ruler. Unable to bear the distance from her spiritual master, Rumi, she hires a
fellow disciple, the Christian painter‘Ayn al-Dawla, to paint his portrait on
paper. Yet no matter how many portraits he makes, the original continually
changes, rendering his representation impossible.^9 With this anecdote,
Aflaki suggests the insufficiency of the image to represent life, much as
Socrates recognizes the insufficiency of painting inPhaedrus(seeChapter 6).
This inherent insufficiency allowed for the legitimation of images, as in
theBook of Wonders(Ajaibnama) by Nasr al-Din Tusi (1201–1274), a
popular twelfth-century text from Anatolia, elements of which were retold
in Dust Muhammad’s preface. Oya Pancaroğlu suggests that the diverse
images in Tusi’swork
advance the idea that these miscellaneous wonders are conceptually unified in their
mysterious testament to God’s will which manifests itself through the talismanic
action of statues...Expressed through a pious stance, Tusi’s validation of images
seeks to realign human reason so that the wonder of images may be perceived as
instruments of ethical instruction rather than as traps leading to idolatry. He
relates the danger of idolatry to a weakness of the human will and not to the
images themselves.^10
Similarly, Dust Muhammad frames his discussion of a story about the
‘Chest of Witnessing’with an acknowledgment that“the masters of depic-
tion are ashamed before the manifest of Muslim law.”^11 He nonetheless
valorizes painting through its association with the prophet Daniel, who
acquires the chest, a relic made by God, from Alexander and copies all the
portraits on silk. This valorization enables Dust Muhammad to assert:
“Unquestionably depiction is not without noble lineage, and because of
this the painter’s mind need not be scratched by the thorn of despair.”^12
Yet false prophethood must be averted through the reflective recognition
of the soul. Like Nizami, Dust Muhammad relies on the narrative of the
ArtangiTablet–described as a span of silk showing a variety of living
creatures–as an example of false proof, deceptive to those of impure hearts.
Those short-sighted ones, the mirror of whose hearts could not manifest the light
of Islam out of extreme mulishness, were deceived by thefigures on his plaything,
and exhibited his painted silk, which was known as the Artangi Tablet, as their
model of unbelief and perverseness, and strangest of all they held that the silk was
equal to the Picture Gallery of China, which is famous, for it unites images of all of
Creation’s forms.^13(^9) Elias, 2012 : 98. (^10) Pancaroğlu, 2003 : 34, 40. (^11) Roxburgh, 2001 : 172.
(^12) Roxburgh, 2001 : 173–174. (^13) Roxburgh, 2001 : 175.
188 The Transcendent Image