Kamran Djam Annual Lecture 2015: Nizâmî: Mirror of the Unseen World
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2015-02-23

http://www.soas.ac.uk/lmei-cis/
"Nizâmî: Mirror of the Unseen World" was the first Kamran Djam Annual Lecture of 2015, it was given by Michael Barry (Princeton University) on 2nd February 2015 at the Centre for Iranian Studies, London Middle East Institute, SOAS, University of London.

Nizâmî (1141-1209), from Ganjeh in present-day Azerbaijan, ranks with Firdawsî, `Attâr and Rûmî among the four most influential and deeply beloved narrative poets in all Classical Persian Literature. Kings in Iran and Central Asia, Turkey and India vied to sponsor production of the most magnificent manuscripts of the poet's five romances, with illuminations by the civilization's most talented painters from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. This and the next slideshow examine just how the Timurid, Safavid, Uzbek, Ottoman and Mughal artists rendered scenes and most especially revealed to us symbolic meanings of the master storyteller's tales from the Haft Paykar ("Brides of the Seven Climes"), further choosing to depict the revered poet himself as the archetypal figure of the Spiritual Initiator or Active Intellect, configured as a venerable Sage: for the poet was indeed once regarded from Istanbul to Delhi as the mystical "Mirror of the Unseen World", âyineh-ye ghayb - as Nizâmî actually calls himself in the preludes to his Laylî-ô Majnûn.

Nizâmî's "Brides of the Seven Climes" or Haft Paykar, literally "The Seven Icons", composed in AD 1197, may be regarded without any doubt as the most sophisticated and psychologically subtle verse romance in Persian literature (as well as one of the most illustrated), and certainly as one of the crowning glories of world literature. Nizâmî takes up here the general theme of the Thousand and One Nights but dazzlingly weaves its tales-within-a-tale around the fierce figure of a doughty Sasanian king and warrior turned into a legendary hero who weds seven wise queens. For the protagonist in Nizâmî's frame-story is none other than King Bahrâm-i Gôr the Dragonslayer (r. AD 421-439) whose lionlike pride, and dragonlike wrath, are tamed, at last, by the seven tales of spiritual initiation told to this most splendid of Ancient Persian rulers by his seven lovely brides - as it were seven "Sheherazades" - from seven different lands, India, Byzantium, Turkestan, Russia, Morocco, China, and Iran. Each princess sits beneath a dome tinged with the colour of her respective ascendant star: Saturday's black (Saturn), Sunday's yellow-gold (the Sun), Monday's shimmering green (the Moon), Tuesday's blood-soaked red (Mars), Wednesday's melancholy turquoise (Mercury), Thursday's healing sandalwood (Jupiter), and finally Friday's radiant white (Venus), corresponding to seven moods and spiritual states.

Dr Michael Barry was born in 1948 in New York City but raised in France with long stays in Afghanistan as a guest of Afghan family friends, whence lifelong interest in the languages, literatures, arts and spiritual traditions of Persianate civilization as well as Italian and Iberian cultures – he holds higher degrees in all these subjects from Princeton, Cambridge, McGill (Montreal) and l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) – although he interrupted his academic career to serve as humanitarian coordinator in war-torn Afghanistan for the International Federation for Human Rights, for Médecins du Monde, then for the United Nations, between 1979 and 2002. He now teaches Sufism, Classical Persian Literature, medieval Spanish history, medieval Indo-Iranian history, and modern Afghan history, in Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. Dr Barry has published extensively in both his writing languages, English and French, on a wide variety of subjects ranging from fifteenth-century Portuguese travels in the Indian Ocean to a prize-winning essay on Nizâmî to a lauded biography of the Afghan commander Massoud; he holds twelve literary prizes from France, the United States and Iran, as well as a major French award for investigative journalism and a US award for excellence in teaching. His latest publication, `Attâr’s Canticle of the Birds, Illustrated Through Persian and Eastern Islamic Art (with Leili Anvar for the French version of the poem and Dick Davis for the poem’s English rendition), was awarded the highest distinction for art history from the French Académie des Beaux-Arts (part of the Académie Française) in 2013, and Iran’s World Book Award on Persian Civilization in 2014. As Consultative Chairman of the New York Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Islamic Art in 2005-2008, he advised the re-organization of the Museum’s current galleries of arts of the Arab lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia.