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”Ba,“ the second story with the harem and the library, reveals that the only

way to escape time is through skill and illustrating. As for the third story, you

proceed to tell me, then.”

“Djim!” said Black confidently, “the third story about the one-hundred-

and-nineteen-year-old miniaturist unites ”Alif‘ and “Ba’ to reveal how time

ends for the one who forsakes the perfect life and perfect illuminating, leaving

nothing but death. Indeed, this is what it demonstrates.”

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I AM CALLED “OLIVE”

After the midday prayers, I was ever so swiftly yet pleasurably drawing the

darling faces of boys when I heard a knock at the door. My hand jerked in

surprise. I put down my brush. I carefully placed the work-board that was on

my knees off to the side. Rushing like the wind, I said a prayer before opening

the door. I won’t withhold anything from you, because you, who can hear me

from within this book, are much nearer to Allah than we in this filthy and

miserable world of ours. Akbar Khan, the Emperor of Hindustan and the

world’s richest shah, is preparing what will one day become a legendary book.

To complete his project, he sent word to the four corners of Islamdom inviting

the world’s greatest artists to join him. The men he’d sent to Istanbul visited

me yesterday, inviting me to Hindustan. This time, I opened the door to find,

in their place, my childhood acquaintance Black, about whom I’d forgotten

entirely. Back then he wasn’t able to keep our company, he was jealous of us.

“Yes?”

He said he’d come to converse, to pay a friendly visit, to have a look at my

illustrations. I welcomed him so he might see it all. I learned he’d just today

visited Head Illuminator Master Osman and kissed his hand. The great master,

he explained, had given him wise words to ponder: “A painter’s quality

becomes evident in his discussions of blindness and memory,” he’d said. So let

it be evident:

Blindness and Memory

Before the art of illumination there was blackness and afterward there will also

be blackness. Through our colors, paints, art and love, we remember that Allah

had commanded us to “See”! To know is to remember that you’ve seen. To see

is to know without remembering. Thus, painting is remembering the

blackness. The great masters, who shared a love of painting and perceived that

color and sight arose from darkness, longed to return to Allah’s blackness by

means of color. Artists without memory neither remember Allah nor his

blackness. All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within

color and outside time. Let me explain to you what it means to remember this

darkness, which was revealed in Herat by the great masters of old.

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Three Stories on Blindness and Memory

ALIF

In Lami’i Chelebi’s Turkish translation of the Persian poet Jami’s Gifts of

Intimacy, which addresses the stories of the saints, it is written that in the

bookmaker’s workshop of Jihan Shah, the ruler of the Blacksheep nation, the

renowned master Sheikh Ali Tabrizi had illustrated a magnificent version of

Hüsrev and Shirin. According to what I’ve heard, in this legendary manuscript,

which took eleven years to complete, the master of master miniaturists,

Sheikh Ali, displayed such talent and skill and painted such wonderful pictures

that only the greatest of the old masters, Bihzad, could have matched him.

Even before the illuminated manuscript was half finished, Jihan Shah knew

that he would soon possess a spectacular book without equal in all the world.

He thus lived in fear and jealousy of young Tall Hasan, the ruler of the

Whitesheep nation, and declared him his archenemy. Moreover, Jihan Shah

quickly sensed that though his prestige would grow immensely after the book

was completed, an even better version of the manuscript could be made for

Tall Hasan. Being one of those truly jealous men who poisoned his own

contentment with the thought “What if others come to know such bliss?”

