A History of the World in 100 Objects

by MacGregor, Neil

  Haleh Afshar, an Iranian-born academic, reflects on the position of Shi’ism in the life and politics of Iran over the centuries, and its role in both the Constitutional Revolution of 1907 and the Islamic Revolution of 1979:

  Shi’ism for centuries was the small part of Islam that was very different and a group which was not a part of any establishment. In fact Shi’ites were always in the process of contestation and on the margins. With the arrival of the Safavids, who declared Shi’ism as the national religion of Iran, we begin to have the establishment of a religious institution with a hierarchy and one that has some kind of influence on policy. That is something quite new in terms of Iranian history. It is a process that has continued through the centuries, and the religious establishment very often has been at the forefront of revolutions, for example the Constitutional Revolution in 1907, in which religious leaders were demanding the establishment of a house of justice and a constitution, and also the 1979 revolution, again in the name of justice, which is a constant theme at the core of Shi’ism.

  This heightened sense of justice perhaps has its roots in the very essence of Shi’ism – its focus on victims and martyrs. By the late seventeenth century, when this ‘alam was made, elaborate ceremonial processions commemorating the deaths of the martyrs featured chain-swinging flagellants, rhythmic movement, music and chanting. This illustrates the paradoxical nature of the British Museum’s ‘alam. Sword-like in form and name and thus at first sight triumphalist and aggressive, it was in fact used in Shi’a ceremonies that commemorated defeat, suffering and martyrdom.

  Present-day ‘alams are sometimes enormous. No longer a single blade of metal, they are great structures covered in decorated cloth, which can span a whole road’s width – and yet they are often borne by one man.

  We spoke to one of the elders of the Iranian community in north-west London, Hossein Pourtahmasbi, who describes how the tradition of carrying ‘alams continues today:

  First of all you have to be a good weightlifter, because it’s quite heavy. It sometimes goes up to 100 kilograms, but it’s not just a matter of weight – it’s the balancing and unbalancing shape of the ‘alam, which is huge and wide. You have to be very physically fit for that, and the people are either wrestlers or weightlifters and physically strong and well known by that society. But to be a strong man is not enough: in that community the people have got to know you as well, because it’s tradition that gives you admission. It’s keeping the memory alive, and it keeps you strong; you keep singing the songs, keeping the tradition and carry on!

  By the time our ‘alam was made, around 1700, this kind of muscular fervour had become a key element of Shi’a ceremonies. But the equilibrium between different faiths achieved by Shah Abbas was abandoned by his successors. The last Safavid shah, Husayn, was harshly intolerant of non-Shi’ites and gave religious leaders extensive powers to regulate public behaviour, a religious repression that may have contributed to his downfall. In 1722 Husayn was overthrown, the long Safavid era ended, and Iran condemned to several decades of political chaos. But the legacy of Shah Abbas is still evident in Iran today. The state is officially Shi’a, but Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians are all by the terms of the Constitution free to practise their religion in public. As in the seventeenth century, Iran is still a multi-faith society, with a tolerance of religious difference that surprises and impresses many visitors.

  82

  Miniature of a Mughal Prince

  Painting on paper, from India

  ABOUT AD 1610

  In today’s world of global politics image is – almost – everything. We are all familiar with the carefully staged photographs of leaders who know exactly what it means to be pictured with a particular royal, politician or celebrity. In the politics of faith, it is even more important in some places to be seen with the right religious leader – although this can be risky, too: to be seen shaking hands with the Pope or the Dalai Lama, for example, may bring immediate electoral benefits, but it can also have tricky political consequences. And few political leaders now would risk being seen receiving religious instruction, let alone reprimand.

  In seventeenth-century India, the dialogue between power and faith was as complex and as explosive as it is today. But around 1610 the picture opportunities were very different: no press photographs, no 24-hour television news, just painting, and often painting aimed at a very targeted audience. This miniature from Mughal India embodies a rare, perhaps unique, relationship between the world of the ruler and the realm of faith.

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe and Asia were dominated by three great Islamic empires: the Ottomans in the Middle East and eastern Europe, the Safavids in Iran, and the Mughals in south Asia, of which the last was by far the richest. It reached its height in the years around 1600 under Emperor Akbar, another contemporary of England’s Elizabeth I, as was Shah Abbas, and it continued to flourish under his son Jahangir, in whose reign our painting was made. The Mughal Empire was vast, stretching from Kabul in Afghanistan in the west across 1,400 miles to Dhaka in modern Bangladesh in the east; but, unlike the Iranian Safavids or the Ottoman Turks, the Muslim rulers of the Mughal Empire governed an overwhelmingly non-Muslim people. Besides Jains and Buddhists, perhaps 75 per cent of their population were Hindu.

  Unlike Christians and Jews, Hindus are not recognized in the Qur’an as other ‘people of the book’, so in theory they were not even necessarily to be tolerated by Islamic rulers, as the Mughal emperors always had to be aware. They managed this potential difficulty by adopting a policy of wide religious inclusion. Akbar and Jahangir worked easily with many faiths. They had Hindu generals in their armies, and close contacts with holy men, Muslim or Hindu, were a fundamental part of the life and outlook of the Mughal elite. Regular meetings with religious figures were a political strategy of the state, publicized through visits and through the media of the day – paintings like this miniature.

  Miniature painting was an art form popular at courts from London and Paris to Isfahan and Lahore. Mughal miniatures show that Indian painters were well aware of developments in both Persia and Europe. Ours, which is about the size of a hardback book, has been dated to around 1610, and shows an encounter between a rich young nobleman, perhaps a prince of the ruling Mughal Dynasty, and a holy man who has neither wealth nor power. The holy man is on the left, grey-haired, bearded and wearing a relatively simple robe, cloak and turban, with in front of him a forked stick – the distinctive armrest or crutch of the dervish, or Islamic holy man. The young man facing him is wearing a purple costume covered with gold embroidery, a jewelled dagger at his waist (an obligatory accoutrement for a noble) and a green turban, a sign of high status. These two figures, the ascetic dervish and the lavishly dressed prince, kneel on a slightly raised platform in front of a small domed pavilion, clearly an Islamic shrine built around the tomb of some revered religious figure. A delicately painted tree overshadows them, at its base a solitary blue iris. Behind, a rolling green landscape disappears into the distance.

  In Mughal painting landscape is often every bit as important as the figures. The Mughals were famous for their ornamental gardens, which were not merely places of pleasure but also physical metaphors for the Islamic paradise. So this landscape is an appropriate setting for our rich young man to be discussing belief with a Muslim teacher. In this idyllic scene power has met piety, and they are in debate.

  I asked Asok Kumar Das, an expert in Mughal painting, to tell me about the purpose of the painting and the possible presence of both Muslim and Hindu figures in one painting:

  Initially these were specifically meant for the eyes of the king or the members of the royal family whom the king wanted to see them, but later on they became fairly universal and we find the same painting or similar paintings in albums and in other books. It does have a specific message to convey, because when Akbar started his great empire-building process there were wars, but at the same time he sent the message that he was not open to war b
ut open to friendship; and there were matrimonial relationships between the Hindus and other princes and that is something very unusual for a Muslim ruler of the sixteenth century. Some of his closest nobles and his principal courtiers were Hindus, and they remained Hindus. There was no animosity between the faith of the king, the ruler, and them. So the message is that here is one king who is not only going to be tolerant but also be very friendly and coexist in peace and harmony.

  In India this sort of encounter, in which a powerful ruler humbles himself before the wisdom of a holy man, has a very long history. The tradition of these meetings interacted with another tradition, that of religious tolerance, which was perceived as a legacy of the Mughals’ great ancestors, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. It was one of the distinctive features of their conquests and differentiated the Mughal Empire from other Islamic states. In the opening section of his autobiography, Jahangir celebrates the tolerance of his father Akbar in contrast to the attitudes of his contemporaries in Turkey and Iran. In Akbar’s India, Jahangir writes,

  There was room for the professors of opposite religions, and for beliefs, good and bad, and the road to altercation was closed. Sunnis and Shi’as met in one mosque and Christians and Jews in one church, and observed their form of worship.

  Britain’s first ambassador to India, Sir Thomas Roe, who arrived in 1617, memorably recorded Jahangir’s own affirmation of religious tolerance, voiced during what was clearly a not unusual drunken evening:

  The good king fell to dispute of the laws of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad; and in drink was so kind that he turned to me, and said: ‘Am I a king? You shall be welcome.’ Christians, Moors, Jews, he meddled not with their faith: they came all in love and he would protect them from wrong: they lived under his safety and none should oppress them; and this was often repeated; but in extreme drunkenness he fell to weeping and to divers Passions and so kept us till midnight.

  Whether drunk or sober, Jahangir was a strikingly tolerant ruler. As he travelled through his empire, thousands would have been present to watch his visits to holy men and to their shrines, and to witness the public demonstration of a multi-faith society in action. But Jahangir seems also to have been driven by a personal desire to explore the spiritual truths of other religious traditions. He had many private meetings with a renowned Hindu hermit, Gosa’in Jadrup, and describes one of them in his autobiography:

  The place he had chosen to live in was a hole on the side of a hill which had been dug out and a door made … In this narrow and dark hole he passes his time in solitude. In the cold days of winter, though he is quite naked, with the exception of a piece of rag that he has in front and behind, he never lights a fire … I conversed with him and he spoke well, so much as to make a great impression on me.

  The tone of Jahangir’s narrative suggests that such encounters were spiritually as well as politically significant in the life of the Mughal ruling elite; and certainly meetings like these showing the powerful and the rich learning from the holy poor are hard to match elsewhere. It is almost impossible to imagine a European ruler at this date, or indeed any date, being represented so submissively taking instruction in faith. The Indian historian Aman Nath reflects on the encounters between politicians and holy men in India across the centuries:

  Born in India and being part of its culture, civilization, history, it seems to me a very normal scene. Even today not much has changed, because people in power and politicians go and visit holy people, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. But in the painting that we’re talking about faith is far above power and politics. A prince who has other priorities as a young man is conditioned to think that if you get the blessings of holy people then all will be well in your reign. And the fact that he is not coerced, he just visits a Sufi saint and bends his neck, that, I think, is the key thing in the painting: a man of greater wealth, power, ambition, sits on the ground and kneels before a man who has sacrificed everything. Less is more in India, and just as well, because there’s so much poverty that that ‘less than’ gets related to the divine and it becomes a form of compensation to say that holy men want nothing, it’s only foolish men and greedy people who seek everything.

  In spite of all the political upheavals in India since the time of Jahangir, this tradition of the state accommodating all religions with equal respect has endured and became one of the founding ideals of modern India.

  83

  Shadow Puppet of Bima

  Shadow puppet, from Java, Indonesia

  AD 1600–1800

  When the young Barack Obama was taken to Java to live with his new Indonesian stepfather, he was astonished to see, standing astride the road, a giant statue with the body of a man and the head of an ape. He was told that it was Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god. The reason why a huge Hindu god was being portrayed in the streets of modern Muslim Indonesia is a fascinating story of tolerance and absorption, a relaxed compromise between religions unlike any of the other solutions to the problems of multi-faith societies that we have been looking at. And it is a story that can in some ways be summed up by a puppet from the Indonesian shadow theatre, a celebrated art form that is living but ancient, utterly traditional but also full of contemporary politics. Through this puppet and his companions, we can explore a great expanse of religious and political transformation which began in south-east Asia 500 years ago and which still affects the region today.

  The puppet shown here, one of several hundred that we have in the collection, dating from over 200 years ago to the present day, is from the Indonesian island of Java. It stands about 70 centimetres (30 inches) high, and represents a male character in stark dramatic profile. His name is Bima. Bima has very distinctive, almost caricature facial features – a very long nose, for example – and long thin arms, each ending in a single large claw. Over his body are delicate lace-like perforations that would have made his shadow even more dramatic during performance. Bima’s face is black, but he is wearing gold clothes and brightly coloured decorations. Although he is lifeless and fragile now, once he would have enthralled audiences in all-night performances at a Javanese court. This kind of performance was known then, and still is known, as the Theatre of Shadows.

  The puppet’s actual shape is the product of one of the most dramatic religious changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. While Spain was converting the New World to Catholicism, Islam spread across what is today Malaysia, Indonesia and the southern Philippines, and by 1600 most Javanese people were Muslim. But the Theatre of Shadows had been a feature of life in Java long before the arrival of Islam. Bima himself is a character known not just in Java but across the whole of India, because he figures in the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata. In Java, though, this Hindu character came to be operated by Muslim puppeteers and performed in front of audiences who were also Muslim. Nobody seems to have minded, and the Indonesian Theatre of Shadows has continued to combine pagan, Hindu and Muslim elements right up to the present day.

  Making a puppet like our Bima was, and still is, an immensely skilled job, requiring several different craftsmen. It is made out of carefully prepared buffalo hide, which has been scraped and stretched until it has become thin and translucent. It was this material that provided the Javanese name for the theatre – Wayang Kulit – ‘skin theatre’. The puppet was then gilded and painted, and movable arms were added and handles made from buffalo horn fixed to the body and arms to control its movements.

  Historically, performances in the Theatre of Shadows lasted throughout the night. Light from an oil lamp behind the puppeteer’s head cast the shadows from the puppets on to a white sheet. Some members of the audience – usually the women and children – sat on the shadow side of the screen, while the men would sit on the favoured other side. The puppeteer, known as a dalang, would not only control the puppets but also conduct the accompanying music performed by a Gamelan orchestra.

  Sumarsam, a leading dalang in the Theatre of Shadows today, gives us an idea of how complicated it is to pull off a sm
ooth shadow-puppet performance:

  You need to control the puppets themselves, sometimes two, three or sometimes up to six puppets at one time, and the puppet master will have to know when to give a signal to the musicians to play. And of course the puppet master also gives voices to the puppets in different dialogues, and sometimes also he sings mood songs to set up the atmosphere of different scenes. He will have to use his arms and legs – all of this to be done while he is sitting down cross-legged. It’s fun to do it, but also a fairly challenging task. The stories can be updated, but the structure of the plot is always the same.

  The stories told in the Theatre of Shadows are drawn largely from two great Hindu Indian epics – the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, both written well over 2,000 years ago. They have always been widely known in Java, for Hinduism, with Buddhism, had been the main religion there before Islam became the dominant faith.

  Like the Buddhism that inspired Borobudur around 800 (see Chapter 59) and the Hinduism that created the Mahabharata, Islam came to Java through the maritime trading routes that linked Indonesia to India and the Middle East. Local Javanese rulers quickly saw advantages in becoming Muslim: besides any spiritual attraction, it facilitated both their trade with the existing Muslim world and their diplomatic relations with the great Islamic powers of Ottoman Turkey and Mughal India. The new religion brought major changes in many aspects of life, but on the whole local Javanese culture and belief absorbed Islam, rather than being totally replaced by it.