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struck with the desire to express his pain and the disaster he’d witnessed

through painting, which until that day, he’d belittled and deemed an affront

to Allah; and so, making use of the paper he always carried with him, he

depicted what he saw from the top of the minaret. We owe the happy miracle

of the three-hundred-year renaissance in Islamic illustration following the

Mongol invasion to that element which distinguished it from the artistry of

pagans and Christians; that is, to the truly agonizing depiction of the world

from an elevated Godlike position attained by drawing none other than a

horizon line. We owe this renaissance to the horizon line, and also to Ibn

Shakir’s going north after the massacre he witnessed—in the direction the

Mongol armies had come from—carrying with him his paintings and the

ambition for illustration in his heart; in brief, we owe much to his learning the

painting techniques of the Chinese masters. Thereby, it is evident that the

notion of endless time that had rested in the hearts of Arab calligrapher-

scribes for five hundred years would finally manifest itself not in writing, but

in painting. The proof of this resides in the fact that the illustrations in

manuscripts and volumes that had been torn apart and vanished have passed

into other books and other volumes to survive forever in their revelation of

Allah’s worldly realm.

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BA

Once upon a time, not so very long ago yet not so recently, everything

imitated everything else, and thus, if not for aging and death, man would’ve

never been the wiser about the passage of time. Yes, when the worldly realm

was repeatedly presented through the same stories and pictures, as if time did

not flow, Fahir Shah’s small army routed Selahattin Khan’s soldiers—as Salim

of Samarkand’s concise History attests. After the victorous Fahir Shah captured

Selahattin Khan and tortured him to death, his first task in asserting his

sovereignty, according to custom, was to visit the library and the harem of the

vanquished khan. In the library, the late Selahattin Khan’s experienced binder

pulled apart the dead shah’s books, and rearranging the pages, began to

assemble new volumes. His calligraphers replaced the epithet of “Always

Victorious Selahattin Khan” with that of “Victorious Fahir Shah” and his

miniaturists set about replacing the late Selahattin Khan—masterfully

portrayed on the most beautiful of manuscript pages—who was, as of that

moment, starting to fade from people’s memories, with the portrait of the

younger Fahir Shah. Upon entering the harem, Fahir Shah had no difficulty in

locating the most beautiful woman there, yet instead of forcing himself upon

her, because he was a refined man versed in books and artistry, and resolving

to win her heart, he engaged her in conversation. Consequently, Neriman

Sultan, the late Selahattin Khan’s belle of beauties, his teary-eyed wife, made

but one request of Fahir Shah: that the illustration of her husband in a version

of the romance Leyla and Mejnun, wherein Leyla was depicted as Neriman

Sultan and Mejnun as Selahattin Khan, not be altered. In at least this one page,

she maintained, the immortality that her husband had tried to attain over the

years through books should not be denied. The victorious Fahir Shah bravely

granted this simple request and his masters of the book left that one picture

alone. Thereby, Neriman and Fahir immediately made love and within a short

period, forgetting the horrors of the past, came to truly love each other. Still,

Fahir Shah could not forget that picture in Leyla and Mejnun. Nay, it wasn’t

jealousy that made him uneasy or that his wife was portrayed with her old

husband. What gnawed at him was this: Since he wasn’t painted in the old

legend in that splendid book, he wouldn’t be able to join the ranks of the

immortals with his wife. This worm of doubt ate at Fahir Shah for five years,

and at the end of a blissful night of copious lovemaking with Neriman,

candlestick in hand, he entered the library like a common thief, opened the

volume of Leyla and Mejnun, and in place of the face of Neriman’s late

husband, drew his own. Like many khans who had a love for illustrating and

painting, however, he was an amateur artist and couldn’t portray himself very

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well. In the morning, when his librarian opened the book on a suspicion of

tampering and beheld another figure in place of the late Selahattin Khan, next

to Neriman-faced Leyla, rather than identifying it as Fahir Shah, he announced

that it was Fahir Shah’s archenemy, the young and handsome Abdullah Shah.

This gossip provoked Fahir Shah’s soldiers and emboldened Abdullah Shah, the

young and aggressive new ruler of the neighboring country, who,

subsequently, in his first campaign, defeated, captured and killed Fahir Shah,

established his own sovereignty over his enemy’s library and harem and

became the new husband of the eternally beautiful Neriman Sultan.

DJIM

The miniaturists of Istanbul recount the legend of Tall Mehmet—known as

Muhammad Khorasani in Persia—mostly as an example of long life and

blindness. However, the legend of Tall Mehmet is essentially a parable of

painting and time. The primary distinction of this master, who, having begun

his apprenticeship at the age of nine, illustrated for more or less 110 years

without going blind, was his lack of distinction. I’m not being witty here, but

expressing my sincere admiration. Tall Mehmet drew everything, as everyone

else did, in the style of the great masters of old, but even more so, and for this

reason, he was the greatest of all masters. His humbleness and complete

devotion to illustration and painting, which he deemed a service to Allah, set

him above both the disputes within the book-arts workshops where he worked

and the ambition to become head miniaturist, though he was of appropriate

age and talent. As a miniaturist, for 110 years, he patiently rendered every

trivial detail: grass drawn to fill up the edges of the page, thousands of leaves,

curly wisping clouds, horse manes of short repetitive strokes, brick walls,

never-ending wall ornamentation and the slant-eyed, delicate-chinned tens of

thousands of faces that were each an imitation of one another. Tall Mehmet

was quite content and reserved and he never presumed to distinguish himself

or insisted about style or individuality. He considered whichever khan’s or

prince’s workshop he happened to be working in at the time his house and

regarded himself as but a fixture in that home. As khans and shahs strangled

one another and miniaturists moved from city to city like the women of the

harem to assemble under the auspices of new masters, the style of the new

book-arts workshop would first be defined in the leaves Tall Mehmet drew, in

his grass, in the curves of his rocks and in the hidden contours of his own

patience. When he was eighty years old, people forgot that he was mortal and

began to believe that he lived within the legends he illustrated. Perhaps for this

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reason, some maintained that he existed outside time and would never grow

old and die. There were those who attributed his not going blind—despite

living without a home of his own, sleeping in the rooms or tents which

constituted miniaturists’ workshops and spending most of his time staring at

manuscript pages—to the miracle of time having ceased to flow for him. Some

claimed that he was actually blind, and no longer had any need to see since he

painted from memory. At the age of 119, this legendary master who’d never

married and had never even made love, met the flesh-and-blood ideal of the

beautiful slant-eyed, sharp-chinned, moon-faced boy he’d depicted for a

century: a part-Chinese part-Croatian sixteen-year-old apprentice in Shah

Tahmasp’s miniaturists’ workshop, with whom quite abruptly and

understandably, he fell in love. In order to seduce this boy-apprentice of

unimaginable beauty, as a true lover would do, he schemed and joined in

power struggles between miniaturists; he gave himself over to lying, deception

and trickery. At first, the master miniaturist of Khorasan was invigorated by

his attempts to catch up to the artistic fashions he’d successfully avoided for

one hundred years, but this effort also divorced him from the eternal

legendary days of old. Late one afternoon, staring dreamily at the beautiful

apprentice before an open window, he caught cold in the icy Tabriz wind. The

following day, during a fit of sneezing, he went completely blind. Two days

later, he fell down the lofty stone workshop stairs and died.

“I’ve heard the name of Tall Mehmet of Khorasan, but I’ve never heard this

legend,” Black said.

He delicately offered this comment to show he knew the story was finished

and his mind was occupied with what I’d related. I fell silent for a time so he

could stare at me to his heart’s content. Since it bothers me when my hands

are not occupied, just after beginning the second story, I started to paint

again, picking up where I’d left off when Black knocked on the door. My

comely apprentice Mahmut, who always sat at my knee and mixed my paints,

sharpened my reed pens and sometimes erased my errors, silently sat beside

me, listening and staring; from within the house the sounds of my wife’s

movements could be heard.

“Aahaa,” said Black, “the Sultan has arisen.”

He stared at the painting with awe, and I pretended the reason for his awe

was insignificant, but let me tell you candidly: Our Exalted Sultan appears

seated in all two hundred of our circumcision ceremony pictures in the Book of

Festivities, watching for fifty-two days the passing of the merchants, guilds,

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spectators, soldiers and prisoners from the window of the royal enclosure

erected for the occasion. Only in one picture of mine is He shown on foot,

tossing money from florin-filled pouches to the crowds in the square. My aim

was to capture the surprise and excitement of the crowds punching, kicking

and strangling one another as they scrambled to grab coins off the ground,

their asses jutting toward the sky.

“If love is part of the subject of the painting, the work ought to be rendered

with love,” I said. “If there’s pain involved, pain should issue from the

painting. Yet the pain ought to emerge from the at first glance invisible yet

discernible inner harmony of the picture, not from the figures in the

illustration or from their tears. I didn’t depict surprise, as it has been shown

for centuries by hundreds of master miniaturists, as a figure with his index

finger inserted into the circle of his mouth, but made the whole painting

embody surprise. This, I accomplished by inviting the Sovereign to rise to His

feet.”

I was intrigued and bothered by how he scrutinized my possessions and

illustrating tools, nay my whole life, looking for a clue; and then, I began to see

my own house through his eyes.

You know those palace, hamam and castle pictures that were made in Tabriz

and Shiraz for a time; so that the picture might replicate the piercing gaze of

Exalted Allah, who sees and understands all, the miniaturist would depict the

palace in cross-section as though having cut it in half with a huge, magical

straight razor, and he’d paint all the interior details—which could otherwise

never be seen from outside—down to the pots and pans, drinking glasses, wall

ornamentation, curtains, caged parrots, the most private corners, and the

pillows on which reclined a lovely maiden such as had never seen the light of

day. Like a curious awestruck reader, Black was examining my paints, my

papers, my books, my lovely assistant, the pages of a Book of Costumes and the

collage album that I’d made for a Frankish traveler, scenes of fucking and other

indecent pages I’d secretly dashed off for a pasha, my inkpots of variously

colored glass, bronze and ceramic, my ivory penknives, my gold-stemmed

brushes, and yes, the glances of my handsome apprentice.

“Unlike the old masters, I’ve seen a lot of battle, a lot,” I said to fill the

silence with my presence. “War machines, cannonballs, armies, corpses; it was

I who embellished the ceilings of the tents of Our Sultan and our generals.

After a military campaign, upon returning to Istanbul, it was I who recorded

in pictures the scenes of battle that everyone would otherwise have forgotten,

corpses sliced in two, the clash of opposing armies, the soldiers of the

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miserable infidels quaking before our cannon, the troops defending the

crenellated towers of besieged castles, rebels being decapitated and the fury of

horses attacking at full gallop. I commit everything I behold to memory: a new

coffee grinder, a style of window grating that I’ve never seen before, a cannon,

the trigger of a new style of Frankish rifle, who wore what color robe during a

feast, who ate what, who placed his hand where and how…”

“What are the morals of the three stories you’ve told?” asked Black in a

manner that summed everything up and ever so slightly called me to account.

“Alif,” I said. “The first story with the minaret demonstrates that no matter

how talented a miniaturist might be, it is time that makes a picture ”perfect.“