Jihan Shah sensed at once that if the virtuoso miniaturist made another copy,

or even a better version, it would be for his archenemy Tall Hasan. Thus, in

order to prevent anyone besides himself from owning this magnificent book,

Jihan Shah decided to have the master miniaturist Sheikh Ali killed after he’d

completed the book. But a good-hearted Circassian beauty in his harem

advised him that blinding the master miniaturist would suffice. Jihan Shah

forthwith adopted this clever idea, which he passed on to his circle of

sycophants, until it ultimately reached the ears of Sheikh Ali. Even so, Sheikh

Ali didn’t leave the book half finished and flee Tabriz as other, mediocre

illustrators might’ve done. He didn’t resort to games like slowing down the

progress of the manuscript or making inferior illustrations so it wouldn’t be

“perfect” and thereby forestalling his imminent blinding. Indeed, he worked

with even more ardor and conviction. In the house where he lived alone, he’d

begin working after the morning prayers and continue illustrating the same

horses, cypresses, lovers, dragons and handsome princes by candlelight in the

middle of the night again and again until bitter tears streamed from his eyes.

Much of the time, he’d gaze for days at an illustration by one of the great old

masters of Herat as he made an exact copy on another sheet. In the end, he

completed the book for Jihan Shah the Blacksheep, and as the master

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miniaturist had expected, he was at first praised and showered with gold

pieces, before being blinded with a sharp plume needle used to affix turban

plumes. Before his pain had even subsided, Sheikh Ali left Herat and went to

join Tall Hasan the Whitesheep. “Yes, indeed, I am blind,” he explained to Tall

Hasan, “yet I remember each of the splendors of the manuscript I’ve

illuminated for the last eleven years, down to each mark of the pen and each

stroke of the brush, and my hand can draw it again from memory. My

Excellency, I could illustrate the greatest manuscript of all time for you. Since

my eyes will no longer be distracted by the filth of this world, I’ll be able to

depict all the glories of Allah from memory, in their purest form.” Tall Hasan

believed the great master miniaturist; and the master miniaturist, keeping his

promise, illustrated from memory the most magnificent of books for the ruler

of the Whitesheep. Everyone knew the spiritual power provided by the new

book was what lay behind Tall Hasan’s subsequent defeat of the Blacksheep

and the victorious Khan’s execution of Jihan Shah during a raid near Bing?l.

This magnificent book, along with the one Sheikh Ali Tabrizi made for the late

Jihan Shah, entered Our Sultan’s treasury in Istanbul when the ever-victorious

Tall Hasan was defeated at the Battle of Otlukbeli by Sultan Mehmet Khan the

Conqueror, may he rest in peace. Those who can truly see, know.

BA

Since the Denizen of Paradise, Sultan Süleyman Khan the Lawgiver, favored

calligraphers over illustrators, unfortunate miniaturists of the day would

recount the present story as an example of how illustrating surpasses

calligraphy. However, as anyone who pays close attention will realize, this tale

is actually about blindness and memory. After the death of Tamerlane, Ruler of

the World, his sons and grandchildren set to attacking and mercilessly battling

one another. In the event that one of them succeeded in conquering another’s

city, his first action was to mint his own coins and have a sermon read at the

mosque. His second act as victor was to pull apart the books that had come

into his possession; a new dedication would be written, boasting of the

conqueror as the new “ruler of the world,” a new colophon added, and it

would all be bound together again so that those who laid eyes on the

conqueror’s book would believe that he truly was a world ruler. When

Abdüllatif, the son of Tamerlane’s grandson Ulu? Bey, captured Herat, he

mobilized his miniaturists, calligraphers and binders with such haste, and so

pressured them to make a book in honor of his father, a connoisseur of book

arts, that as volumes were in the midst of being unbound and the scripted

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pages destroyed and burned, the corresponding pictures became mixed up.

