The Lost Treasures Persian Art. Vladimir Lukonin
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mere light reading – it was valued as “a book full of wise thoughts”.
Thus, towards the end of the Sassanian period several literary genres already existed as well as official history and religious works. Tradition relates that the last of Iran’s shahanshahs, Yazdegerd III, commissioned a scholar called Daneshvar to compile a dynastic history.
This book, the Khwataw-namak (Book of Rulers), grouped together myths, historical romance and royal records in a single cycle. This marked the beginning of a written tradition, although one must bear in mind that such works would hardly have found a wide readership. Written Middle Persian was extremely complicated and hard to understand. It involved a vast quantity of heterograms and in addition the lack of vowel points and the enormous polysemy of individual signs made the writing so difficult that contemporaries had good reason to name it “the devil’s script”. When reading these books, dabirs (scribes) and priests often had to “translate” them into spoken Persian.
To make this clearer (for the problems of literature and language will play an important role later on in this account), we will cite the literal translation of one section from the Sassanian romance, Book of the Deeds of Ardashir:
“(1) In the book of the deeds of Ardashir, son of Papak, it is thus written that after the death of Alexander Rumi in the kingdom of Iran there were 240 rulers of principalities. (2) Isfahan, Parsa and the adjacent provinces were under the hand of the governor Ardawan. (3) Papak was marzban and governor of Parsa and was among those designated by Ardawan. (4) Ardawan sat at Istakhr (5) and Papak did not have any son to bear [his] name. (6) And Sasan was shepherd to Papak and always to be found among the sheep, but [he] was of the line of Darius.”
Everything underlined in this text was written in heterograms. And this is one of the easiest texts! Consequently, as previously under the Parthians, the basic literary works – epics, folk tales and true histories – were recited by poets and gosans, versifiers of epics, at courts and the castles of “knights”. Their names have survived and in later works there are a number of stories about their talent and their outstanding role in court life, for example the story of Barbad, the gosan of the shahanshah Khusrau II. We know only four lines from one of his poems, but these are the oldest verses at present known in the Dari language – the spoken language of late Sassanian Iran, which was to become the Iranian literary language two centuries later. They were preserved by the Arabic-speaking historian, Ibn Khurdadhbih: “Caesar [here the Byzantine emperor] is like the moon, but Khakan [king of the Turks] is like the sun. But my lord [Khusrau II] is a mighty cloud [Khusrau II was called Parwiz, “cloud”]. When he wishes he will cover the moon; when he wishes, the sun”.
These unsophisticated verses are one of the first examples of the ruba’i, the quatrain, a literary form that was to become extremely widespread in the Iran of the age of Islam.
It is beyond the scope of this study even to draw up a brief list of the problems connected with the new Islamic religion, which has been the dominant ideology in Iran from the 7th century to the present day.
However, one of its aspects is of great importance. From the very beginning, Islam rejected figurative representation, or more exactly the depiction of living creatures, as a means of propagating its ideas. In this respect Islam differed from Buddhism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, which made widespread use of figurative representation and had for a long time anthropomorphised their deities. This hostile attitude towards the depiction of living creatures – though in essence only towards anthropomorphic representation as an object of worship – had a number of consequences that were decisive for the development of art in Iran.
Firstly, it caused a gradual decline of monumental art forms such as rock reliefs, stucco panels and wall-painting (although we know that the latter existed in eastern Iran up to the 13th century, and in central and western Iran up to the 17th century).
Secondly, it diminished the status of the artist, at any rate during the first centuries of Islam when it expelled him from the ranks of those creating works pleasing to God, and transformed his occupation into something not entirely commendable from the point of view of religious morality.
Thirdly, it narrowed the range of new themes that could emerge, above all the religious ones which were central to all Christian and Buddhist art – the depiction of God and his deeds, the stories of prophets and saints – everything on which an artistic impression of the world was founded in non-Muslim cultures during the Middle Ages. The reasons why anthropomorphic representation was unnecessary in the propagation of Islam are complex and have not been satisfactorily elucidated. We will examine a few of them here.
Theology, in the true sense of the word, took shape very late in Islam. Early Islam was interested only in external ritual observance and it elaborated questions of religious law, but despite this, in the 8th century, as Vasily Bartold writes, in Islam “the same disputes about God and his relationship to man were arising as in Christianity; apart from the direct influence of Christian dogma on that of Islam, this can be explained by the identical conditions in which both religions found themselves”.[14]
Especially important is the school of theology of the Mutazilites (from the Arabic for “separatists”). This school, which created Islam’s first carefully elaborated theological system, made widespread use of Greek devices and achievements in logic and philosophy, particularly those of Aristotle. Its fundamental thesis was “the cognition of the divine unity”.
The Mutazilites resolutely opposed the concept of God in human form and of his attributes or qualities which were invented by man, even those such as “omnipotent” or “all-seeing”, for these are “conceivable” categories. According to the doctrine of the Mutazilites, God is a unity that is pure, undefinable in human terms and unknowable.
It was during the flourishing of the Mutazilites that the following hadiths (traditions of the words and deeds of the prophet Muhammad) first gained popularity: “artists will be tormented on the Day of Judgement […] and they will be told: bring your own creations to life”.
But one must bear in mind that from the point of view of its structure Islamic theology was in no way comparable to, say, that of Christianity. Firstly, though it became a state religion, even the dogmatic theology of the Mutazilites remained such for only a few decades. Secondly, Islamic law pervaded all aspects of social life (even contracts for buying and selling had to be agreed upon in the presence of a religious judge, a qadi), yet it was not founded on any absolute and clearly formulated law, but had four bases: the Koran, the hadiths, ijma – consensus of opinion between the faqihs (the authoritative theologians), and qiyas – the method of analogy with the Koran or the hadiths.
In consequence, one can fully understand why the faqihs held various opinions on the subject of the “hadiths of the artists”, but views such as the following, expressed by Abu al-Farisi in the mid-10th century, were more or less general:
But if someone should say: “surely it is said in the hadith, “the artists will be tormented on the Day of Judgement”, and in other hadiths, “and they will be told: bring your own creations to life”, then the words “the artists will be tormented” relate to those who depict Allah in the flesh. And as far as any addition to that is concerned, these are communications of isolated individuals who are unworthy of trust. And as we have noted, the ijma does not dispute this opinion.[15]
Oleg Bolshakov, who has studied the known sources on this question, formulates his conclusions as follows: “Defining the permissibility of this or that depiction, the jurists proceeded first of all from the consideration of the extent to which they are dangerous as potential objects of worship. Disagreement between the various scholars arose over the attempt to define this very matter.”[16]
But the existence of persistent disagreements even between the faqihs did not, and never could, give rise to any official and general prohibition. Of course, in the history of Muslim theologians’ attitudes towards figurative art there have been periods when a more rigorous attitude prevailed, and even periods of persecution and extreme reaction (not until the 17th and 18th centuries, it is true, and then only in individual Islamic
Bartold 1969–1977, vol. VI, p. 121.
Bolshakov 1969, pp. 148, 149.
Ibid., p. 150.