Since I myself am a genuine great master, so acknowledged by Almighty Allah, who sees and knows all, I knew that one day I would go blind, but is this what I wanted now? Since His presence could be sensed quite nearby in the exquisite and terrifying darkness of the cluttered Treasury, like a condemned man who wishes to look upon the world one last time before he is beheaded, I asked Him: “Allow me to see all these illustrations and have my fill of them.”
As I turned the pages, by the force of God’s inscrutable wisdom, I frequently came across legends and matters of blindness. In the famous scene showing Shirin on a countryside outing falling in love with Hüsrev after seeing his picture on the branch of a plane tree, Sheikh Ali Rıza from Shiraz had drawn distinctly all the leaves of the tree one by one so they filled the entire sky. In answer to a fool who saw the work and commented that the true subject of the illustration wasn’t the plane tree, Sheikh Ali replied that the true subject wasn’t the passion of the beautiful young maiden either, it was the passion of the artist, and to proudly prove his point he attempted to paint the same plane tree with all its leaves on a grain of rice. If the signature hidden beneath the beautiful feet of Shirin’s darling lady attendants hadn’t misled me, I was of course seeing the magnificent tree made by the blind master on paper-not the tree made on a grain of rice, which he left half finished, having gone blind seven years and three months after he started the task. On another page, Rüstem blinding Alexander with his forked arrow was depicted in the manner of artists who knew the Indian style, so vivaciously and colorfully, that blindness, the ageless sorrow and secret desire of the genuine miniaturist, appeared to the observer as the prologue to a joyous celebration.
My eyes wandered over these pictures and volumes, no less with the excitement of one who wanted to behold for himself these legends he’d heard about for years than with the worry of an old man who sensed he would soon enough never see anything more. There, in the cold Treasury room suffused with a dark red that I’d never seen before-caused by the color of the cloth and dust within the peculiar light of the candles-I would occasionally cry out in admiration, whereupon Black and the dwarf would rush to my side and look over my shoulder at the magnificent page before me. Unable to restrain myself, I’d begin to explain:
“This color red belongs to the great master Mirza Baba Imami from Tabriz, the secret of which he took with him to the grave. He’s used it for the edges of the carpet, the red of Alevi allegiance on the Persian Shah’s turban, and look, it’s here on the belly of the lion on this page and on this pretty boy’s caftan. Allah never directly revealed this fine red except when He let the blood of his subjects flow. So that we might wearily strive to find this variety of red that is only visible to the naked eye on man-made cloth and in the pictures of the greatest of masters, God did, however, consign its secret to the rarest of insects living beneath stones,” I said and added, “Thanks be to Him who has now revealed it to us.”
“Look at this,” I said much later, once again unable to refrain from showing them a masterpiece-this one could’ve belonged in any collection of ghazals, which spoke of love, friendship, spring and happiness. We looked at the trees of springtime blooming in an array of color, the cypresses in a garden reminiscent of Heaven and the elation of the beloveds reclining in that garden as they drank wine and recited poetry; it was as if we in the moldy, dusty and icy Treasury could also smell those spring blossoms and the delicately scented skin of the joyous revelers. “Notice how the same artist who rendered the forearms of the lovers, their beautiful naked feet, the elegance of their stances and the lazy delight of the birds fluttering about them with such sincerity, also made the crude shape of the cypress in the background!” I said, “This is the work of Lütfi of Bukhara whose ill-temper and belligerence caused him to leave each of his illustrations half finished; he fought with every shah and khan claiming that they understood nothing of painting, and he never remained in one city for long. This great master went from one shah’s palace to another, from city to city, quarreling all the way, never able to find a ruler whose book was deserving of his talents, until he ended up in the workshop of an inconsequential chieftain who ruled over nothing but bare mountaintops. Claiming that ”the khan’s dominions might be small but he knows painting,“ he spent the remaining twenty-five years of his life there. Whether he ever knew that this inconsequential lord was blind remains, even today, a subject of conjecture and a source of humor.”
“Do you see this page?” I said well into the night, and this time they both rushed to my side, candlesticks aloft. “From the time of Tamerlane’s grandchildren to the present, this volume has seen ten owners on its way here from Herat over a span of one hundred fifty years.” Using my magnifying lens, the three of us read the signatures, dedications, historical information and names of sultans-who’d strangled one another-filling every corner of the colophon page, pinched together, between and on top of each other: “This volume was completed in Herat, with the help of God, by the hand of Calligrapher Sultan Veli, son of Muzaffer of Herat, in the year of the Hegira 849 for Ismet-üd Dünya, the wife of Muhammad Juki the victorious brother of the Ruler of the World, Baysungur.” Later still, we read that the book had passed into the possession of the Whitesheep Sultan Halil, thence to his son Yakup Bey, and thence to the Uzbek sultans in the North, each of whom happily amused himself with the book for a time, removing or adding one or two pictures; beginning with the first owner, they added the faces of their beautiful wives to the illustrations and appended their names proudly to the colophon page; afterward, it passed to Sam Mirza who’d conquered Herat, and he made a present of it, with a separate dedication, for his elder brother, Shah Ismail, who in turn brought it to Tabriz and had it prepared as a gift with yet another dedication. When the denizen of paradise Sultan Selim the Grim defeated Shah Ismail at Chaldiran and plundered the Seven Heavens Palace in Tabriz, the book ended up here in this Treasury in Istanbul, after traveling across deserts, mountains and rivers along with the victorious sultan’s soldiers.
How much of an aging master’s interest and excitement did Black and the dwarf share? As I opened new volumes and turned their pages, I sensed the profound sorrow of thousands of illustrators from hundreds of cities large and small, each with a distinctive temperament, each painting under the patronage of a different cruel shah, khan or chieftain, each displaying his talent and succumbing to blindness. I felt the pain of the beatings we all received during our long apprenticeships, the blows inflicted with rulers, until our cheeks turned bright red, or with marble polishing stones upon our shaven heads, as I flipped-with humiliation-through the pages of a primitive book that displayed methods and implements of torture. I had no idea what this miserable book was doing in the Ottoman Treasury: Instead of seeing torture as a necessary practice administered before the supervision of a judge to ensure Allah’s justice in the world, infidel travelers would convince their coreligionists of our cruelty and evil-heartedness by having dishonorable miniaturists abase themselves and dash off these pictures in exchange for a few gold pieces. I was embarrassed at the obvious depraved pleasure with which this miniaturist had drawn pictures of bastinados, beatings, crucifixions, hangings by the neck or the feet, hookings, impalings, firings from cannon, nailings, stranglings, the cutting of throats, feedings to hungry dogs, whippings, baggings, pressings, soakings in cold water, the plucking of hair, the breaking of fingers, the delicate flayings, the cutting off of noses and the removal of eyes. Only true artists like us who’d suffered throughout our apprenticeships merciless bastinados, random pummelings and fists so that the irritable master who drew a line incorrectly might feel better-not to mention hours of blows from sticks and rulers so that the devil within us would perish to be reborn as the jinn of inspiration-only we could feel such extreme joy by depicting bastinados and tortures, only we could color these implements with the gaiety of coloring a child’s kite.