Since it did not befit the honor of Ulu? Bey for his son to arrange and bind

albums without a care for which picture belonged to which story, he

assembled all the miniaturists in Herat and requested that they recount the

stories so as to put the illustrations in proper order. From each miniaturist’s

mouth, however, came a different account, and so the correct order of the

plates was confused all the more. Thereupon, the oldest surviving head

miniaturist was sought out. He was a man who’d extinguished the light of his

eyes in painstaking labor on the books of all the shahs and princes who’d

ruled over Herat for the last fifty- four years. A great commotion ensued when

the men realized that the old master now peering at the pictures was indeed

blind. Some laughed. The elderly master requested that an intelligent boy, who

had not yet reached the age of seven and who couldn’t read or write, be

brought forward. Such a child was found and taken to him. The old

miniaturist placed a number of illustrations before him. “Describe what you

see,” he instructed. As the boy described the pictures, the old miniaturist,

raising his blind eyes to the sky, listened carefully and responded: “Alexander

cradling the dying Darius from Firdusi’s Book of Kings… the account of the

teacher who falls in love with his handsome student from Sadi’s Rosegarden

…the contest of doctors from Nizami’s Treasury of Secrets…” The other

miniaturists, vexed by their elderly and blind colleague, said, “We could’ve

told you that as well. These are the best-known scenes from the most famous

stories.” In turn, the aged and blind miniaturist placed the most difficult

illustrations before the child and again listened intently. “Hürmüz poisoning

the calligraphers one by one from Firdusi’s Book of Kings,” he said, again facing

the sky. “A cheap rendition of the terrible account of the cuckold who catches

his wife and her lover in a pear tree, from Rumi’s Masnawi,” he said. In this

fashion, relying on the boy’s descriptions, he identified all of the pictures,

none of which he could see, and thereby succeeded in having the books

properly bound together again. When Ulu? Bey entered Herat with his army,

he asked the old miniaturist by what secret he, a blind man, could identify

those stories that other master illustrators couldn’t determine even by looking

at them. “It isn’t, as one might assume, that my memory compensates for my

blindness,” replied the old illustrator. “I have never forgotten that stories are

recollected not only through images, but through words as well.” Ulu? Bey

responded that his own miniaturists knew those words and stories, but still

couldn’t order the pictures. “Because,” said the old miniaturist, “they think

quite well when it comes to painting, which is their skill or their art, but they

don’t comprehend that the old masters made these pictures out of the

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memories of Allah Himself.” Ulu? Bey asked how a child could know such

things. “The child doesn’t know,” said the old miniaturist. “But I, an elderly

and blind miniaturist, know that Allah created this worldly realm the way an

intelligent seven-year-old boy would want to see it; what’s more, Allah created

this earthly realm so that, above all, it might be seen. Afterward, He provided

us with words so we might share and discuss with one another what we’ve

seen. We mistakenly assumed that these stories arose out of words and that

illustrations were painted in service of these stories. Quite to the contrary,

painting is the act of seeking out Allah’s memories and seeing the world as He

sees the world.”

DJIM

Two hundred fifty years ago, Arab miniaturists were in the custom of staring

at the western horizon at daybreak to alleviate the understandable and eternal

anxieties about going blind shared by all miniaturists; likewise, a century later

in Shiraz, many illustrators would eat walnuts mashed with rose petals on an

empty stomach in the mornings. Again, in the same era, the elder miniaturists

of Isfahan who believed sunlight was responsible for the blindness to which

they succumbed one by one, as if to the plague, would work in a half-dark

corner of the room, and most often by candlelight, to prevent direct sunlight

from striking their worktables. At day’s end, in the workshops of the Uzbek

artists of Bukhara, master miniaturists would wash their eyes with water

blessed by sheikhs. But of all of these precautions, the purest approach to

blindness was discovered in Herat by the miniaturist Seyyit Mirek, mentor to

the great master Bihzad. According to master miniaturist Mirek, blindness

wasn’t a scourge, but rather the crowning reward bestowed by Allah upon the

illuminator who had devoted an entire life to His glories; for illustrating was

the miniaturist’s search for Allah’s vision of the earthly realm, and this unique

perspective could only be attained through recollection after blindness

descended, only after a lifetime of hard work and only after the miniaturist’s

eyes tired and he had expended himself. Thus, Allah’s vision of His world only