on the left you have a scene from the life of iskandar and this is from the hamsa the quintet of nizami and the story is that he in his endless quest for knowledge and understanding he goes to visit a hermit in a cave now the painter has decided that since the message of the hermit is like the message of the tree and israel feel the the angel of death it's all the same al get used to it you're just like the rest of us you're going to die so the painter has used this spectacular architectural background to connect with that symbolism on the tower you see the tower there on the upper right and the doorway at the upper left you see those little panels of calligraphy there he has inserted here a way of identifying this building so that you'll understand the symbolic significance and it says from the quran iram of the columns the like of which has not been created in any kingdom in any realm and the importance of that is that the city of iran was associated with a really pompous leader a king named shaddad who died and whose city fell apart after him so the city of iran the many columns is the message is if iran the many column can fall apart we're all we're all destined for death so he's put this scene here now the interesting thing about part about it is that alexander actually visits the city of iran later in the narrative but the painter has put this here to tell you what the symbolism of this visit to the hermit is i'm going to skip the one on the right now because i'm running out of time but you can come back later i just have a couple more things to say and then we'll take some questions in the realm of embellishment there's also this interesting thing called supplement and substitution these two images are from a hegeographical work from late 16th century baghdad done for an ottoman patron these are in the chester beatty library in dublin and the story on the left is that the guy who's on the pulpit on that little minbar the little preaching platform his name is junaid and he was one of the great 9th century sufis of baghdad and the cute little dude looking out at you from just to the right there is his uncle sorry the green grocer now the story says the story is really only about as much as you you see there in those panels above and below it's not a long story and jamie says junaid had a dream in which the prophet said to him you must preach to the people you must give them your message and junaid who's a young man but who's shown here with more salt and pepper in his beard because that gives him gravitas i guess he says well i can't do that i'm too young and he's walking down the street and he runs into his uncle sorry who says you are going to preach aren't you he says well how did you know that ansari says the prophet appeared to me and told me what he told you so that convinced him and he holds a session and he preaches and that's all the story says but the painter has decided that since this meeting must have been a collection of the famous sufis of baghdad that he's going to tell you who they were now unfortunately you might not be able to see this but there are smudges on the turbines of a number of these characters they look just like little smudges you can probably spot a couple of those those are the names of the characters written in by the painter because he says you know you really ought to know who was at this meeting even though jamie doesn't tell you painting on the right is a good example of substitution in that the story is that the young famous now famous sufi as a boy his name was abdul khadr al-jilani abdul khadr has a dream and the dream says you must make a pilgrimage you have to leave your mother he's he she was a single parent apparently and you must tell your mother you have to leave and go on pilgrimage and he sees in this dream a place near the city of mecca called the valley of arafat so he's got two problems arafat is a brown field full of brown boulders nobody's going to look at a picture of that but he says i can substitute the most iconic thing associated with the pilgrimage and that's the kaaba so he put the kaaba in there second problem is there are no women illustrated in this manuscript for whatever reason so he decides that the boy is up on the upper left there telling his dream not to his mother but to his grandfather or to some uncle interesting pair of substitutions now i had some themes that we can come back to later my favorite motifs heroes imperiled marvelous birth father-son alienation preferred younger sun theme this is a common theme in world lore it's always the younger son who gets the kingdom even though his older older brothers might eventually do him in out of their jealousy iskandar seeking knowledge a wonderful theme that that shows up in all kinds of different ways and then marvels both prophetic and saintly so if we get a chance later on we can possibly look at these images again and talk about them but for now i think i need to stop i just want to end with a public service announcement pro bono of course and it is that it's been proven that looking at persian ministers is is a habit forming the good news is that should you become addicted you will die happy thank you um i know that roberta's here so do you want to take it and this is wonderful let me just say this this was a feast thank you so much we will have ample time with jack and we will go over the questions do you well i i have to start by telling you i'm taking the podium darn angry i got stuck in a meeting and i was supposed to be here to hear the entire marvelous talk and i am so upset that i just arrived for the very very last snippet the only consolation i am taking is that we have videotaped it but my name is roberta shaffer and i really do have the pleasure of serving this institution and the american people as the associate librarian for library services but every once in a while you like to give yourself a real treat and one of those is that the enormous benefit of being in this building is that we have these fantastic lectures and programs and of course this absolutely sparkling diamond of an exhibition that the um that the library staff has put together and so i'm sorry if you've already done this but i must ask everyone involved in this show to please rise i would like to give you a round of applause mary jane chris where are you and and this is you know an embarrassment of riches to have to pick such um from from an enormous collection that represents such an incredible culture over the course of a thousand years and to really think when you're looking at the map and each of the items how influential persian materials have been to such a wide swath of geography over the course of a thousand years and i just wanted to share with you thinking last night as i was going through the show about the the idea of having been for so long the lingua franca and hearing that being and you probably said something about that in the talk but hearing that um sort of responsibility and tribute now being given to the english language and the culture that is created in the english language all i kept thinking about at each frame last night was wow there's a lot of competition for that mantle and i hope that we who are english speakers and creating in english can even begin to emulate the history and the legacy that the persian language has left to us and i will say that i am just so delighted apropos that that we have some special guides with us today and i guess yesterday and that is a group of poets visiting the library of congress from iran so maybe you can help us and you can pass the gauntlet which i now think we all share in terms of the future life and the mind of the world and not just a specific culture so i thank you so much for being here again i am a bit envious i will have to see this in two dimension and you got to see it in three but please plan to take a lot of time with the exhibition and to come back for the many and varied programs that will be we will be presenting as part of the run of the exhibition and thank you so much those of you who had a part to play in helping us financially to put this show on this is not easy to do uh in terms of financial resources so i thank each and every one of you for that contribution it is enormous thank you very very much we can do questions now uh fatima john uh let's have dr renar come up in case may take a moment um i would like to say that without the help from roshan cultural heritage institute and the special gift that dr elaje omigliar mirjalali gave for this speaker series we would have not been able to have this wonderful occasion so without further ado we just wanted to say thank you to them and acknowledge that contribution and we could have a few minutes of question and answer if jack would like to come here i have a microphone so if you guys have any questions i can come around oh there's a microphone there hello sir hi it was a very delightful presentation thank you i i really enjoyed it the depth of your knowledge about the literature of that region is amazing my name is mohammed nawid i'm from afghanistan and i was teaching art history this style of art which flourished from 14th century to 16th century it started from as far as i know from transaxonia came to horasan and then went to persia in 16th century most of the paintings were done in herat under the timurids of herat you know when prince bison started the the school of fine arts their musa kazem musamusava was one of the first one and before basad there were mirak and mawlana walu lovely their contribution in creating this style is amazing later on when it went to safavid court uh it changed in terms of iconography in the colors and shadings and also it went to india as babur left kabul and invaded daily in the third battle of panipat yeah and then the same style went there but became more colorful in terms of war i as a researcher i have a question about the term portion painting for a big variety of schools of art which started in samarkand herat shiraz i think it's a very generic term if we use that if we say that because it's most of them were written in persian poetry the language there are so many poets since that the poetry is in turkish language in terms of content also it's from bible from arab culture in terms of language also there are so many pashto illustrations so i think this is a very generic term that western scholars use to introduce a wide variety of so many schools of art which flourished from 14th century to 17th century but i i think i have a problem with this with all due respect with my persian friends that i love their culture i've been in iran i studied there but i have a problem with this very generic terminology well let me thank you let me make clear that i was not referring to the painting as persian as such i was trying to suggest that we're talking about illustrations of persian books so using that as my general foundation i was simply referring to the various different ways i agree entirely that there are so many different styles and so many different modes of of illustration that i would not call all of the illustration persian illustration but the literature which they are illustrating is persian and therefore they are persian books that was my point sure okay uh i have a request please keep it short and keep it to a question no commentary please thank you mostly we have these illustrations out of the epic epics the book of persian kings we know that lots of epics have been to motion picture we have billboards several versions of that has it does it give any ideas to put them in motion picture because hollywood industry and you know if you have the accessories here the sceneries and you know actually the design the stage design is clear um why not what do you think does it give any ideas to americans to put them to motion picture i'm specifically mentioning the characters in actually the book of kings and persian mythology like siobhash and others rustam and sohrab and his family and other characters thank you thank you well that's something i don't know anything about i really have no idea how in fact i think some later speakers in the series will be will be talking about more contemporary issues and will probably touch more on that than i am able to do what you showed us are beautiful illustrations but they all come after mongols do we have anything before mongols do you have any access to any paintings or books or illustrations before mongols came to iran nothing to speak of the the most important paintings whether they're from the arab middle east are from the 13th century and actually no there are some that are a little earlier there are well there are some from 13th century the the makamat some arabic texts but that's as early as i know of apart from perhaps some illustrations of some scientific texts that de materia medica and a few of these other things but i don't think they go back much earlier than 1200 at least not in any numbers not correct all right thanks for the talk i i recognize this young man yes uh yeah i think we've uh met before a couple times but um i had a question about the depiction of animals and both in the visual and the textual components of these manuscripts and um kind of interested in the human animal divide and if you think that it's something that was very sharp or kind of it seems like a lot of the animals had like obvious allegorical roles where they were representing humans but also where there are probably times when it was important that they weren't actually supposed to be human and you know whether that varies over just what you think about that if you think there's a very important divide or not maybe with these categories and and you know perhaps since also there's a lot of nomadic cultures that become like the ruling class and these different empires that you know have a special relationship with animals particularly horses and things like that how that might affect that relationship that's a good question and that that's also something that i don't know much about i know that there is um maybe amy can can address that later on in in the discussion session but um one of the things that i do find very interesting is is the the tendency to depict all of creation as alive the faces in the rocks i mean it's a very interesting kind of there's a continuum seems to me a sense of the continuity of life at all levels and that's really about as close as i can get to uh to that i know that some of my favorite animals appear they are stock animals for example there's an elephant with a smile who always appears down at the lower right and then there is in the middle of the desert the ever popular snow leopard that some of the animals are just there for decoration that much i'm i can assure you yes amy um i'm sorry yes i was just wondering if any of the pictures are signed either with a signature or with a signature item or a signature um design element or something that would indicate which ones are done by the same artist yes there are there are quite a few that are signed but i don't think much before the late 15th century uh that would that be correct late 15th century signatures start appearing we have some earlier but in terms of the popularity of signatures that comes around like 15th century bizaad who you've referred to and also in the 16th century greater number of artists and that goes along with the parallel development of uh creating albums morocca in addition to manuscripts and so you have a lot of painters becoming individual authors of compositions and just a lot of them a lot of those are in the mogul art as well just to speak to this idea of the popularity of animals and manuscripts also considering moralizing tales like khalil wadimna and how effective and powerful it is to tell stories about human beings and qualities heroic qualities and weaknesses of human beings through stories about animals rather than people so just to comment on that thank you very much i had one question back here let me give it back to you there you go thank you i was just wondering if you've ever seen a transition from two dimension to three dimension illustrations yes there's there is a move in that direction especially in indian painting in the mogul dynasty beginning in the late 16th early 17th century and in fact you can see it in this picture here you notice that there is a sense of receding space and the mogul painters were were very adept at using architecture to give a sense of of receding space and and there's a gradual increase in that especially mogul painting and some people say that it was because of the gifts that the jesuits brought to the emperor akbar in the late 16th century they brought him polyglot bibles from northern europe engraved block block prince and that they show this their their european northern renaissance european painting and that he had his painters recreate those and thus began a tendency in development in mogul painting to to become to effect or to affect let's say to affect the three-dimensional style okay hi hello thank you so much for the wonderful presentation and welcome like you and many iranians i'm also in love with these miniature allegorical images and paintings of iranian art i have two simple questions one is if one was looking for a real scholarly book that would contain material related to these images such as example your presentation of today art history book would you have any recommendations well one that really comes to mind is uh is a book by shreev simpson who used to be at the freer gallery and she wrote a wonderful book on the freer jami it's sultan ibrahim's manuscript ibrahim mirza is that it anyway that would be a really spectacular book it's a very expensive one but she actually did a more consumer-friendly small version of it that takes a kind of a kind of the greatest hits of the tree or jammy sure image here that we saw about yusuf and zolejo entering and the women of the court of zoler cutting their cutting their hands i have seen various images of that and i'm trying to see which one is the authentic because in some of the persian miniatures um they instead of the orange we talk about which is also in the uh original poem and some literature we see anar or pomegranates and then few drops of blood here and there that are indistinguishable whether they are blood on their fingertips or what whether it's pomegranates pomegranate juice so where um what is which one the is the authentic original story well the story is about the oranges but what the point i was trying to make with that that suggestion of three different images is just simply to suggest that the painters want to add their own ingredients and they add them on basis of the cultures in which they live whether it's the clothing or the dessert fruit okay um one more question and then afterwards we have to start lunch i if you don't mind would like to start the tours of the exhibition around 12 20 12 25 so um let's let's do 12 30. let's uh let's start at 12 30. so we get a chance to eat something too exactly all right go ahead yes yeah thank you but uh why do you think there is a darkness in the first thousand or maybe beyond why you were talking about only the last thousand of years in uh persian history or persian literature well this what i really am doing here is about the middle 500 and and i'm talking about it because it's the only one i know the only part that i know and i got hooked on these medieval persian manuscripts as a religious studies specialist especially you know looking at religious texts in arabic and persian and so that's that's the part that i know something about but enough i'll do fairness don't you agree that most of the stuff that has survived really is from the mongol period onwards from the south on 1300s on so this no i know the iranian history goes back to the an ancient what have you when you're talking paintings and manuscripts people it's clear it has only lasted from 1300s onward not older than that books don't last from very very old times it's just simple you know so that's why we don't have that much surviving that's older thank you but we do have um like textual references uh for example um an arab historian who refers to seeing uh pictures of the history of the kings of iran so we have textual references but not the actual illustrated works when you come to the physical book i think that's the period that we can talk about well let's give professor renard this was a truly fitting start we look forward to others we hope follow that wonderful academic and humorous and and comprehensive coverage of the subject thank you so much good afternoon ladies and gentlemen we're now going to begin the second part of our program today which is going to be a round table discussion with three distinguished scholars which will touch on the material that jack renard talked about this morning the program is pretty well constructed by them my job is basically to introduce them but before i do that i'm going to tell you a few things about the the neary section of the african middle eastern division here at the library of congress the vast majority of material that you will either see or have seen in the exhibit comes from the neary section the persian collection or the persian language collection the near east section staff are responsible for basically two aspects of librarianship the first being to acquire material from and about the areas of their responsibility the second is to make that material accessible and that's done in any way from simply having a person come in and request a volume to having extensive research discussions you know research methodologies sources etc with scholars and our scholars who come and do research are everything from the person who wants to come in and read some poetry to senior scholars doing very very serious and complex research and the exhibit that this is that today is celebrating the opening of is another thing that we do to make no one to the broader community who after all with their tax dollars pays for our existence here although the exhibit itself was funded by very generous outside funders but the idea of the exhibit and the programs attached to it is to make better known to scholars to the iranian-american community and to the general public what we have here what we've built here and i would really plead with any of you who have research projects please come and see hirodinavari if it's about iran or persian language materials are one of the other specialists if it's about some other part of the near east now our three scholars are very distinguished when i ran out the bibliography alone of uh jack bernard it went on for pages and pages and pages and i know he was introduced this morning but i will very briefly introduce him again and before i do the introductions i want to thank the three scholars for taking the time to you know come here today and take part in this okay jack renard is a professor of religious studies i believe at saint louis university okay he completed his phd at harvard and has as i said a very long list of publications of awards and is exactly the kind of scholar we want to see come here and use our collections fatima keshevars is the recently appointed i guess it's about a year and a half now a year and a half as the director of the roshan persian studies institute at the university of maryland previous to her appointment at maryland she was at washington university in saint louis and she too has a very extensive list of publications excuse me and while people often dwell on her scholarly publication she's also a published poet in her own right amy landau is at the walters art gallery in baltimore um she's in charge of the south and this the south asian material in middle eastern yeah okay south asian she's really you know at the beginning of her scholarly career she received her doctorate from oxford in 2007 and young scholars like her are also we very much want them to come and work here but without further ado because i know you want to hear from them rather than me i will let them begin thank you well thank you again for um being here and coming back for the panel um when the three of us were talking about what would be the best way about putting this panel together and we decided that we should open up with some general remarks and then really turn it into a conversation between us and you but really make the focus of the panel general ideas like what about the use of these manuscripts what is important about them how do we use them in classroom what about exhibitions and you know all of these questions related to the present exhibit and then i was thinking well what do i contribute to this can i contribute to this and i remembered an instance from my own graduate studies which i think would be probably a good entry into the topic when i went to england in to do my graduate work i discovered this whole collection of persian manuscripts at the welcome institute for the history of medicine and i started doing research on them and it turned out in the end to become the topic of my phd work because there were over 600 manuscripts in a wide range of topics it was really an amazing world of scholarship and thinking and even though the welcome institute was and is dedicated to pharmaceutical work and to scientific research and history of medicine but in fact the collection had many many other important pieces in there one of those pieces became a and a very memorable and instance in my my phd work and that was i was walking in the um close stock section of the manuscripts and i saw this beautifully decorated 18th century european binding and i thought what is this doing here of course a lot of that collection had been purchased in india and um so i pulled the book out and i opened it on the most exquisite double page painting which was a horoscope and it had the images the stars personified around the page you know the mars fighting warrior with the sword and venus playing her ood you know it just absolutely beautifully illustrated there were four angels on the corners bringing a little crown to someone which indicated the manuscript goes to a royal figure i was so excited and shocked that i closed the manuscript and put it back i i just did not did not know how to take all this in i mean the whole sky was lapis lazuli and gold golden clouds flying over it and it was just absolutely breathtaking when i finally went back it was a two or three days later and i opened it and i read the beginning of it it was indeed a horoscope written for prince eskandar the grandson of tamerlane in shiraz the city in which i have been born and raised and it was it so it was dated 1410 fairly early for that period and so i talked to a friend of mine who was an archaeologist and he said you know this was this clearly was something the library needed to showcase and take care of and suddenly a lot of people were interested in it that there's a new teamwork manuscript and who was i an unknown student of you know phd student we suddenly have people with their cameras there wanted to take pictures and so we invited a whole group of people to come and see it at the same time and i introduced the manuscript that's that was the advice from friend the french so that it became clear who actually presented the manuscript but in the next few minutes and i'm not really going to go on very long about that i'm going to tell you what really came out of that manuscript which was for um chapters and it was a horoscope it said when the prince was born it said uh calculated all of that stuff very carefully mathematically made predictions about his life and every corner of the page every page had four different marginal illustrations which is absolutely beautiful well first of all who produced the book it became very important who did all the calculations and turned out to be the grandson of a great iranian mathematician riya sadinakoshi who then later on i learned about him he had his own fame in the field of mathematics why given to iskandar mirza well research showed that skandar was particularly interested in illustration it in fact had a small academy in shiraz of painters and manuscript producers because timurid princes were competing with each other over that and there was something like this going on in herat and so he wanted to have his own side of things was he shiite or sunni was something else that people were interested in and then of course we got his full title there and we could tell from the title the way he was addressed that came out of it that he was most probably not a shiite who illustrated the manuscript well i don't know that we really solved that problem because the illustrations were so finely calculated that it had to have been done by someone who also had the astrological astronomical and mathematical knowledge in fact my advisor professor vivar from school of art and african studies in london he very much thought that the mathematician writer must have been the illustrator too but to me i mean i i cannot really answer that it wasn't something that it was too fine for someone whose profession is something else but we learned some other things about the illustration of the period and that was up until then the belief was that the timurid miniature paintings don't have movement in them that you don't see much movement and this manuscript on the margin of each page had a little flower a little bird with their wings up in the air or a leg lifted or you know it was in fact full of movement we managed to date the school of shiraz up to at least 1410 because this was given to the prince at that time um and the process of just looking at that double page painting told us that much about the you know the historical background of that now there was also something else that um the the astrologer predicted that the prince's eye was in danger and we actually know that he was blinded at the end of his life but then a historian friend of mine said well that one wasn't very hard to calculate as the timuri princes when they fought each other and they didn't want their cousin to be fit to be the next king what they could do was you know blinding them and that was a practice that so every prince's eye was in danger and you could say that in any horoscope you made for them i hope that does give us some food for thought and that later on as we get into the discussion we you know we can refer to this and other details and i think it would be lovely if amy comes to the podium now and takes it from here are we setting up now so it's a pleasure to be here with all of you today and i wanted to thank fatima and jack and christopher and for allowing me to be here with you and to talk about my experience of being a curator with a large portion of persian manuscripts at the walters art museum in baltimore and for working in this field of islamic art with a focus on iran and armenia and i would also like to congratulate harad it's an absolutely stunning exhibition at a time where exhibitions such as this are needed and it looks effortless and simple which means that a curator is really hard at work to pull that off and i have a feeling you had many sleepless nights so congratulations and enjoy your success and it's all of our success because what we need to do which i want to talk to you about today is this need to foreground the history of persian the history of persian speaking lands particularly at this moment it's a moment where you don't want your children your father your mother to learn about iran on fox news for example or somewhere else we'll edit that out later but you want to have them have the experience of the beauty of the poetry the richness of the tradition the visual tradition the food the music early on and as a curator that's part of my role and as wonderful as large exhibitions are we can only do them each institution can only do them every let's say four to five years because of budget so how can we pull our resources together in the nation's capital and surrounding areas to make sure that there's systematic programming in this area which means performances exhibitions and teaching and so often we forget the importance of undergraduate teaching there are some wonderful programs in islamic art in persian studies at a handful of ivy league schools for example and often in graduate programs but we have to introduce this material earlier on in undergraduate unfortunately i was introduced to this material a little late it was my junior year of being at nyu as an undergraduate i was studying middle eastern history and hebrew and jewish studies and i went for an art history class i met a really inspiring young iranian woman who introduced me to the poetry and to the art and i would like other people to have that and i think what they're doing at the roshan institute is absolutely fantastic the students that are coming out of that program who i've interacted with have such a solid base for language skills and they could go on to anything from there so i applaud you for everything you're doing in the program and also the other individuals i can admit for example who works in the program as well so i'm just going to quickly go through a series of slides i want us to have a conversation because it's been a long day and conversations are always better and i'm just going to quickly go through what i like to talk about in galleries and when i teach undergraduates and also for us to think together about future things we could all do there's a number of reasons we have the library of congress we have freer sackler here we have george washington that recently hired someone um for islamic r in the field of mogul painting mega native in the back so we could draw on these resources to work together so very quickly exhibition since i've been a curator at the walters i've had five small shows featuring our islamic manuscripts and trying to emphasize our persian collection because as we know when it comes to the illustrated manuscript it's those manuscripts were written in the persian language that are so richly illustrated and here you see poetry and prayer a small show that was visited by a large number of people and also featured on the um page for the for the chairman of the neh the national endowment for humanities with midshipmen coming to see the the manuscripts and that's also important we can't just talk to one another we have to talk to the public and you're having people who are going to be in those regions fairly soon and on the side you see one of the small chana mays jack has been talking about the chana maze earlier today one of our earliest examples from around 1300 and i'm going to ask are there any stupid students of persian in the audience to read the rubric can you read the rubric on the page or anyone here that feels brave enough uh-huh yeah exactly so what is said what is what does the rubric say and then what is the picture right and what's going on in the picture they're not really fleeing right so here they're confronting each other right so that's a little bit confusing so the rubric is different than the painting so we could go back to this issue of the conversation or lack of conversation between text and image here you have a an illumination that represents a period of time when we do not have systematic system systematized workshops there's three of these small channels that exist and they all have different iconography so we're not dealing with a work with workshop practices at this time when people come to our galleries i also like to bring out the humor in the persian tradition when we talk about arts of the islamic world we very we need to laugh more so and there is a great deal of humor and here you see a wonderful page from our hamsa of amir khusro del avi and it's two deeds and they're illustrated in the frontis piece so in the preface of the manuscript where amir khusrow says why he wants to write this work and it's for the edification of his offspring and one of the lessons to be learned is the danger of being idle so solomon's deeves didn't have much to do and they were causing a lot of chaos so solomon asked the devs to one of them to fill the sea with sand and then the desert with water to keep them busy and you see how you see how wonderfully the diva is depicted here you also want to talk about the universal lessons of how to be a good human how to be a good king which runs throughout persian poetry which fatimi will i'm sure speak about and this is a beautiful manuscript from the golestan of saudi and down below you see an image of a beggar coming to ask a king for money again the king says why should i give you money i already gave you money you wasted it you squandered it and then he's told by his wise vizier that one doesn't raise someone up just to dash their hopes and one should continue being generous another part of my role is to make the manuscripts available everyone is welcome to come to the walters to consult our manuscripts but we also have them digitally so everyone could go through every single page of our manuscripts they've been digitized front to cover and have been cataloged and can print out the entire manuscript so someone could do systematic textual studies and codecological work before they come to visit the actual manuscript here resources again the five exhibitions i've done are also online which you could consult and what we need to do next i think is make sure that there's translations of the material i think there's more understanding when people know what one another is saying so it's not just enough to present the islamic manuscripts the persian manuscripts in our galleries but also to present what they're saying and i'm working with a company in california hopefully called me don maidan that will offer translations over some of our pages so we're looking forward to that and here's a page from the bobbur name the book of babor people say it's the earliest autobiography in the islamic tradition i'm always a little bit hesitant to say that because it doesn't seem this is what we say right but it doesn't seem like it could be true but that's what we say also what what culture loves and enjoys poetry so much that poetry is found on all functional objects objects like this one it's the cup of hussein baikara in the 15th century from hirat from afghanistan we know it's his because there's a stamp on the back saying it belonged to his collection so you have wonderful poetry on objects that are being used in social settings of the modulus where poetry is being composed recited debated riddles are being made and how do we engage the american public with this joyous history also a culture that even when images are separate here you're looking at a painting from the chahel satun a wall painting that doesn't exist beside text but one wonders with individuals so versed in poetry did poetic verses just come to one's head just seeing images like wall paintings and i'm gonna stop there i did bring some extra slides but i want to open up more for a conversation rather than just one person talking so i'm going to stop here and we could go back to jack's slides or fastumas just be brief about this how i got into this stuff as a religious studies person going way back my first paid job was teaching high school students at a catholic jesuit high school in st louis religion and i taught what was then called and sometimes still called world religions comparative religion basically history religion and i began using visuals art and architecture to teach because the squirming bunch of high school kids standing up and talking adam isn't really all that profitable sometimes so and i found that they liked pictures so i began to use visuals and then when i got into graduate school i i wasn't really planning to get into islamic art but i was hoping to teach to work on islamic theology with two very famous specialists in islamic theology only to find out the day that i arrived that they had just left the university without consulting me and it turns out that two of the people who were there and who became really important in my academic life whom i had never heard of and one of them was a very famous and wonderfully entertaining islamic art historian named oleg brabar well i got hooked i took six courses with him and that was the beginning of my falling in love with islamic art and ever since then i've been using it whenever possible as part of the historic record in other words i i think of whereas when i was teaching high school i thought of visuals as a distraction from words and something that would attract students attention i now think of it as integral to the historic record and as important as primary source material as texts and that's how i got into it well i think oh often please wonderfully exciting field which you're foregrounding looking around seeing so many students of the persian language and various other related fields it's really amazingly encouraging thank you so very much i want to make a suggestion and ask a question the suggestion i make is in recent centuries a note has been made has formed perhaps by historical accident between the persian language and iran as a country i appreciate that in the 19th and 20th century uh much of the energy that has gone into the persian language and persian literature research has come from the country of iran as it began to take shape in the 16th century and definitely more during the khajar and pallavi and today it has not always been like that so may i suggest as a colleague that we make an acknowledgement to the sharedness of this heritage the heritage of the persian language is shared by indians by ottomans by central asians by caucasians of various types and now by the diaspora i think an acknowledgement in that direction does not take anything away from the country of iran and i also think it goes to amy's point about the unfortunate association that people make between this art and a country that for good or bad is going through turbulent times at this time so i think it would be very good for us to give full credence to the diversity of the language which is hidden to those who do not notice the languages and the scripts it looks like arabic but it's not arabic so it's got to be persian so goes the logic in the mind of our lay american for example so i think the languages that were featured this morning ranged from chagatai uzbek to ottoman to urdu to various other languages but of course the centrality is with persian as it has been since the century the 13th century in much of the art production so may i suggest that we emphasize the sharedness heritage the cosmopolitan nature of this work they attempt to reach universally beyond the confines of any particular country to a world interested in arts that display similarities and differences with the most familiar artistic tradition that we have had and that's the european traditions the question i have is uh we know we seem to know very little about the processes of production of this art the ateliers the studios the workshops and how did they differ the eco the economies of this production who did who did what first who were behad proteges who worked there were the scripts written first and images come later or did they did the images come first and the script to follow the headings that you alluded to iranian is that an original heading or it's not so it does that depend on the site of production or not how about the usage of color and the material that goes into color production those things are i think should be the subject of future research of course much of it but at least you can update us as to state of the arts in these fields thank you very much you want me to speak to that okay can we get the slides going are the slides going um so yeah well to speak to your first point um about the inclusiveness i think by doing that we're actually replicating historical we're replicating the history and one could see so many instances of this for example in mogul india in the 1590s with the um a the translation house that akbar established where so many like a chagatai texts were translated and for example the babur name which we saw before and also um hindustan texts from hindustan like the mahabharata for example that was translated into the razam name which was about a conversation these translations did not take place between an individual who is bilingual and just looking at text it was a conversation between one who's reading the sanskrit able to speak persian talk explaining the text to someone else and then another individual who has beautiful persian prose writing creating the text so and that sort of shared history is important and it brings us into the contemporary because you have artists such as um shazia sikandar who goes back to her own history which is an indian history but involves sort of india and pakistan for example but she's going into sort of she's looking back to a persianate environment right so that speaks to your first point the second point you you mentioned workshops and unfortunately we only have a few documents that speak about workshops we have rasheed aldine's walk where he specifies how he wants the works that he wrote to be illustrated and disseminated in persian and arabic and this happened he wrote it uh it's like the illustrated versions we have are ones dated 13 14 so it's around that area so we do get a scent a little bit of sense of processes in that there's another document in the 15th century called the azardasht which is sort of a progress report like this artist did so much this artist and that gives us a small window a glimpse into workshop practices and then we have a third document that could also be considered important but we don't have much about how these workshops were organized we have pictures like the one that jack showed earlier on um so a lot of it is guesswork and some of the guesswork has to do with a code ecological look at the manuscript who d who wrote it first and so uh what choir sort of was written and then when it was illuminated and when it was illustrated so these can be broken down but it's we're on shaky ground um and then there are of course the dissemination of the great world workshops in the safavid period pretty much after what would you say chatama's period a little bit later where it seems like you have individuals not so much attached to the court but working in the bazaar for example and then i'll open it up yeah in relation to the first point i would say that this was in fact a point very much on our mind i mean this was probably one of the most major conversations between herod and myself and chris and and mary jane that and i think the nature of the exhibit shows that the inclusion of afran produced material produced by afghans by a tajiks by you know what as far as we could get our hands on the collection in fact it was at the forefront of the thought about the exhibit so and and very much i i felt very much gratified by that approach um and i also think that jack's presentation in fact was focused on that i mean in fact he asked the question what does the persian book mean and all the components that come to it and build it so i don't mean to say that your warning is not needed but i want to say that it's very much something that has been on people's minds in producing this exactly because it adds to the richness and opens horizons for us to explore and understand the situation better and i'm very much hoping that that's what the library and the team has been focusing to do on the question of process of production i think when there are workshops and major historic instances there are which mass production takes place then there are all these questions that become very relevant how do these people go forward but in many many instances there are individualistic and smaller group micro kind of production and i think the manuscripts themselves could help us in some way for example the papers don't have watermark and i don't buy it for one instant that because the paper um and the mold thank you because the molds were not metallic and they were mostly made of wood that they could not create the watermark i think they were absolutely capable of creating watermark if they wanted to it was just that paper making was not prestigious enough was not at the level of being signed until later on the european paper made that of interest to people so in some instances i think we just have to be guided by individual manuscripts and because the collection i worked on was partly medical partly literally partly artistic it became very clear to me that the one issue that we have is the division in the academy the person who trains as a scientist is not a historian of science the person who's a historian doesn't not does not know enough um science or no you know so they don't speak to each other so sometimes i had manuscripts that i had to go to scientists or physicians and explain it to them to try and understand what is actually in a manuscript so i'm assuming that in the art history the same division may be between people who understand the intricacies of the art as opposed to the ones who know enough historical background to come together one last point i think in terms of which was made first in the majority of the cases because we have manuscripts that the areas of illustration were left undone that most probably the illuminations and illustrations were carried out later and in cases that we are not lucky they were carried out by someone who didn't know the text well or was not enough of an expert but in a lot of cases for you know when the book was given to a collection of an important person the illustrator would be of the same caliber and we also have mogul manuscripts which have a lot quite a bit of notations in the margins that give sort of directions so it seems like this relationship between text and image is sometimes mediated by a supervisor who's saying to the painter this paint this so that's another bit of evidence i left out and also later on when you have let's say the rise of the individual artist 15 16th century and you have what we think one painter taking care of a page which i'll show you you do have more um more thought and sort of the po the painter becomes a poet as it were um here's like this painting i love this is something i worked on for my doctoral thesis so it's signed by muhammad zaman and um you see that his signature appears in the little tambourine and he's illustrating not a typical scene of bahram visiting one of the beautiful princesses who tells him an edifying story but he's illustrating the story that the indian princess tells so a story within a story and these have been illustrated but not very frequently and there's no sort of solid iconographic tradition that's being repeated and repeated so this shows sort of the freedom of the artist thinking like a painter and as an artist um so if you have new questions go ahead we see lots of the influences of the european art and also christian iconography my question is when it started uh during the time of shah tahman or later or during the time of ismail safavid because i know that berlin is some of blindi's people came to to to persia at that time and then there's one characteristic about the paintings of the 15th century that so many scenes were in one theme because i don't know why the artists were doing they were showing different scenes and one this tradition started with the paintings of musamusawa and continued until bazaar and then if mr heideli agrees he is the utter sheikh called cultural of afghanistan in the national archive of afghanistan we have a series of painting about maybe 35 illustrations from one maharak from one album which shows different episodes of yusuf zalaika it's not combined in one it's about 35 or 40 paintings and it does not have any writing that was very interesting for me i think someone has to with the permission of the afghan embassy should study those paintings i i love because i was only for two weeks in kabul i couldn't do lots of research on that but that was very very different than the other illustration which was done on the tradition of bazodian school and that's a suggestion and first thing was as a question thank you do you want me to okay so about um the contact uh let's just say um iran here with uh or that's the but we could go back to that that's a really sweet painting um foreign so this relationship with europe is very exciting one and a very old one i mean we do have textual references to this notion of ferengi saazo ferengi much earlier than the 17th century and one could imagine that they understood that there was a mode of painting from europe as early as let's say the 13th 14th century with rasheed aldine for example in the 14th century bringing in works from the latin west but then there's this really intellectual engagement with the arts of europe in the 17th century and it was a result of continuous interaction between european communities resident in iran so you have the missionaries in iran giving license to build and to live into practice by sha abbas the initial years of the 17th century and they're there you also have the armenian christians who have this global network who are bringing material in and of course start the the first printing press working in iran um and this is something i've worked really hard to do with my work on this material is to not talk about influences because influences of course makes one person passive and one person active but the individual exactly so the individual who is creating and is being inspired that's the active participant not the passive one so i try to stay away from this notion of influence and look at sort of engagement and so here you have a wonderful example of this engagement again by muhammad zaman with a rather long inscription that was done for suleiman in the sixth late i think 1670s or something is the date or 1689 or something and here he's looking at a print that's coming out of an antwerp workshop and it's initially based on rubens yeah and he's changing mary um so she'll look a little bit more beautiful of course he's using green for the veil of mary and he's not necessarily in his translation process what he's doing is what i think he's doing is he's illustrating a story of the return of maryam in esau that is being revitalized and was always part of the textual tradition in kisasa lambia for example stories of the prophets right so that's what he's illustrating he's not just copying but he's thinking you know here's a really interesting print that you know you could see the full body form the volume and has a bit of perspective and i'm gonna make this part of my tradition and that's what fascinates me about persian art and persian poetry is that it's constantly engaging and then deciding what it wants to do with the material and putting a spin on it so that's a real interest of mine so thank you for your question um if i may just um follow up on one very important point that i think amy made that in the issue of influence if we can get away from that and really think more in terms of confluence and that may help with the idea that earlier on ahmad raised that probably thinking in terms of the bigger regions and bigger constellations of art if we're not worried about who's making the influence on who who's the authentic the original who's the copier if we can get rid of that and free ourselves from that then i think we would be much opener to the idea of seeing the diversity the confluence the exchange and the kind of the vibrancy that results there and you see that sort of in the indian style of poetry you know the poor indian style poetry was fascinating you know that that's a great period but it had the weight of sort of influence of india you know and it's i think you know scholars nowadays are showing that i was uh actually talking about the iconography of christian religion coming to this region you know it it happened in india also in the time of akbar and it influence not and it inspired all right many artists of that period to do paintings of such style which is very interesting i'm not criticizing it it's it's a new phase of looking because it is not flat anymore it's not two-dimensional it has shades and has volumes it has background you know and and that says very important in each page you get separated because it stands for itself it's not the whole story combined in one painting thank you for this conversation i'm really enjoying it i wanted to bring up the issue of uh images outside or miniatures or painting outside the context of the book obviously this is done in honor of the exhibit on a thousand years of the book so i'm happy with that part of it but what does the fact that the painting and the prestigious paint prestige painting is actually contained in a book what does that um tell us as opposed to for instance an explosion of imagery on other media or other online walls or separate paintings and does that is that supposed to give us the message that the book was the prestige item that that if you could just basically share your thoughts about the fact that these precious paintings are actually contained within books and surrounded by texts and that would be lovely i think that's just another well i i can't give you any reasons why certain productions were put in books and others were not but but there there is this interesting variation on the theme and that's the album which does not contain any text which is a collection of of images so it it raises um for me at least it suggests that there were a lot of images produced freestanding and um and then collected images on paper and that were collected by wealthy people and some of those albums of course were that amy had a slide on a few minutes ago from golestan of saudi and which had two pictures which were once set a set apart with the text and then were razored out and put together and i guess i don't know it i've always had the impression at least that that uh books were so popular because they were handy it was a nice portable way of looking at lots of material in one place and so i guess it was prestigious to the extent that you had the money to pay for it i don't know but i think that my art historian colleague will be speaking more intelligently to this but i also have this feeling that you can actually say this about about a lot of the art produced in that part of the world that it's very much a part of life it is not something that you just set aside and enjoy visually it becomes a part of the text it becomes part of the carpet you walk on it becomes part of the you know the candle holder or whatever is in your life and i think as such these drawings also come kind of closer to you kind of come down the wall and come to your life by being a part of the book you handle as jack mentioned and um i think that there was something else that i wanted to add to that that escapes me right now but yeah i think the personal aspect of that is very important um just really quickly uh it's that's a wonderful question and it's a very simple question often the simplest questions are the most difficult and really make you think um well you know one always says it's this emphasis on al-kitab sort of the book the quran and this respect for writing of the quran but we know sort of there's so many different veins of a culture than just that and what does it say about different communities and peoples that live sort of in historic iran where the book was always emphasized and was emphasized as the medium for art historical for artistic innovation and the best artists were working in arts of the book and we talk about what makes a great patron in the persian eight sphere and that is one with a large library and a one that had different copies of the great poets and so that's really interesting so it's an issue of you know one respect for the the text the poetry how much that poetry as you were saying fatima is interwoven into your life and also not just you personally because what's interesting is a book is something an object that we think of just one person holding but there were also objects that supported social interaction like at the modulus for example so i find that interesting and also you have to think about different sizes of books whereas some are very small and personal companies you have these huge manuscripts as well you know of the chathame where you could think of a number of people sitting around and not just reading but also riffing off of what's being read um so it's a very interesting question and then when it goes into albums and paintings are removed from their proper text you're dealing with people you're dealing with with uh groups of people who are so well versed in poetry that they see the image and you know you know this better than i do but i what i'm saying this to you in this way is that i think that's an important point to communicate to the public because poetry has been lost very much in a with the american youth and they don't have that sort of joy and education and i think that's something that the persian communities could could bring out yeah so that's very long actually making a comeback in the american society through poetry slams which is wonderful but i remembered my point and i want to say and that is no i mean that was wonderful because i think it it is kind of bounces off of what jack was saying because these images were so so in integral to the story so the book was the place for them because they were telling the story and actually in the persian tradition of iran i'm not that i'm not knowledgeable on whether the same thing happened in afghanistan or tajikistan or other areas around but was also very common you would have an image there and you would provide the text but the images were what made the text come to life so i think probably part of the reason why the images are in the book is because they make the book come to life i'm glad you got to pair the honey that was the point i had just in here i wanted to talk and ask you about well i'd like to participate in this conversation because i have a thought that has been on my mind for a long time and i want to share it and see if if you can correct me or respond to it and that is that coming from the field of anthropology and sociology and being in love with imagery of persian art um i have always thought about the characters that are depicted in these pictures and in these paintings and i pay attention to specifically the that idea of who is passive who is active on the scene um stratification um who commissioned this work is this a regal royal aristocratic art of course when you talk about manuscripts in gold and silver-leafed margins and things like that right over there you can lean towards thinking that these were the arts of the court and then being the persian i know like fatima says those are stories of honey or those poems and proverbs are part of iranian's everyday life one thing about the manuscripts that we saw today i wanted to make this point that it seems that even in such regal paintings and valuable pieces of work that the wealthy people commissioned and the kings gave money to the best of the safavid artists to paint or depict you do see quite a few other characters that are not marginal they are very active like bricklayers and the chef who's making kebab or this servant or the musician or the paper maker there's a vast array of professions and skills and plebians if you will there are these little equivalents of norman rockwell scenes if you will kind of behind the very detailed curvy linear stylized royal paintings am i correct on the right path or not jacquard that's not something that i'm really familiar i'm not really familiar with the the the functions of the images or the or the particular characters in it except just to the extent that they have religious themes that's kind of the extent of my and um we often cite 15th century or the bazodian style as a period the 15th century where there's greater interest in these other characters going on not just the great heroes or the kings but these little vignettes of everyday scene so you're right to point that out um and then you have you know like the image of the translators and the moktavkane you have that for example um and then in the single page sorry this isn't going well but in this here it is um you have hindu and muslim translators so they're not great kings or heroes and then when you have the single page you also have like the individual dervish you have a man on the street for example so you see different types of people coming out in the single page but also sometimes when in a manuscript you have a what panorama of people and then you have a king in the center or some other people important people the general background makes them stand out so while these people are seen and you know they're included but their ordinariness makes the extraordinariness of others more apparent so i think it probably is something that will have to be studied with reference to each individual scene to to make some kind of a social anthropological sense out of it and that also goes in parallel with um some scholars cite an increase in um more individuals being named in tazkaray literature so you have more individuals not just great you know there's a number of different poets and we track that to around the 15th century and that has parallel developments i think in the painting and with the signatures so i'm looking at all these beautiful paintings but i somehow forget that these were built and made in an islamic land where the religion somehow discourages painting of human figures so i'm wondering how did this happen or what happened do you want to take it well this is a this is a really interesting topic i think and uh i i think it's useful to start with the fact of the documents and what a lot of people do when they see these things is to jump to conclusions and say well either they were not muslims or they were bad muslims or in some cases there were those pesky shiites that that's how some people dismiss this problem you know but the fact the matter is there are thousands of these images that have been respectfully and most affectionately portrayed and the thing to keep in mind that in different times in different places images which are rarely meant to be likenesses until very late are used for educational purposes and for purposes of entertainment and um i'm reminded of the the literature the early say the hadith literature there there are contradictory hadiths sayings attributed to muhammad about what one does with visual images i mean you can pretty much take your pick some of them say have a very make a very harsh judgment on the very existence of these things others say well it depends on what you're going to use it for others say depends where it is in the house and the story of of the prophet muhammad going to the kaaba in the year 630 and as the saying goes cleansing the kaaba and a member of his party found a picture of mary and jesus a madonna and asked should i destroy it he said no take care of it nobody's nobody's going to misuse it and so there's such a wide range of of purposes or pardon me attitudes even in the earliest sources but what i what i the way i try to look at it is who did this what are they trying to do with it and what function did it serve and there are so very few instances that i've seen in which these these images were created for simply flat out unacceptable purposes idolatrous purposes i mean there are very few of them i think that that fit in that category but unfortunately i think a lot of people hear muslims don't do images and i say have you ever been in the bookstore of your local mosque and they said well those are pictures for kids yes but they are pictures and they're pictures of human beings why do you not have a problem with that are you are you suggesting that everybody who goes to that mosque is you know not up to snuff as a muslim so it's a very complicated issue i think it's a fascinating cultural question but i think it's important to start with the assumption that these images which are beautiful and obviously the product of tremendous effort and devotion are almost never intended to be defaming in any way yeah i would just add to that that sometimes certain pieces of religious text or a certain quote or something is picked up and generalized and very much they're kind of the for the lack of a better word the orientalist literature that first approaches or writes about persia and many other places around it has that expectation it has the expectation that a good muslim would not be a good poet that a good muslim would not draw pictures and then that is given precedence over the actual facts there i mean it may be hard for us to now believe but for a very long time orientalists who wrote on roomie considered him anti-poetry they said that he wrote some poetry because he had to he had no choice but he hated it and a guy you know produced thousands and thousands of the most beautiful vibrant kind of poetry you can think of so i think the point of making that the facts on the ground are far more important than the general perceptions that you know i i very much appreciate all the analysis that it's that it's taking place here on this painting but one thing that i would like to hear i have always wanted to hear or see is the analysis that um dr kind of touch on that like in term of color composition line patterning and these are something that i hardly hear and these are the elements that might actually connect these painting to 21st century so we can take it to classroom and we can talk about it it seems it's all only belong to scholars and that's that's really a um it creates a boundary for these paintings that's a good point and let's go through this together then um so let's take this for example and then we could go to a more traditional painting i see your point how do you engage people who are not reading the text and who are not going to want to talk about history but want to talk about just the art and how do you bring it up to the contemporary day so here on the right hand side with the muhammad zaman one you could talk about color and so he's understanding this issue of modulating forms through his interaction with european art but at the same time he's coming back to a very persian aesthetic sensibility which is defining figures through blocks of color and blocks of vibrant color and then you could sort of bring it out to what are other artists in europe or in america that define form through color and also artists that were let's say inspired by islamic art and then for example this issue of pattern you see he's looking at the cloud in the print after rubens and yet he's reducing it to not reducing it i'm sorry that's the wrong word but he's reconfiguring it to pattern in the sky which is going back to a very sort of old tradition of sort of these types of clouds in the sky so he's engaging with his tradition um yeah there's so much to be said about that and i'm happy to have a conversation with you afterwards um but i'll stop there but it's a very good point thank you yeah i am wondering if i mean if that would make it more accessible in classroom i think it's a wonderful area we need to explore it we need to have experts to do to deal with that but i think that if we don't up until the time that that happens i would still not say that these images only belong to the scholars they are parts of life their images of people engage in different aspects of their lives and related to the story so i i would still hope that we would bring it to classroom and make them come to life and then hopefully all those other layers of knowledge and and exploration will follow and you also have to understand um my position and those in the audience there's many who are much better than me in the audience of being an art historian um sort of how we're trained and we were also trained to be careful of let's say the collectors in paris in the late 19th century who are loving persian paintings and taking them out of books and putting them on the walls because of the wonderful colors for example and just talked about the forms and it was very important for people in later generations to talk about the text to contextualize it um yeah so i hope that also speaks to your question here i have i have to tell you something i'm sorry i'm taking so much but i'm very much interested in the subject uh painting did not exist as an in in the independent art in in islamic world until 11th century before that especially during the period of hamayats and abbasid in afghanistan persia and transactions we don't see so much independent paintings but we see some mural paintings which was done during the time of masood raznavi because he'd love decorations and there are some examples of him from and safar in herat which are in british museum british lab right now and uh also about the the use of the colors the colors until 17th century did not come from europe like the paper which they were using were created domestically so there was two kind of kind of pain pain pigments that they use one which was coming from minerals and one which was coming from the plants like flowers like leaves and then they were using artists were mixing their own pink paint segments that's why in 17th century you see the whole different array of colors because from europe yes excuse me sorry and actually this gentleman over here yes there so one of the things i wanted to ask about was kind of a missing link between the language and then the paleography so even if you've studied persian for many years as a foreigner you can't really access these once roosbay said it was gorikhtan you know iranian then you can begin to make it out and this is something i think that could be addressed both in the schools and the museums when i was in france you know if you look at roman tombstones they have the latin and then they have you know in the little card next to it like dot dot dot letters that are there and then they have the complete latin they have the translation here and you mentioned having translation i think that's one thing but then there's the missing link how does somebody who knows a little bit about the script relate that to this because it's kind of uh and i don't know if iranians or afghans are able to just read this or based on training and i don't know much about that yeah yeah yeah no that's an excellent point so it's not just sort of the english but you also want to speak to the people who know per can read it but then can't read the nostal leak yeah that's a great point okay actually i have a question because this is something that uh well here on and mary jane i've heard this many times the question of when we created this exhibit was the struggle not to make it because we're putting out incredibly beautiful and in some ways exotic things but as fatima said these things are created out of a living community you know and it's one of the things that uh you know i think we have to uh try to inculcate into our viewers that this you know that the people who made these books are not a kind even if the books seem exotic they're not a kind of human exotica and that's how how do you take such beautiful objects made often for a uh a very elite audience and connected to the fact that you know this is part of a community yes yes absolutely it's really difficult and you know bravo to you for doing such a good job because you're only given a certain amount of text to give and you have to explain so much to the american public and and you did for example a wonderful access point was the children's stories which i thought was very one of the many successful parts of your exhibition yeah i think that um that's that's a great point that um the kind of extreme beauty of these objects could give them a kind of foreignness it it could um tempt one to think of them as the other or something very different um and we are living in and you know very often thinking of people and cultures that are not familiar for us in those terms but at the same time the objects themselves provide the very practical side of things when you actually read the text when you connect with the the history of it the the the how was it acquired how was it produced it all dimensions of life come into it and i think one way one that um you guys really managed to bring life into this was first keeping in mind the vastness of this area that you were dealing with that and the multiculturality of it if you like within that culture and also the span of coming to the present time so that you can see the time differences i loved the way the idea of gender was brought out and so i think in a very creative way all different aspects of the reality of life was brought into the picture i think it's helpful for me at least to think in terms of a broad socio-cultural spectrum of the arts and every museum i can think of is full of elite art there may be a little corner where there are or a special exhibit in which the folk arts or the quilting or that this sort of thing comes in sort of a little corner of the museum that becomes a an anthropological display at some point but i i don't uh it doesn't seem odd for me at all to to think about these extremely expensive extremely delicate things whether it's calligraphy or or painting things that would take months and months per page and in some cases six or eight specialists in different aspects of the art to think that that just because it is elite it that it is somehow dis divorced from uh the life of ordinary people uh most art is elite art and so you know i think that uh that doesn't sort of take away from its uh connection to ordinary folks necessarily yeah and perhaps the struggle of each artist to stay connected with life while they are dealing with the elitist side of the work what they have to do the training you cannot easily do this not everyone can sit down and do the copying do the illustration do the writing but that struggle of staying connected with life as part of the creativity or the creative energy that finally leads to the production of the work and i think ultimately good art as the one that despite being elitist speaks to a broader uh group of people and i think it's also the art of the elite that survives too that's part of that on that theme of popularizing or trying to popularize elite art i know that iran for example is now printing a great many of the manuscripts and so can you address the idea of printing versus keeping these manuscripts as objedar if you want and to be exhibited and printing them and popularizing them is printing going to devalue the object simply by making it more popular and available to others or can it be seen as an educational tool or is it just another collection item well i think that digitization is going to take over and with printed material and with manuscripts and arts and it's a great blessing because ultimately only the ones who've done enough training and have enough interest are going to go look for the material that's related to them but the basic accessibility is there one thing that for example in iran i am really impressed with is the amount of books you can find online now you don't necessarily always find the edition exactly that you want by you know your favorite editor but one one of the pastimes of the people is just to put one book online make it available to someone and i think that it is something that is happening and it's a good thing to happen still we will have people working in there you know the definition of being an elite and elitist will change a little bit but i think it's a great thing good thank you because it it's actually something that we're doing we're actually digitizing a lot of our manuscripts and so i was sort of you know wondering are we in the on the right track i think it's wonderful it's my opinion okay we have we have just about one minute so this will have to be the last question okay i want to go back to the point i made earlier about the anthropologist here and i want to say that part of art is also the viewer each viewer sees a different thing in the same piece of art and some of those very elitist images and artwork they cannot help but reveal some arts of the very lower class libyan people for instance if you go around i'll give you two examples and i'll be done we are in washington dc if you go to the capitol building and you see that huge muriel beautiful painting of declaration of independence when i look at it what i look at is besides this historical context i noticed that there is a vivid persian hand-knotted either made in turkey or haris or in some village in iran underneath of all these guys who are signing the declaration of independence if you go to blair house the protocol house of the white house in one of the rooms where hundreds of ambassadors and kings of various uh countries have come to visit on the floor is the bacteri nine by thirteen so those guys do not escape my view even though they are not elitist they keep they send me right to the bacteria tents around shiraz and kush thank you very much okay it is now three o'clock which i believe is when we wrap this up i would like to thank our three panelists uh who have given us a very enlightening discussion and i'd like to thank all of you who contributed to it as the audience with that thank you this has been a presentation of the library of congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 104,819

Rating: 4.0809917 out of 5

Keywords: Library of Congress, Persian Language (Human Language), Book

Id: qfMHxU49Su0

Length: 168min 50sec (10130 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 09 2014