3 The Insufficient Image
If music was understood as producing images in the soul, then how were
visual images understood to communicate? This chapter examines the role
attributed to music in a story about Plato playing the organ in the
Iqbalnamah(1194) of Nizami of Ganj (1141–1209). A sixteenth-century
illustration of the story extends this commentary to the comparative value
of sonic and visual mimesis in light of increased awareness of European
painting. Incorporation of the Simurgh, afigure central to Firdausi’s
Shahnameh(c.977–1000) and transformed inThe Language of the Birds
(Mantiq al-Tayr, 1177) by Farid al-Din Attar (1145–1221), suggests inter-
medial and intertextual poetic theorization of the image in popular cultural
forms. It reflects an understanding of Islam characterized less by a painting
prohibition than by recognition of the image’s insufficiency to represent
the divine.
3.1 Plato as Musician in theIskandarnamahby Nizami of
Ganj
Verse often popularized converging philosophical and cultural discourses by
transforming them into entertaining forms. Perpetuating the Alexandrian
legacy in the Islamic sphere, Nizami’sIskandarnamahprovided models for
archetypal leadership. Just as Firdausi’s Persian-language Islamized retelling
of pre-Islamic histories in theShahnamehbolstered the right to rule of the
successive Samanid and Ghaznavid dynasties, Nizami’s exaltation of the
Macedonian King Alexander (r. 336–323 BC) reflected the Seljuq dynasty’s
interpolation of its own power with that of ancient Greece.^1
In theIqbalnamah, an associated mirror of princes, Nizami includes an
exemplary story pitting reason against inspiration as the path to knowl-
edge. In it, Alexander’s tutor Aristotle rises from a row of courtly poets to
declare himself the pathfinder for all rational knowledge. Plato,“master of
(^1) Pancaroğlu, 2001 ; Yalman, 2012. 79