Download PDF | (The Idea of Iran 8) Sussan Babaie (editor) - Iran After the Mongols-I B Tauris (2019).
318 Pages
Introduction
Sussan Babaie (The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London)
This book is the eighth in the Idea of Iran series – a monumental undertaking launched in 2010, sponsored by the Soudavar Memorial Foundation. This volume is the result of two symposia held in 2014 and 2016 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, under the auspices of the London Middle East Institute. The integration of the essays from the two symposia into one volume has produced an assembly of scholarly reflections from a variety of disciplines: history, history of art and architecture, literature and Sufism. It also represents a range of viewpoints, ranging from chapters with a broad historical sweep to those examining single texts, objects and personalities. Taken together, these twelve essays open new vistas onto the transformative impact on West Asia — indeed on the entire known world in Afro-Eurasia — of the Mongol invasions of the first half of the thirteenth century.
In 1258, Hiilegti (1256-65), the grandson of Chinggis Khan, placed Baghdad under siege, leading to the conquest of the centre of the Islamic empire and the collapse of the Abbasid caliphal hegemony (750-1258). In effect, this was now a pan-Asian empire, placing lands from Russia and Syria to China under the tutelage of a Mongol Khanate. Although a shocking blow to the notion of an Islamic caliphal empire, the disintegration of the Abbasids was already underway. Competing centres of caliphal authority had been established in Egypt-Syria and in Andalucia since the tenth century. In the east, however, the caliphs remained the titular authority, even though political authority was the purview of powerful clans and dynasties — subjects already covered in the preceding volumes in this series. While the Mongol impact may seem less consequential from the point of view of Western Islamic lands, the collapse of Abbasid hegemony set in motion profound transformations in the historical trajectory of Islamic West Asia. The Mongol polities that followed Hiilegii’s conquests in Western Asia were no longer obliged by tradition to seek caliphal legitimation, thus releasing a model of sovereignty that was a composite of the Iranian, Turco-Mongol and Islamic models of kingship.
This volume traces representations of the complex frameworks that articulated, freshly and more powerfully than any moment in the history of Greater Iran since the Arab invasions in the seventh century, the reinterpretation and reinstatement of Iranian cultural identities across a vast region. Chief among the post-Mongol polities was the Ilkhanate in Greater Iran, Iraq, Anatolia and the Caucasus during whose relatively short reign (12561335) left behind the indelible mark of what becomes a Persianate culture in the following centuries.
The Persian language, already dominant in literary spheres, gained unprecedented currency also for administrative, historical and scientific writing. Jame’ al-tavarikh, written in Persian and Arabic, was composed by the great vizier Rashid al-Din of Hamadan, and situated the Mongol ruling elite within a universal, Eurasian history centred on its Persianate homeland and reaching into Biblical, Quranic, Iranian, Chinese and Mongolian imaginaries of shared pasts. Buildings, including the urban developments in Tabriz and Sultaniyya, and manuscripts, especially copies of the Shahnameh (‘Book of Kings’), were produced for princely patrons who aspired to claim the Iranian crown of kingship.
The contributors to this volume investigate the immediate effects of Mongol rule during the Ilkhanid period, but also explore the fourteenth century in its own right as a period of the emergence of local Iranian dynasties in the face of continuing Mongol prestige following the collapse of the IIkhanid dynasty, and the development of alternative models of authority. By the middle of the 1330s, the Ilkhanate in Greater Iran had been replaced by regional successor polities, making room for a multiplicity of cultural, political and religious arenas with their own regional centres. The most prominent among these local polities were the Jalayerids, Muzaffarids, Sarbadars and Karts.
This period also witnessed the expansion of the princely patronage of large building projects beyond the political centres of the Ilkhans, including Yazd and Kerman. Luxury manuscript copies of the Shahnameh and its imitations also found patronage, as well as extraordinary copies of the Qur’an and other objects of luxury. Several of the greatest Persian poets, including Khwaju Kermani (d. 1341 or 1352), Ubayd-i Zakani (d. 1371) and Hafiz (d. 1389), and major historians such as Hamdullah Mustawfi (c. 1335), Mu’in al-Din Yazdi (c. 1356) and Nezam al-Din Shami (c. 1404) were active during this period.
In the realm of intellectual history, the fourteenth century was extremely important. Such major theologians as ‘Adud al-Din al-Iji (d. 1355), Sa‘d al-Din Taftazani (d. 1390) and Sayyid Sharif Jurjani (d. 1413) were active. Among the prominent Sufi figures, eponyms of important sociopolitical movements and Sufi tarigas, were Baha al-Din Nagshband (d. 1389), Fazl Allah Astarabadi (d. 1394) and Shah Ne‘mat Allah Vali (d. 1430). The period saw the rise and consolidation of distinct Sufi groups with their origins in the thirteenth century: the Mawlaviyyeh, Kubrawiyyeh and Safaviyyeh.
The richness and cultural complexities involved in reinventing the idea of Iran during this period draw attention to aspects of the representation of cultural longevity and fluid transformations. The Idea of Iran emerges from the intersections between these new constellations of the competing cultural, political and religious aspirations in the post-Mongol world.
This creative synthesis of seemingly incompatible, even contradictory cultural inclinations in the post-Mongol period is made tangible by the Courtauld Bag, reproduced on the cover of this volume.’ This is an extraordinarily intriguing object: a brass-lidded container inlaid in gold and silver, made for a woman of high social rank, to be held for her by an attendant. It would presumably have contained personal items — a kerchief or a perfume box perhaps — although there is no way for us to know. It was made in Mosul, a city in present-day northern Iraq where, from early in the thirteenth century, high-quality and distinctive inlaid metal objects were made. It does not bear any signatory marks or a date, but comparisons demonstrate its stylistic and manufacturing features to be of the Mosul variety. The epigraphic band on the depressed zone of the rectangular lid also points to standard phrases praising a noble person.
Every detail on this bag harks back to the technologies and visual preferences that had been part of the repertoire of Islamic arts — the dense geometric patterns, the stylised and standardised figures of the seated prince, the hunter, the musician, the cup-bearer. The exception — and this is truly exceptional — is the rectangular band inlaid, engraved and densely composed, with figures posed to focus their attention towards a central seated personage. There is indeed a specific scene depicted here: attendants in a variety of headgear, some of which is distinctly Mongol in style, each holding an instrument of a courtly task — a bird of prey, a fan, a bottle. One figure on the left holds a pouring vessel, into which he has presumably poured libations out of the large bottles on a table, while a kneeling man just in front him — sporting a strangely sombrero-like hat — offers a cup to yet another figure. This last one, just to the left of the central axis of the image, half-kneeling before a figure larger than the rest, is seemingly corpulent and female. That she is a she, seated on a Chinese-style bench shared with the man to the left, is surmised mainly from comparisons with depictions on paper, in album drawings and manuscript paintings. She is in other words the object of the court scene’s attention as well as the viewer’s. Clues to details about the bag — its owner, the status of the owner, the bag’s function and the context for the use of such an object — are discernible from this very festive and bibulous scene. This is a prestige item made for a high-ranking female member of the IIkhanid court — a khatun — and carried alongside her by an attendant. That the scene is produced using means other than the standard formulae available to metalworkers, who were skilled at making the familiar designs of seated musicians or hunters on horseback, becomes clear when it is compared to paintings that graced the newly popularised and widely disseminated copies of the IIkhanid manuscripts of the Shahnameh.” The point to underscore here is the rise to prominence of the Shahnameh as a source for ideas about kingship and authority, and a signal of the longevity of the idea of Iran so amply represented through such sources, and so tightly intertwined with a new present that had become inseparable from the Ilkhanid alliances with their East Asian kin.
The erudite essays in this volume make use of numerous such representations of the survivals and revivals of the notion of Iran, or Eran — a reference to Eranshahr.
Note on Transliteration
Despite all efforts, the chapters in this volume may vary in the transliteration of Persian and Arabic words. Some have done away entirely with the use of the diacritical marks; others have followed the IJMES system, more or less. This, I felt, was justified as in some instances the need for proper reading of transcribed poetic lines requires full-scale transliteration while in others the absence of the diacriticals can be tolerated. Nevertheless, we have tried to keep to the common usage of Anglicised terms and names — Isfahan not Esfahan — and to standardise oft-used words in the chapters, such as the Shahnameh.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق