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 Uluğ 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 pages destroyed and burned, the corresponding pictures became mixed up. Since it did not befit the honor of Uluğ 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 Uluğ 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.” Uluğ 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 memories of Allah Himself.” Uluğ 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.”

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 becomes manifest through the memory of blind miniaturists. When this image comes to the aging miniaturist, that is, when he sees the world as Allah sees it through the darkness of memory and blindness, the illustrator will have spent his lifetime training his hand so it might transfer this splendid revelation to the page. According to the historian Mirza Muhammet Haydar Duglat, who wrote extensively about the legends of Herat miniaturists, the master Seyyit Mirek, in his explication of the aforementioned notion of painting, used the example of the illustrator who wanted to draw a horse. He reasoned that even the most untalented painter-one whose head is empty like those of today’s Venetian painters-who draws the picture of a horse while looking at a horse will still make the image from memory; because, you see, it is impossible, at one and the same time, to look at the horse and at the page upon which the horse’s image appears. First, the illustrator looks at the horse, then he quickly transfers whatever rests in his mind to the page. In the interim, even if only a wink in time, what the artist represents on the page is not the horse he sees, but the memory of the horse he has just seen. Proof that for even the most miserable illustrator, a picture is possible only through memory. The logical extension of this concept, which regards the active worklife of a miniaturist as but preparation for both the resulting bliss of blindness and blind memory, is that the masters of Herat regarded the illustrations they made for bibliophile shahs and princes as training for the hand-as an exercise. They accepted the work, the endless drawing and staring at pages by candlelight for days without break, as the pleasurable labor that delivered the miniaturist to blindness. Throughout his whole life, the master miniaturist Mirek constantly sought out the most appropriate moment for this most glorious of approaching eventualities, either by purposely hurrying blindness through the painstaking depiction of trees and all their leaves on fingernails, grains of rice and even on strands of hair, or by cautiously delaying the imminent darkness by the effortless drawing of pleasant, sun-filled gardens. When he was seventy, in order to reward this great master, Sultan Hüseyin Baykara allowed him to enter the treasury containing thousands of manuscript plates that the Sultan had collected and secured under lock and key. There, in the treasury that also contained weapons, gold and bolt upon bolt of silk and velvet cloth, by the candlelight of golden candelabra, Master Mirek stared at the magnificent leaves of those books, each a legend in its own right, made by the old masters of Herat. And after three days and nights of continuous scrutiny, the great master went blind. He accepted his condition with maturity and resignation, the way one might greet the Angels of Allah, and he never spoke or painted again. Mirza Muhammet Haydar Duglat, the author of the History of Rashid, ascribed this turn of events as follows: “A miniaturist united with the vision and landscape of Allah’s immortal time can never return to the manuscript pages meant for ordinary mortals”; and he adds, “Wherever the blind miniaturist’s memories reach Allah there reigns an absolute silence, a blessed darkness and the infinity of a blank page.”