My Name is Red

I AM CALLED “STORK”

At about the time of midday prayer I heard a knock at the door. It was Black from long ago, from our childhood. We embraced. He was chill and I invited him inside. I didn’t even ask how he’d found his way to the house. His Enishte must have sent him to question me about Elegant Effendi’s absence and his whereabouts. Not only that, he also brought word from Master Osman. “Allow me to ask you a question,” he said. “According to Master Osman, ”time“ separates a true miniaturist from others: The time of the illustration.” What were my thoughts? Listen closely.

Long ago, as is common knowledge, the illustrators of our Islamic realm, including, for example, the old Arab masters, perceiving the world the way Frankish infidels do today, would regard everything and depict it from the level of a vagabond, mutt or clerk at work in his shop. Unaware of today’s perspectival techniques, of which the Frankish masters haughtily boast, their world remained dull and limited, restricted to the simple perspective of the mutt or the shop clerk. Then a great event came to pass and our entire world of illustration changed. Let me begin here.

Three hundred fifty years ago, when Baghdad fell to the Mongols and was mercilessly plundered on a cold day in the month of Safar, Ibn Shakir was the most renowned and proficient calligrapher and scribe not only of the whole Arab world but of all Islamdom; despite his youth, he had transcribed twenty-two volumes, most of which were Korans and could be found in the world-famous libraries of Baghdad. Ibn Shakir believed these books would last until the end of the world, and, therefore, lived with a deep and infinite notion of time. He’d toiled heroically all through the night by flickering candlelight on the last of those legendary books, which are unknown to us today because in the span of a few days, they were one by one torn up, shredded, burned and tossed into the Tigris River by the soldiers of the Mongol Khan Hulagu. Just as the master Arab calligraphers, commited to the notion of the endless persistence of tradition and books, had for five centuries been in the habit of resting their eyes as a precaution against blindness by turning their backs to the rising sun and looking toward the western horizon, Ibn Shakir ascended the minaret of the Caliphet Mosque in the coolness of morning, and from the balcony where the muezzin called the faithful to prayer, witnessed all that would end a five-centuries-long tradition of scribal art. First, he saw Hulagu’s pitiless soldiers enter Baghdad, and yet he remained where he was atop the minaret. He watched the plunder and destruction of the entire city, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, the killing of the last of the Caliphs of Islam who’d ruled Baghdad for half a millennium, the rape of women, the burning of libraries and the destruction of tens of thousands of volumes as they were thrown into the Tigris. Two days later, amid the stench of corpses and cries of death, he watched the flowing waters of the Tigris, turned red from the ink bleeding out of the books, and he thought about how all those volumes he’d transcribed in beautiful script, those books that were now gone, hadn’t in the least served to stop this horrifying massacre and devastation, and in turn, he swore never to write again. Furthermore, he was 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.

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 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.

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 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, 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 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.“ ”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.“

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:

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.

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 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 Bingöl. 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.

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.”

Certainly it was less out of desire to hear my answer to Master Osman’s question on blindness and memory than to put himself at ease that Black asked me the question while he pored over my possessions, my room and my pictures. Yet again, I was pleased to see that the stories I recounted affected him. “Blindness is a realm of bliss from which the Devil and guilt are barred,” I said to him.

“In Tabriz,” said Black, “under Master Mirek’s influence, some of the miniaturists of the old style still look upon blindness as the greatest virtue of Allah’s grace, and they’re embarrassed about growing old but not blind. Even today, fearing that others will consider this proof of a lack of talent and skill, they pretend to be blind. As a result of this moral conviction which bears the influence of Jemalettin of Kazvin, some of them sit for weeks in the darkness amid mirrors, in the dim light of an oil lamp, without eating or drinking and stare at illustrated pages painted by the old masters of Herat in order to learn how to perceive the world like a blind man despite not truly being blind.”

Somebody knocked. I opened the door to find a handsome apprentice from the workshop whose lovely almond eyes were opened wide. He said that the body of our brother, the gilder Elegant Effendi, had been discovered in an abandoned well and that his funeral procession would commence at the Mihrimah Mosque during the afternoon prayer. He then ran off to deliver the news to others. Allah, may you protect us all.