Salmiya

Christmas in Oman

2012-01-07T11:23:00.002+01:00

I had missed Sultan Qaboos' Grand Mosque when in Oman last time, about 7 years ago. We visited the marvellous mosque, which has been finished only in 2001, on Christmas Eve. It now harbors the world's second largest hand-woven carpet and chandelier (after those in Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan mosque in Abu Dhabi which have been installed only in 2010). The mosque in Oman features architectural gems and recalls, at the same time, Cairo's Ibn Tulun and Esfahan's Shah mosque, the Timurid floral and Arabesque tiles in its Friday mosque, Safavid muqarnas, Persian weaving art and a Paradise garden.

On Christmas Day, we attended the mass in the Protestant Church in Ghala, at only a couple of hundred meters distant from the Grand Mosque (although heavy construction work would have made it impossible to walk). I was not really prepared to meet an evangelizing Christian there who expressed her hope and good wishes for us to find the way back to salvation, only after having admitted that I wasn't too much religious and mentioning that evangelizing Omanis appears to be kind of weird. Indeed, I suppose that evangelizing Christians are only tolerated on the Arabian Peninsula by highly tolerant, friendly and peaceful Omanis.

Toward Misfah

2012-01-02T06:51:00.003+01:00

What can you do in Oman when you have just a couple of days? We were lucky that Ahmad, a fisherman from beautiful Sur and cousin of a friend, promised to drive us to Nizwa. Friday market with cattle and goat on sale. Many tourists and generally no collectible souvenirs. We had lunch in a restaurant only with separate rooms for families.

We then went to Misfah, a small village in the mountains with spectacular views into canyon-like wadis with subtropical (actually tropical!) vegetation. The road to Al-Hamra and Misfah offers spectacular view at Oman's highest mountain, Jebel Shams (3009 m).

Ahmed Saleh Al Araimi may be hired as guide also for longer tours by emailing him: teenh2001@yahoo.com.

Royal Opera House Muscat

2012-01-01T08:47:00.002+01:00

A couple of weeks before the opening ceremony, I stumbled over the brand new Opera House in Muscat on the internet. The program included Turandot, Carmen and, well Pjotr Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. When it was dead-easy to purchase tickets online, I planned to spend Christmas once more in the Middle East. The performance of the world class Mariinsky Ballet on opening night was marvelous, and so was the opera house in Al Qurum.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T17:57:00.004+01:00

While 2011 comes to an end, New Year's pledges are hard to formulate. Generally, predictions are unreliable, and what had happened this year hardly anybody had envisaged one year ago. So, there might be some hope for 2012.

The year started promising, millions of North Africans eventually lost patience after realizing that nothing had to be expected in the aftermath of President Obama's historical speech in Cairo of June 4, 2009, just one week before Iran's disputed presidential election. Whether WikiLeak's diplomatic cables ignited what is now known as Arab Spring is not clear, but they certainly contributed to it. The world won't be the same after the brave publication of the cables. If there had been trust in U.S. foreign policy, it has vanished. If anybody had kept faith with Obama's integrity his hypocrisy must have come as a shock.

Ongoing perplexity of world leaders on how to deal with the aggravating global financial crisis, or catastrophic effects of global warming; Obama's need for being re-elected, and Iran's suffocating encirclement and ruined economy; two lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and beacons of hope Julian Assange and Bradley Manning arrested. Well, the future will tell what the future will be.

We spent Christmas this year again in the Middle East. Oman's comparably broad-minded and western music loving Sultan Qaboos bin Said al Said had made his dream come true and bestowed peaceful and friendly Omanis and everybody else a, well, opera house. It is said that the Royal Opera House Muscat was one of the most expensive opera houses so far (more expensive than Sultan Qaboos' Grand Mosque with its second largest hand-woven carpet and chandelier). We attended Pjotr Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake given by the world class Mariinsky Ballet, an unforgettable experience.

To all my readers Happy New Year 2012!

First published at Freelance.

The Lost Decade

2011-09-09T21:09:00.001+02:00

http://youtu.be/BwQuMUe5hfk

Please see the video here.

Where have I been ten years ago? Well, I don’t know. Ten years ago, Ahmad Shah Masoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, had been assassinated by Al Qaeda, but I have learned about that critical event long time after the killing. I suppose I have written about my whereabouts two days later already. It was one of these significant emotional events in life you won’t ever forget (and no one in the world did). I had actually been filling packing boxes all day looking forward to a critical move, to the Middle East. I had got a job offer at Kuwait University. My new colleagues were awaiting me (but, honestly, after the Twin Towers and Pentagon had been hit and hit again, not anymore). The first TV commentators mentioned the world wouldn’t be the same after the assault. They had been right, of course.

When having arrived in Kuwait, I and my colleagues (who were surprised that I had made it) were eagerly or skeptically awaiting the retaliation strikes which then started on October 7.

Contrary to immediate fears, life turned out to be easy in Kuwait, and I got a premier seat for observing what was going on in Afghanistan (and later in Iraq) and developed new sensitivities of an expat, who happened to experience hospitality in an allegedly “hostile” environment. So, I caught up, developed, learned and matured.

Not so the U.S. That the 9-11 attacks had not come out of the blue, Americans never understood. “Why do they hate us?” was the naïve question which was heard everywhere. Americans did never understand that the attacks had something to do with the decade-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the presence of, as regards intercultural competence, ignorant, well infidel, agents and soldiers in Saudi Arabia, with failed Middle Eastern politics under Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush senior, Clinton and now incredible Bush junior, who seemingly wanted to top previous attempts of patronizing in the sensitive region.

No wonder that the Abu Ghuraib scandal and personal circumstances when I heard about it first were another significant emotional event considerably changed the attitude of most upright men and women in the world. Then Guantanamo. Iraq body count, the Granai airstrike, the similar one of Kunduz. Iran’s nuclear program and how the U.S., together with its western allies, imposed rounds of painful sanctions on the country which seemed to copy those one decade earlier on Iraq (I don’t want to write about the apparent coup attempt after the disputed Iranian presidential election of 2009). This war (including the events after WikiLeaks had published the "Collateral Murder" video, the Iraqi and Afghanistan War Logs and the Diplomatic Cables) andwhich appeared to be directed not only towards terror or terrorism but the Islamic world at large, goes on and on. Obama’s speeches had been turned out more or less hollow. This year’s Arab awakening did not occur due to his nice words but in spite of Obama. The NATO bombarding of Libya in order to oust Qadafi the western ally has always had a fishy smell. What comes next there? In Egypt? Tunisia?

Well, Al Qaeda has not been the winner of this war either, definitely not. The network declines for some time, not only after Osma bin Laden's killing, and loses influence among Muslims (which has always been very small). But hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and displaced people in Iraq and Afghanistan must in a way be balanced with the couple of thousands of innocent victims on September 11, 2001. Has it been worth it?

When reviewing the past ten years, I've got the impression that some of the real terrorists had been sitting on Wall Street.

Here's something else.

First published at Freelance.

Once Upon a Time in the East

2011-06-26T09:12:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Intlxpatr, who loved to live there too, I came across this beautiful little piece. Kuwait changed sometimes during two-month summer vacations much. After four years, it has beautified so much. Amazing. I used to live close to Salmiya's wonderful corniche. Miss it much.

Cairo, April 2011

2011-04-29T18:24:00.004+02:00

We just returned from a short trip to Cairo. We spoke with a few people about the revolution. There is certainly hope but not really the spirit of change. Egyptians have listened to President Obama's historical speech on June 4, 2009 in Cairo but also have noted that his words on America's support of democracy all over the world were not meant very seriously.

That the revolution in Egypt is now irreversible may be an over-opimistic conclusion by Mohamed ElBaradei who might run for presidency in September but without any real chance. See his interview with Charlie Rose while promoting his new book The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times here.

Mabrouk Kuwait!

2011-02-26T17:30:00.003+01:00

These days, Kuwaiti citizens celebrate their “Golden Independence Anniversary” and 20 years of liberation from Saddam Hussein’s hordes. And HH Amir Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah is five years in power, of course. 50-20-5. The city is beautifully illuminated and each citizen has got 1000 dinars ($3500) already. Panem et circensis. Uproars in North Africa and even Bahrain seem not to affect the Kuwaitis, although last week has seen some protests of bedouns, or stateless people.

I remember similar celebrations when one of the current Amir’s predecessors, HH Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah (“Baba Jaber”), returned in 2002 from treatment in the United States after having recovered from a mild stroke. We got stuck in the traffic deadlock on our way back to Salwa, we had to walk. Young people were enthusiastically dancing on the cars. Kuwaitis love their Amirs.

When once asking one of my bright Kuwaiti student what exactly they were celebrating on February 25/26, she responded, “Oh, we became independent (in 1961).” “But honestly,” she added, “we had never been dependent!” I liked that. Of course it isn’t true and never was. Kuwait wouldn’t even exist (apart from a small village of fishermen and pearl divers, and some Bedouins living in tents, without the oil which had been discovered in the late 1930s. It would not exist without the Britons and later the U.S.

Anyway, congratulations! Mabrouk to all brave Kuwaitis!

Strong Women (and Men)

2011-01-17T06:23:00.003+01:00

On my numerous visits to Iran during the last decade I have rarely come across nomads. Once, when being on trips from the southern city of Shiraz to Pasargadae and the Margoon waterfalls in the Zagros mountains, my young companion pointed to migrating ‘gypsies’ as the Qashqa’i people were sometimes called by ordinary Iranians. They were on the move north to escape from the scorching heat during the summer months, I was told. It wasn’t clear whether he wanted to express his respect for the free will of the free people in a theocratic dictatorship who won’t be in need for the accomplishments of modern civilization; or rather a slight contempt.

What I came across of, however, were their beautiful products, textiles and rugs, which frequently added to my growing collection of tribal art of the Middle East. In retrospect, one had to concede that my craving for high quality pieces only intensified when returns to the Middle East became more difficult. And, as I was told recently, those pieces won’t be found anymore in Persia these days. Nomadic life in the Islamic Republic of Iran of the 21^st century may not have a future, though the tide of events (conquests, wars, famine and plagues) has only proved the resilience of strong people living in harmony and peace with Nature.

I have recently written about the frontier nomads of the Shahsevan in Azerbaijan and their beautiful soumakh weavings used for mafrashs and khorjins, larger and smaller bags and cradles, a sort of furniture of people on the move. People who hardly exist anymore. Their colorful and ornamental, painstaking weavings is the art of their womenfolk. They are rare nowadays and highly sought-after collectibles since they are pretty small and often wonderfully composed of geometric and/or highly symbolic designs which may or may not be open to endless interpretations about their meanings.

Richard Tapper, an emeritus professor of Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, is an expert of the Shahsavan and has written a political and social history of these frontier nomads in the northwestern corner of Iran. He and Jon Thomson, a visiting fellow at St. Cross College, University of Oxford, and Director of the Beattie Archive in the Department of Eastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, have collected a large number of essays of the different nomadic tribes in Iran which are supplemented with wonderful photographs of the people by Nasrollah Kasraian. They were ‘taken’ as Thompson explains in the preface, during the 1980s, a time when Iran was in a murderous war with arch foe Saddam Hussein, then dictator in Iraq.

“We speak of ‘taking’ a photograph, and faced by a camera, many people intuitively sense that the photographer is taking something which in essence is for his own use. Even though a promise may be made to send prints – a promise often broken – the feeling remains that there is a predatory aspect to his work. This is especially the case when pictures are taken without a person’s permission or knowledge. The situation becomes abundantly clear to anyone foolish enough to use a Polaroid camera in the field. As soon as the subjects discover that they can get hold of the image and keep it for themselves, and furthermore they can control the image they present, all resistance vanishes and the clamour to be photographed is unending.”

The pictures are indeed breathtaking. My first impression was that they mainly portray old, middle-aged and young women with their children and grandchildren, not men: beautiful women with striking features. It is mentioned in the book and crystal clear when watching the pictures: “[they] are visibly tougher and freer than their settled sisters, yet their life consists of back-breaking work fetching huge loads of fuel and water and long hours at the loom.” One may instantly feel a desire to get to know them personally, talk with them and share so different experiences in life.

In his political and social study Richard Tapper documents also some voices of the Shahsevan. He recorded a few stories of elders of the Geyikli tribe in 1966. Here comes an example:

̉Emran Imani of Geykili on Nurollah Bey Qoja-Beyli
In the time of Naser ad-Din Shah, the Shah summons Nurollah Bey Qoja-Beyli to Tehran to account for his misdeed. In those days there were no government representatives in Azarbaijan, though there were in Araq. People say to Nurollah Bey, ‘The Shah may have summoned you to Tehran, but don’t go, he’ll kill you; he wants you to account for your misdeeds.’ ‘Even if the Shah has summoned Nurollah Bey Qoja-Beyli to Tehran to die’, he tells them, ‘Nurollah Bey will not pay any attention to your warnings; I am going.’
So he takes one servant and sets off from Moghan for Tehran. In those days there were no cars nor even proper roads, so they go by horse; and it takes them twenty days or a month to get there. He arrives in Tehran and rests for a little, then after a couple of days he has a letter written to the Shah, as follows: ‘God save Your Majesty! Nurollah Bey Qoja-Beyli, whom you sent for is here, come to your feet, ready, at your service.’
Taking the letter, he approaches the inner court and says to the sentry, ‘May I have permission to deliver a letter to the Shah?’ The sentry tells him, ‘I’m afraid I can’t give you permission, but if you’ll hand me the letter I’ll take it and deliver it to His Majesty myself.’ But it seems that the Shah has heard this conversation, since he immediately orders the sentry to let Nurollah Bey come in.
He passes through the courtyard door and enters the inner court. The Shah comes out onto the balcony, and Nurollah Bey finds himself in the royal presence. He takes out the letter and presents it to the Shah, who reads it and sees that this is indeed the Nurollah Bey whom he had summoned on such-and-such a date and at such-and-such a time.
‘Nurollah Bey’, he says, ‘Weren’t you frightened of coming here to see me?’
‘No’, replies he, ‘God save Your Majesty, I wasn’t frightened.’
The Shah is most surprised at this boldness, and goes on: ‘Nurollah Bey, I’m going to ask you three questions; if your answers are satisfactory, I shan’t harm you; but if not, I shall have one of your wrists cut of and one of your eyes put out.’
Well, if a man gets such an order from the Shah, he must be very bold indeed to remain unafraid! Nurollah Bey says, ‘God save Your Majesty, go ahead.’
‘Nurollah Bey’, says the Shah, ‘Where is strength?’
‘Sire’, replies Nurollah Bey, ‘Strength is in gun-powder!’
‘Bravo, Nurollah Bey!’ cries the Shah. ‘Nurollah Bey’, he goes on.
‘Sire?’ replies Nurollah Bey.
‘Nurollah Bey, where is pleasure?’
‘Sire’, replies Nurollah Bey, ‘Pleasure is in meat!’
‘Bravo, Nurollah Bey!’ cries the Shah. ‘Splendid! Nurollah Bey’, he continues, ‘which are prettier, your women or ours?’
‘Sire’, replies Nurollah Bey, ‘Our women are prettier!’
‘Eh?!’ cries the Shah.
‘Yes’, says Nurollah Bey.
‘How’s that?’ asks the Shah.
‘Because, Sire’, explains Nurollah Bey, ‘If it rained cats and dogs for twenty-four hours and we put all those women out in the rain, then the rain would wash the rouge and powder off your women, and the dirt off ours, and then you’d see which of them were prettier!’
‘Bravo, bravo!’ cries the Shah. ‘Nurollah Bey, I shall grant you a boon, just ask me whatever you like.’
At first Nurollah Bey – who was very smart, a really cunning fellow – says, ‘Sire, all I want is good health for Your Majesty.’
‘No, Nurollah Bey, you must ask me for something.’
‘Sire’, says Nurollah Bey, ‘Since you’re so kind as to grant me this boon, give me all the land between Taulan and Lakiwan for my horses to graze.’ (This was Taulan on the Dara-Yort, and as far as Arshaq.)
So the Shah writes him out a Royal Farman, and gives it to him, saying, ‘Nurollah Bey, take your leave if you want to, it’s up to you; if you like, you may stay here.’
Nurollah Bey takes another few days’ rest, then comes back to see the Shah and ask permission to leave. He enters the Royal Presence once more and says, ‘Sire, your servant requests permission to take his leave.’
The Shah replies, ‘You're very welcome, Nurollah Bey, have a good journey and come again.’
At the time Nurollah Bey was paramount chief of all the Shahsevan, the Shahsevan delegate, as it were. The thirty villages he acquired are still in the hands of his descendants; the Shah had no idea where ‘the land between Taulan and Lakiwan’ was, he thought it must be one village, or something like that. Nurollah Bey was a very clever chap, and scored quite a triumph there, getting the Shah to write him a Farman for all that land.”

First published at Freelance.

Just Fallen Short

2010-10-30T08:31:00.004+02:00

Quasi-periodicity in 15^th century Islamic Art and whether it actually has been developed as a concept is still a matter of a somewhat controversial debate. There are three sites in the city of Esfahan which have been studied in this regard in considerable detail, two rather small patterns on a spandrel and a portal on the Darb-i Imam shrine in the Dardasht quarter of the old city (1453) and a huge pattern on the western iwan of the Great Mosque. Several authors have, in the meantime, tried to overlie Penrose patterns of kites and darts or thick and thin rhombuses in order to prove that medieval artisans were able to apply what had been described by Roger Penrose only five centuries later. See, for example, Lu and Steinhardt (2007), their response to some additional work by Makovicky (2007), or Cromwell (2008) here, here, and here.

However, while a certain desire for subdivision and self-similarity can easily be traced on the respective buildings, it is not perfect, in particular not at the Darb-i Imam’s spandrel and portal, and the Great Mosque’s western iwan (probably 17^th century). The higher level of girih- or proto-tiles is composed of decagons and bowties in each case only. I have pointed some time ago to a possible solution for creating in fact a perfect subdivision if one had considered a special arrangement of girihs in the upper right corner of the spandrel of the Darb-i Imam, which is composed of decagons, bowties and, in fact, the elongated hexagon, or bobbin, which can be found all-over. The picture below indicates the higher level pattern originally found on the spandrel (left) and a suggested pattern (right) which takes into account a small portion of the lower level pattern in the upper right corner. See more information here.

On the western iwan of Esfahan’s Great, or Friday, Mosque, the highest level is composed of alternating half decagons while the spaces in-between are filled with half bowties. Both decagons and bowties follow mainly the suggested subdivision rule. However, the pattern is distinct as it introduces, at the intermediate level, a rhombus, which is otherwise missing in the subdivision. If one adds colors (picture below, left), it becomes clear that the artisans just fell short in creating a true Penrose pattern.

Certainly, it would have been possible to assemble the five-point star (purple in the left picture) by a bobbin and two bowties instead. How it would look then can be seen in the right picture above (by Benjamin R. Schleich from his dissertation, which can be found here). A nice animated gif, instantly explaining the concept of subdivision and self-similarity, can be found here.

The picture below shows the western iwan, or sofe-shāgird, the iwan of the student (sic!). Sofe-e ustadh (the iwan of the master) faces it, it is the eastern iwan.

That medieval artisans just fell short of creating something that would really have amazed us 500 years later may be regarded as indirect proof that they had not really penetrated the mathematical concept. But if they actually had, why would that have been more interesting? Medieval artisans were keen to produce, with the help of eminent mathematicians, interesting ornaments and designs on mosques and buildings, not mathematical breakthroughs. They achieved a ‘dazzling’ appearance anyway; I have pointed to that several times here on this blog, see here and here. By removing color as a common element, for instance in the case of the Gonbad-e Qabud in Maraghah (1196), they even created something what would absorb and dazzle scientists even eight centuries later.

That has made a lasting impact, hasn’t it?

First published at Freelance.

Intricate Patterns

2010-10-03T17:03:00.008+02:00

Mathematic breakthroughs in the 10^th and 11^th centuries in Baghdad and, for instance, Esfahan may have resulted during the 15^th century in an explosion of Islamic Art and Architecture. In particular the use of so called girih tiles, that is a set of polygonal prototiles with well-defined decorating lines may have allowed medieval artists in Iran and Central Asia to create decagonal tessellations with, in few cases, Penrose-similar patterns. Between the mid-14^th and early 16^th centuries, the Timurids ruled over much of the Islamic world. The highly sophisticated and strictly geometric (‘Islamic’) patterns on glazed tiles covering buildings and monuments became later more and more floral. Exquisite examples of this changing style can be seen in Esfahan's Grand Mosque and Darb-i Imam, Mashhad’s Gohar Shad mosque, or the Friday Mosque in Yazd.

The Timurids were repelled in Iran by the rulers of the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736 CE) who established the Shi’a branch of Islam as state religion. Many historians regard specific achievements during these centuries as the true apogee in Islamic Art and Architecture. One marvelous example is the Naqsh-e Jahan in Esfahan. Geometric, calligraphic and floral designs cover both religious and secular buildings while ancient roots of the Iranian society, in particular the Achaemenid style of intricately carved wooden ceilings and slender pillars are well preserved in certain palaces, reminding of the grandeur of ancient Persepolis.

Another area where the specific designs of the Safavid period can still be studied is few surviving carpets of that time. Two years ago, Christie’s Auction House has sold an Esfahani silk carpet of about 1600 for an, at that time, record amount of $4,450,500. I was wondering at that time, how many of these inalienable carpets are still hoarded by wealthy Tehran bazaaris in their vast storages.

Well, some of these masterpieces have only survived in paintings of the European Renaissance period (14^th to 16^th centuries). Famous examples include paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger (ca. 1498-1543) and Lorenzo Lotto (1480-1556). Saudiaramco World has dedicated an article in its recent issue to “Threads on Canvas”, i.e., mainly Anatolian carpets displayed on famous Renaissance paintings (by Tom Verde). Some of the carpet designs are even called after Holbein, and others may have been identified on still existing pieces. In particular Holbein’s portrait of merchant Georg Giese, or Gisze as the painting was entitled by the artist, (1532) is a fascinating masterpiece illustrating much of the life circumstances of the confident young man, for example his engagement (the carnations in a fragile vase placed too close to the edge of the table) and wealth, symbolized by the carpet on the table. The strapwork border and even the design of the central field can actually be seen in an Anatolian carpet in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Another example by Holbein is the famous Ambassadors (1533) which may strike the viewer by its surrealistic anamorphic skull in the lower third of the painting, which is only discernible as such when the picture is viewed at an acute angle. It is what nowadays would be called a gimmick, both to shock, or at least surprise, the viewer and impress him or her for the superior mastering of the complicated technique. Again, the table is covered by an Anatolian carpet with a ‘large-pattern Holbein’ design. A similar existing example can be found in the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, Germany.

More about carpets of the Ottoman era in general and Holbein carpets in particular may be found here.

First published at Freelance.

Shahsevan

2010-09-18T10:36:00.016+02:00

I have visited northwestern Iran in 2005, just after the election of current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I stayed only 72 hours or so and went on to Mashhad but, as usual when in Iran, I have met a couple of nice people there, in particular Dawoud and Alireza, who didn’t mind to show me around. So, I had the opportunity of having a ride to Daryacheh Orumiyeh and another to Kandovan. I have reported on these trips here and here on this blog.

That memories lasted long was partly due to the purchase of a very nice small Shirvan rug for my own tiny gallery. Its owner Dawoud, a very knowledgeable carpet collector and honorable dealer in Tabriz, was rather reluctant to sell it to me since he had it in his own flat for 20 years. I knew at that time already that Shirvan was a region in Azerbaijan in Transcaucasia. Buying that small rug didn’t make me a collector, though. The people, exotic places, adventures, and the circumstances of finding collectibles in original places, the bargaining made it, which fascinated me. I have told the stories about Seyed and Mirwuis, Ali and Hussain, Mr. Okhravi and his eldest son Sirus here on this blog. Of course I was fully aware of spending most of the time money on rubbish. But I didn’t mind.

Well, that might have been changed since I am living in a much more boring region right now, far away from exotic places and with no time anymore for extensive travelling in particular in the Middle East. When planning this year’s holidays in Istanbul, I eventually dared to contact a German carpet dealer whom I had located in Munich before (but who currently has his business in Istanbul) and whose webpage with special antique rugs and textiles from the Middle East and Central Asia I had frequented for some time. I asked for a particular Shahsevan bag (khorjin) face displaying tastefully, indeed elegantly, arranged Memling guls and which was allegedly from 1800. It looked so new! Brilliant colors, no visible damage. The carpet dealer, Bertram, enlightened me that it had been restored, of course. By courtesy he provided me with a picture of the piece indicating how it looked when he had bought it. I admit that, given the price he mentioned, I lost somewhat interest in the piece. Should I pay the huge amount for the masterful repair or the antique? It seems so as if, well, sort of over-restoration had created a completely different piece of art here.

The following weeks, Bertram and I had a spirited exchange of emails. I could learn a lot from him, he told the novice. And he was right! We exchanged our differing experiences which we had made in the Middle East. He had travelled in the 1970s, as so many young people from the West, to Iran, Afghanistan, India. Morgenlandfahrer, as Hermann Hesse would have called them. After the Islamic revolution, though, he had avoided entering in Iran. Amazing that, when I recently asked Abbas Okhravi in Mashhad, he remembered a young German guy called Bertram whom he had actually met then.

I was interested in one of his pieces which resembled, in design, my Shirvan rug. He told me that it was not extraordinary but interesting anyway and had belonged to the collection of bag faces collected by a German engineer, Hans-Gerhard Bach, who had died in 2000. He had been commissioned to sell these pieces; some were of very high quality, most had been sold already. He had published the best pieces in a book and kindly provided me with a copy and another copy of his other gorgeous book about Shahsevan sumakh bags.

Due to some circumstances, I missed Bertram in Istanbul. He suggested visiting Seref Özen and Mehmet Çetinkaya in Istanbul, famous and knowledgeable carpet dealers with most interesting stuff.

The latter’s gallery, a temple of exquisite taste and a gold mine for both its owner and the opulent (I am not) connoisseur, impressed us very much. Mehmet’s catalogue with an explicit statement and beautiful examples of the very fact that tribal art of Central Asia might have antedated 20^th century’s Modernism by several hundred years is stunning. The two pieces from Transcaucasia (Shahsevan, Moghan), which I bought there, were expensive but not so special.

The bag face below is from the Bach collection (plate 32). Initially classified as Shahsevan, Bertram now considers it Luri. It has a special patina and might be one of the oldest, from the early 19^th century. The other piece is a Shahsevan from Qeydar, a small town south of Zanjan in the Khamseh district in Azerbaijan. It may be the other face of a mafrash displayed here; same but not identical.

More about the Shahsevan, a confederacy of nomadic tribes “loyal to the shah” at the frontiers of Azerbaijan, can be found in Richard Tapper’s book. More about their mainly flat weavings can be found here.

Kitties in Istanbul

2010-09-06T06:52:00.002+02:00

It's a cat-friendly city. They are fed by the people and seem to enjoy life. Different from other parts of the Middle East. In Kuwait, for instance, stray cats are living in and from garbage containers and would not allow fondling. They are terrified. Istanbul's cats apparently are not.

Ramadan Kareem!

2010-08-10T17:23:00.002+02:00

To all my friends in the Middle East: Ramadan Kareem!

Thanks for the wonderful crescent to intlxpatr.com.

The Night Journey

2010-07-09T00:01:00.005+02:00

When recently having read German Orientalist Tilman Nagel’s voluminous opus maximum on life and legend of the prophet of Islam, I became once more interested in the different versions of Muhammad’s ascension to heaven and his night journey to Jerusalem which had already been combined in the earliest surviving text on his life, Ibn Ishaq’s (d. 761) Sirat Rasul Allah (“Life of the Messenger of God)”, edited by one of his students, Ibn Hisham (d. 830 CE).

Largely powerless, his preaching oppressed, his followers brutally persecuted, Muhammad had tried, just 18 months before emigrating to the city of Yathrib, to reassert himself by telling strange stories about night journeys. According to the Kitab al-Tarikh wa al-Maghazi by another biographer, Al-Waqidi (d. 822), the prophet ascended to heaven on Ramadan 17 (621 CE) when having a nap at the Ka’aba in Makkah. A ladder (mi’raj) was put up by the two angels Jibril (Gabriel) and Mikhael (Michael) between the Zamzam well and the station of Ibrahim (maqam Ibrahim). Then, all three climbed up. After having met other eminent prophets and having had a close look at hell and paradise, Muhammad received the order to commit ritual prayers five times a day, and after having accomplished the descent, Jibril informed him about details of the rites.

Al-Isra’ wa Mi’raj
According to Ibn Ishaq’s account, the ascension took place in Jerusalem. At night while sleeping in Abu Talib’s daughter Umm Hani’s house, on Rabi’ al-awwal 17, one year before the hijra, he was brought al-Buraq, the mythical white-winged mare, and accompanied by Jibril, they rode to the “farthest mosque” (al-masjid al-aqsa), i.e., according to most Muslim beliefs, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Muhammad tethered the animal at a site now called Robinson’s arch at the south western flank of the Temple Mount. From there he climbed the divine ladder up and down, and the horse brought him back to Makkah. The Qur’an mentions the night journey (al-Isra’) in its homonymous surah 17, 1:

“Glory to (Allah) Who did take His servant for a Journey by night from the Sacred Mosque to the farthest Mosque (Masjid al-Aqsa), whose precincts We did bless, – in order that We might show him some of Our Signs: for He is the One Who heareth and seeth (all things).”

Muhammad did not follow Umm Hani’s advice, not to talk about his night journey. The Quraysh quickly contested that it would have been possible to travel to Jerusalem in one night and scrutinized the story. According to a hadith by Ibn Katir “the Quraysh were asking me (Muhammad) about my Night Journey. They asked me things about Bayt Al-Maqdis (Jerusalem, the Temple Mount) that I was not sure of, and I felt more anxious and stressed then I have ever felt. Then Allah raised Bayt Al-Maqdis for me to see, and there was nothing they asked me about but I told them about it.“ So, it must be concluded that Muhammad had never been in Jerusalem before.

What Did the Prophet Actually See in Jerusalem?
But what had he seen when in Jerusalem? After its final destruction in 135 CE by the troops of Roman Emperor Hadrian who brutally cracked down the Bar Kokhba revolt, Jews were no longer allowed to settle there. Christianity was still a forbidden religion. The city was renamed Colonia Aelia Capitolina. Hadrian ordered that a temple for Aphrodite was erected. The entire province of Iudaea became Syria-Palaestina.

When Emperor Constantine I (d. 337 CE) became a ruler of the Roman Empire in 324 CE, Christianity got its chance. His devout Christian mother Empress Helena, while having been travelling the Holy Land at a time when Christianity had been legalized throughout the Roman Empire, had discovered the hiding place of what was held the True Cross, used for the crucifixion of Jesus. Amazingly, her son, Emperor Constantine, renewed the prohibition on the residence of Jews in Jerusalem. Jews were only allowed to mourn for the destruction of their temple once per year, on the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av. In 325, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea which established a largely privileged status for the Bishop of Jerusalem.

Constantine discovered in the holy city the site where Jesus has allegedly been crucified, buried, and resurrected, and ordered to build the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Church of Resurrection, and the Church on Mt. Zion commemorating the Last Supper. As a result of Constantine’s promotion of Christianity, Jerusalem flourished again after several centuries and became a center of pilgrimage for the whole Roman Empire.

In the fifth century, the city was further expanded by Eudocia, wife of Emperor Theodosius II, who ordered to build further churches in Jerusalem. Emperor Justinian erected in 543 CE another large church in honor of the Virgin Mary, called Nea Ekklesia of the Theotokos. It was completely destroyed by an earthquake in 746 and never re-built.

The Byzantine rule in Palestine ended when, after a siege of 21 days and massive bombardment of the city walls with ballistas, the Sassanid army under general Shahrbaraz eventually conquered and looted Jerusalem in 614 CE, and massacred its (mainly Christian) inhabitants. Most of the churches including the Holy Sepulcher were burned down. The True Cross was taken as a trophy to Ctesiphon. This was four years after declaring Muhammad’s prophecy, eight years before hijra.

Persian rule lasted for some 15 years, and in 629 Heraclius re-conquered the city, seven years after hijra. He triumphantly returned the True Cross to the re-built Holy Sepulcher. Only nine years later, the Islamic Caliphate extended its dominion to Jerusalem. The rashidun Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab signed a contract with Patriarch Sophronius assuring the Christians and their holy places that they will now be protected under Muslim rule. The Holy Sepulcher had been rebuilt and redecorated in 1048.

Reconstructions
Coming back to the question regarding Muhammad in Jerusalem, what did he actually find on the Temple Mount? Oleg Grabar’s Book on early Islamic Jerusalem, The Shape of the Holy (Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1996) provides some computer-generated views of Jerusalem as it probably looked around 600 CE. While the Holy Sepulcher and Nea are prominent landmarks, the area of the former Temple is empty. (Note that the Al-Aqsa mosque has been built by the Umayyad Caliph Al-Walid in 705, a couple of years after Abd’ al-Malik’s Dome of the Rock.) But these sacral (Christian!) monuments lay more or less in ruins when Muhammad arrived on his mythical mount in 621. When the Quraysh asked him about details and Allah raised Jerusalem before his face, did He show him the Christian city in ruins? Or the empty area on top of the Temple Mount?

The Two Qiblas
At least since the Mishna in 200 CE Jews face the Jerusalem Temple Mount in prayers. So did Muhammad even after having arrived in Yathrib, then Madinah, in 622. The following year, while leading the prayers in a mosque, he got a revelation by Allah (surah 2, 144) to turn the qibla to the Ka’aba in Makkah. So, two-and-half years after his miraculous visit to Jerusalem from where he ascended to heaven, he finally turned his interests towards Makkah.

The picture shows the Madaba (in Jordan) mosaic map of Jerusalem in the mid or late sixth century. The (northern) Damascus Gate to the left, (eastern) St. Stephen’s Gate as well as the Holy Sepulcher (west) and Nea church (south) are discernible.

First published at Freelance.

Mombasa's Old City

2010-01-30T18:34:00.004+01:00

I have mentioned in a previous post that the special charm of Mombasa’s old city can hardly be perceived instantly. My Jordanian colleagues from Kuwait and I had booked at the Whitesands Sarova Hotel north of the city. The view of the Indian Ocean just outside the hotel with camels on the beach was breathtaking. The constant breeze from the ocean made humidity and tropical temperatures very comfortable. In fact a place to die, I was thinking.

My friends are not the ideal company when exploring exotic places. On my request, we went to Mombasa, but it was hot and dusty and I was told “we know all of this” from home. When I became curious about the 16th century Mandhry mosque with its strange minaret, I was informed by my Muslim friends that it was not prayer time, so asking to enter was hopeless. Nobody was either interested in the vegetable and fruit market. Was that a bazaar? We rushed through the lanes. Souvenir shops sold beautiful collectibles at reasonable prices.

Seh Mihraba Prayer Rug

2009-12-22T10:47:00.003+01:00

I have posted on this blog some time ago an unusual Seh Mihraba rug from the Shindand market area in west Afghanistan. I had bought it from my friendly Afghan carpet sellers Mirwuis and Syed who used to have a small shop in Kuwait’s Souq Mubarakia. They frequently offered a variety of rugs from Afghanistan and Iran on the Friday market in the Al-Rai industrial area next to the notorious 4th Ring Road, just behind the nurseries. Opposite to the animal market, there is what is called the Iranian market where you may find in fact everything you might be looking for. The whole area is very fascinating. My friends and I liked to go there, if possible every weekend.

I would like to post another, much more typical, Seh Mihraba rug here. Tareq Rajab, Kuwait’s former Director of the Department of Antiquities and Museums in Kuwait and owner of two most marvelous private museums in Jabriya (the museum for calligraphy I had a chance to visit shortly before leaving Kuwait for good in 2007), also had a tiny shop in Salmiya, next to my flat in the Al-Qana’a towers: the Kuwait Design Center, where Mr. Rajab sold certain items from his vast collection. I have heard that the shop has meanwhile been closed down when the friendly lady from the Philippines, Marlene, and her colleague decided to leave Kuwait for good.

Visiting the shop has always been a delight. They had fine furniture, carpets, chinaware, engravings, and many other affordable and not affordable collectibles for sale. Every now and then, the two organized, with the help of Mr. Rajab and his wife Madame Jehan, exhibitions in the couple’s third building in Jabriya, Dar Al-Cid, where even more exclusive furniture, carpets and rugs were displayed.

It was on one of these occasions when I bought this high quality Seh Mihraba (literally meaning three mihrabs, or prayer niches) prayer rug which is displayed here. The design is typical for rugs from the Shindand area south to Herat, Afghanistan. The central field contains four rhombus-shaped medallions described as nakshe hozi (“water basins”). The overall dark-red field displays highlights of triangles in bright-red and bright green and blue dots. In the centers of the main medallions. The central area is flanked by columns of white, stepped rhombuses, again surrounded and containing bright highlights. The border system consists of four stripes. The main border is composed of interrupted white stripes. The very soft and shiny wool has a silky appearance. See a similar carpet in Parsons’ Carpets of Afghanistan, plate 97.

Afghan Baluch prayer rug
Seh Mihraba design
Afghanistan,135 cm x 86 cm, second half of 20th century

Warp: W, Z2S ivory
Weft: W, S, grey
Pile: W, Z
Knots: as2 (asymmetric, open to the right)
Density: 11 x 7, ca. 77 kpsi (1200 per sq dm)
Height of pile: 3 mm
Handle: velvet, grainy
Upper end: 6 cm kilim, W, soumak technique
Lower end: 4 cm kilim, W, soumak technique
Sides: 0.5 cm wide, W, selvage dark-brown
Colors: 9, black, dark-brown, dark-blue, Bordeaux, white (undyed), bright red, bright green, bright blue,

See another very similar rug here.

The Curse Of Jumba La Mtwana

2009-11-01T18:52:00.001+01:00

Suleiman, one of Whitesands Hotel’s tour managers, wasn’t in a good mood. Very talkative, he obviously believed that I would actually be interested in his family affairs which seemed to be in a mess. His wife had been taken back to Riyadh by her parents where they were living. Arabs. A black man was not really the son in law they had expected, he told me. But at least you are a Muslim, aren’t you? I asked him. Yes, he replied, but his mother was Christian, and it doesn’t really matter. Then he told me about the origin of the Palestinians. Although knowing the story about Jacob and his older twin brother Esau, the two sons of Isaac and Rebekah, I wasn’t aware about theories regarding the two resulting tribes, the children if Israel (or Jacob) and those of Esau, the Palestinians (or Edomites, I suppose). An interesting hypothesis.

We took a ride to Jumba la Mtwana (he unavailingly tried me to pronounce the Swahili words correctly). The century-old gorgeous ruins of a town north of Mombasa can be found just off-shore the Indian Ocean. We crossed the beautiful Mtwapa creek and then turned right after having passed through a busy village. Suleiman mentioned that many old Europeans, males and females, come here to get married again (?) and start a new life. He pointed to rather strange examples, old and pretty ugly men with young girls doing shopping. He found that okay. I was in doubt. Is it a sort of sex tourism? I asked. Not really, he explained. Both parties have advantages, so it’ll be okay!

Into the jungle! We approached the ruins of what had been a bigger town. A Muslim place, I immediately recognized. A young guide was desperately waiting for tourists. I was the only one so far today. When entering the site I saw a huge skeleton of a Blue Whale which has once stranded here. Further we went into the magical remains of buildings, mosques, squares, a cemetery with a stele covered by Arabic script. Century-old trees, even Neem, or medicine, trees I once was very interested in for medical reasons. A 1.5 meters long green snake disappeared in a hole, a colorful lizard was more curious. Magical. My guide told me a word in my ear: “Germans used to give the best tips!” I was wondering why the people had disappeared from this place? “Was it an epidemic, sort of plague?” He gave me an evasive answer.

When returning to Whitesands, I asked Suleiman about it. “Didn’t he dare to tell you the true story? It was Allah’s curse. Once, the king of the town wanted to marry another girl. But people warned him that she was one of his own daughters. He didn’t mind, and from then the town’s destiny was doomed.

Marshmallow

2009-10-02T19:33:00.003+02:00

I couldn't resist.

Mombasa's Fort Jesus

2009-10-02T13:58:00.031+02:00

Mombasa does not reveal its special charm easily. I had been in the old city before (I will report later) but was a bit disappointed. The organizers of the AMER IADR Meeting had scheduled a guided tour on Friday afternoon, and I was the first to register. Twenty-eight Euros for three hours, whow! I expected gorgeous insights into the East African societies and culture.

Out we went with the bus. The group promised to be fun. In fact, we laughed a lot. A South African couple was interested in my pretty exotic experiences in Kuwait and Norway. Our first stop was at the Akamba Handicraft Industry Cooperative Society, a non-profit organization where some 10'000 people were employed who carved beautiful sculptures and small items, chairs, masks, etc. from ebony wood, Kenya's gold.

Well, when entering Mombasa city we got more or less stuck in the afternoon traffic jam. Our guide seemed not to have the slightest clue what he wanted to show us. We passed the famous giant tusks but I could't take a snapshot. The other day, my friends and I had started our walking tour at Fort Jesus, and I asked the guide whether we will also visit that sight. I saw in his face that he loved my suggestion. "Don't worry", he told me, "it won't be closed", he dispelled my concern.

Upon arrival we had in fact half an hour left. Only four of us were interested. The guard at Fort Jesus was knowledgeable and showed us around. The fort had been built by the Portuguese in 1593 and in the following centuries, it had changed hands at least nine times between Portuguese sailors, Omani soldiers (who recruited their slaves in Mombasa) and Swahili rebels. In 1875 the British finally used it as a jail. There are great views from the Fort's mighty walls at the Indian Ocean. The Fort's museum is not a must but turned out to be an excellent refuge for cooling down from the steamy heat.

A Dokhtar-i Ghazi Prayer Rug

2009-09-17T05:20:00.008+02:00

Timuri prayer rug
Dokhtar-i Ghazi design
Afghanistan, 150 cm x 98 cm, old (second half of 20th century)

Warp: W, Z2S, ivory, light brown
Weft: W, S, ivory
Pile: W, Z
Knots: as1
Density: 17 x 11, ca. 187 kpsi (2900 per sq dm)
Height of pile: 2 mm
Handle: like velvet, grainy
Upper end: -
Lower end: -
Sides: 0.5 cm wide, W, selvages black
Colors: 5, black, dark-purple, dark blue, brown-red, ivory (beige)

Classic Dokhtar-i Ghazi (the Qadi’s daughter) design. With considerable density of knots. The origin is sometimes identified as Timuri, an Afghan/Central Asian tribe which, according to George O’Bannon, does no longer exist in Afghanistan. See also a less interesting rug in R. D. Parsons’ Carpets of Afghanistan, plate 98. Good examples may be found on Thomas Cole’s page:
http://www.tcoletribalrugs.com/article45YaqubKhani.html , http://www.tcoletribalrugs.com/article30PitOcts.html

A Kordish Baluch Rug from Khorassan

2009-09-05T18:07:00.013+02:00

Kordish Baluch rug, Ali Mirzai design

Khorassan, Northeastern Iran, 198 cm x 107 cm, old, possibly antique (first half of 20th century)

Warp: W, Z2S, ivory
Weft: W, S, grey
Pile: W, Z
Knots: as2 (asymmetric, open to the right)
Density: 12 x 7, ca. 84 kpsi (1300 per sq dm)
Height of pile: 3 mm
Handle: thin, evenly grained
Upper end: 2 cm kilim, W, 3 bands, black, red-brown, olive
Lower end: -
Sides: 0.5 cm wide, W, selvage dark-brown
Colors: 4, black, dark-blue, brown-red, white

The main field consists of octagons, alternating either filled with blossoms or with another octagon and an octagonal star. In between the main octagons, stylized cocks are displayed (note that "Baluch" is etymologically derived from cock, cockscomb, or bundle of hairs). They generally face each other with the exception of the lower row of cocks, where the second is turned.

The main border has a hashie nargessi (narcissus border) design, which is very typical for the Ali Mirzai (S. Azadi, Carpets in the Baluch Tradition, Klinckhardt & Biermann 1986; see, for example, plates 49ff).

Considerable wear. Dark-blue and black areas are alternating, while the black-dyed wool is considerably corroded.

Bobbins and Bowties

2009-08-30T10:44:00.007+02:00

I have promised some time ago to describe, in separate posts, the different iwans at Esfahan’s Masjed-e Jomeh. I have discussed the southern and western iwans but political turmoil after the presidential election has largely dampened my enthusiasm of reporting on Iran’s glorious past.

What has attracted my interest on the occasion of my last visit of Esfahan were some dazzling tessellations on the Darb-i Imam (1453 CE) and on the western iwan of Esfahan’s Great Mosque (about the same time) which have caused considerable discussions in the academic world. It had even been speculated whether they represent early examples of quasi-periodicity. You may find more information on it here and here.

What is evident is that these complicated tilings frequently with five-fold ornament (decagons and pentagons) must have been composed of certain units which have been called girih tiles. They have conventional decoration ribbons with internal angles of multiples of 36°. You may find them in decorations all over the Islamic world in particular during and after the 15th century. In the finished tiling the construction lines would be erased leaving only the interlaced decoration ribbons. Thus, the underlying framework is concealed. One of the main reasons for the frequent impression of, well, dazzling. The precision which results in using these girih tiles is absolutely stunning. A nice article on the topic has recently been published by Peter R. Cromwell (Mathematical Intelligence 2009; 31:36-56). He described a somewhat larger set of what he calls Islamic prototiles, rhombus, pentagon, hexagonal barrels, octagon, bow-tie, hexagonal bobbin, and decagons.

Well, precision was not always granted. Also on the western iwan, in one spandrel, I noticed a similar tessellation as that of the nearby huge and famous decoration, which, after reconstruction, turned out to be quite different from that on the Darb-i Imam. You may reconstruct it with bobbins and bowties, and decagons bordering the spandrel. But it didn’t work out so nice. I offer here a somewhat different solution. But it is not really satisfactory anyway.

Note, that the insert below is a mirrored image of the right spandrel (not shown) which tesserae almost fit those on the left spandrel. So, the artisan knew what he did.

More Holy Sites

2009-08-23T10:04:00.041+02:00

I haven’t posted here for a long time (but see my other posts at Freelance where I have been pretty busy in recent months). It was mainly the Iranian election with its outcome (not surprising) and the turn into a police state afterwards. The Iranian people have a tough time right now. I have seen the new cabinet suggested to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the other day in a picture (they have to be approved by the majlis, but God forbid!). To be honest, none of them looks trustworthy. One is even wanted by Interpol. It’s a shame, but maybe the good people there (are there?) will reject the proposal in total.

I have received a disturbing email from Iran as a response to my Ramadan Kareem greetings wanting me to pray for the people there. I will try to do that by posting another series of pictures of holy places, this time in Shiraz, the city of nightingales and roses, poets and poems, vine and paradise gardens, and beautiful girls. This post is dedicated to the friendly people in Iran and in particular to the great hospitality of Nilo and Maryam who I have met in Esfahan on last year’s Christmas Day. Nilo had shown me the way to the Vank church in the Armenian quarter where she also wanted to pray since she (as a Muslim) loved Jesus so much.

Well, when in Shiraz in 2006 (please see also my previous posts on this blog on Persepolis, the paradise gardens and Masjed-e Vakil) I came across three posters (among pictures of modern idols such as movie and pop stars) which had been attached to a fence. It showed Jesus offering His heart, and the Virgin Mary with a Baby Jesus and a lamb. Leonardo’s Holy Supper I found only later (left) when more closely inspecting the photograph. You can imagine how emotional such a sudden and unanticipated encounter can be in a Muslim country, in fact, the only Islamic Republic so far.

I had been invited by the organizers of an international conference and was stunned again by the great hospitality of my hosts. I was assigned to a guide, a beautiful young lady and former student, who introduced herself “to make things easier, my name is Kathy”. Of course, the organizers had orders not to let me stray alone through Shiraz and Katajoun did her best to show me the most significant sights in her home city. We visited the gardens and parks, and Shah-e Charagh, when she called a male student to guide me in since she didn’t want to wear the obligatory chador.

I sometimes managed to escape to do my own studies. The onion-shape tile-decorated domes of the numerous mosques in Shiraz resemble in their colorfulness Fabergé eggs. I watched a funeral where the coffin of the deceased was quickly transported from the mosque to the cemetery. Shiraz is home of Iranian Shi’ites' most holy places, the tombs of close relatives of Imam Reza who had found refuge after persecution in the aftermath of the poisioning of the Holy Imam in the 9th century. His tomb is found in the northeastern corner of Iran in the holy city of Mashhad. I had joined, in 2006, a group of Kuwaiti pilgrims and have reported several times about my impressions and emotions on this blog.

Seyyed Mir Ahmad was a brother of Imam Reza. He died in Shiraz in 835 CE and his remains are housed in the mausoleum of Shah-e Charagh. I suppose that the present complex is Safavid (17th century?) but the first mausoleum erected there is much older. The courtyard is a most pleasant place, peaceful and busy with the faithful, even pilgrims, pouring in and preparing for visiting the shrine inside the mausoleum. At the southeastern corner of the courtyard lies the mausoleum of a brother of Ahmad, Seyyed Mir Mohammed who also died in Shiraz.

The Imamzadeh of Hazrat Shah Mir Ali Hamza is another holy site in Shiraz. The tomb contains the remains of a nephew of the 7th Imam Musa al-Kazim, father of Imam Reza. The courtyard is covered by tombstones since the faithful hope for a better afterlife in the vicinity of the relatives of the Holy Imams.

In 2004, I went as a tourist to Shiraz, mainly to visit Persepolis. My Esfahanian friend Ehsan joined me on the trip and we went also to the Zagros mountains and visited a famous spot there, the mighty Margoon waterfalls. We joined a group of students and were invited for a delicious picnic of kebabs. Ehsan and I later attended a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummernights Dream. Unexpected, sudden, and highly emotional. The theater was filled with the people of Shiraz, men women and children of all ages. The female actors wore wigs instead of the hijjab. Sometimes, 30 people were on the stage. The play was given in Farsi, and Ehsan had only eyes for one of the actresses he had fallen in love with just before the performance when he had met her in my hotel and had been invited to the act. Miraculous Iran! But these days are definitely over, I am afraid. Iran might turn into a military dictatorship or police state, again God forbid!

The Long Way

2009-05-30T07:35:00.010+02:00

That the small but oil-rich state in the northwestern corner of the Persian Gulf has recently elected four female MPs in parliamentary elections has seemingly pushed Kuwait again into a forerunner position among its Arabic neighbors, in particular largely retarded Saudi-Arabia. However, the tiny democratic achievements are at risk due to continuous outrageous reactions of six notorious Islamists in the parliament, namely Faisal AlـMislem, Waleed AlـTabtabaie, Dhaifallah BuRamiah, Jamaan AlـHarbash, Mohammed Hayef and Mubarak AlـWalaan. As we read in the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Watan Daily, they threaten to “walk out of the swearing-in ceremony of the two female MPs if they do not wear the hijab while taking the oath of office.” They even met to “discuss the legal procedures to be initiated against Aseel Al-Awadi and Rola Dashti for violating the Election Law which states that female candidates must stick to Islamic dress code during elections.”

It is definitely a long way until democratic values will eventually reach even the Arab world. Islamists will sooner or later vanish anyway. It is, however, a great shame that the same troublemakers of the former parliament are again abusing their largely serving role as ‘parliamentarians’ when intimidating others about an absurd issue, wearing hijab, or Islamic headscarf, whether it is inside or outside of Kuwait’s nice parliament building.

First published at Freelance.

Kuwaiti Women Power

2009-05-17T09:32:00.007+02:00

In the third parliamentary election within only three years, four women have won seats in the Kuwaiti parliament yesterday. Women have fought successfully for their voting rights in 2005. I remember with much sympathy the women of Kuwait demonstrating in front of the parliament when inside lawmakers eventually agreed to give them the right to vote. When I congratulated some of my female Kuwaiti colleagues, open-minded and westernized, well-educated young women, they argued, however, that the right to vote may only strengthen the influence of the Islamists in the country. The paradox may be explained as follows. Very traditional Kuwaiti family fathers have, of course, up to four wives and plenty of grown-up but still unmarried daughters who, in all likelihood, will vote what the householder prefers: one man, several votes.

In the following parliamentary election in 2006, and two years later when the parliament had untimely been dissolved by the Amir of Kuwait, His Highness Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmed, women failed to win seats in the very much male-dominated Islamic country. Now they eventually succeeded. Congratulations to former Minister of Health Massouma al-Mubarak, Salwa al Jassar and liberal candidates Aseel Awadhi and Rola Dashti!

The widely perceived retardation of scientific, cultural and human rights development in many if not most Islamic countries may be due to an important fact. In rapidly growing societies with population growth rates of between 3 and 5%, countries are soon evolving into, well, boys’ countries. The testosterone factor of the frequently unemployed, unmarried into their thirties and therefore profoundly unsatisfied young men, who have, if at least realistic, little hope for change, are running the society at the low-level, while male-dominated administrations try to keep this power under control only by restricting normal civil rights.

A typical example of a boys’ country is, of course, Saudi-Arabia. Despite undisputable rights for equal education women in Iran suffer from a mainly male-dominated and completely outdated interpretation of Shari’a family law. In particular, women rights movements there are brutally suppressed. Boys’ countries are undemocratic.

Yesterday’s Kuwait election is a flicker of hope after the previous very much annoying legislative period.

First published at Freelance.

Abstract Art

2009-04-26T15:12:00.017+02:00

For some time, the Gonbad-e Qabud in Maraghah in Western Iran has attracted considerable attention. Maraghah is a small city east of Daryacheh Urumiyeh in the East Azerbaijan province of Iran. It lies about 100 km south of Tabriz close to the southeastern shores of the huge super-salty lake at the southern foot hills of 3700 meters high Kuh-e Sahand. On the other side of the mountain lies the picturesque village of Kandovan, Iran’s Cappadocia [1].

Maraghah is quite famous for its five tomb towers (four are preserved) from the Post-Seljuq and Mongolian periods (12th till early 14th centuries). Gonbad-e Qabud, the Blue Tower (1196/97), has the most elaborated and complex brick pattern which has fascinated and confused generations of explorers and tourists. It represents an octagonal tower with eight panels each crowned by a niche with a pointed, gothic, arch. The brickwork results in highly ornamental net of unglazed ribs interlaced with turquoise blue ribbons unrelated to the pentagonal geometry of the overall pattern. It can be shown that the pattern extends over two panels and therefore repeats four times.

Almost hidden in a book about Fivefold Symmetry edited by István Hargittai (World Scientific, Singapore 1992) which compiles very interesting articles on all aspects of fivefold symmetry, mineralogist Emil Makovicky at Copenhagen University has argued that the incredibly complex brick pattern which is displayed on the eight panels of the octagonal tower may in fact represent a Penrose pattern [2]:

“Aperiodic tiling with pentagonal geometry, discovered by Penrose [in 1974, 1978], have been, in its different versions, the object of intensive study by numerous mathematicians and crystallographers. The present discovery of a similar, 800-year-old tiling from (post) Saljuq Iran therefore represents a matter of considerable interest. Besides giving a surprising insight into the skills of ancient geometric artists, it also reveals some new aspects of Penrose tiling and leads toward further generalizations.”

Makovicky correctly describes the large-scale pattern of the Gonbad-e Qabud as consisting of:

“[…](a) regular pentagons; (b) complex decagons, hereafter called butterflies with convex angles of 72° and reentrant angles of 108°: (c) deltoids (“kites”) and a pair of partly overlapping pentagons that always form together a rhomb with “deltoid-marked” corners of 72° and unmarked corners of 108°; and (d) occasional nested pentagons with five spokes. “

What follows are combination rules, described as “simple”:

“[only] straight-line segments of the net intersect (at 72°), whereas all line breaks (of 108° or 144°) are outside these intersections. Polygons of the same kind do not share edges. Butterfly wings terminate in pentagons and are surrounded either by four additional pentagons or by an additional cis pair of pentagons and a cis pair of rhombs (each straddling the long diagonal).

“The entire pattern is too complex to be understood at a glance. It requires long contemplation, and almost appears to be designed by a mathematician rather than an artist. Its badly damaged lowermost portions can be safely reconstructed because of the good state of preservation of the corresponding uppermost portions.

However, “[in] a small part of the bottom portions of the pattern the artist gained the upper hand over the mathematician. The tenfold stars, which can be traced in the polygonal net on both sides of the partly overlapping nested pentagons at the bases of the corner pilasters […] were emptied of their original polygonal contents and were filled by fivefold 'rosettes.' Eye-attracting rosettes of this kind are common in Islamic wall ornaments, but those used here (only once per each side of the building) are completely foreign to the rest of the pattern.”

After his lengthy analysis of the pattern on the Gonbad-e Qabud, Makovicky concludes that it is “[b]ased on tiles that can readily be obtained by transformation of the Penrose pattern of pentagons, stars, and lozenges. It deviates from a true cartwheel Penrose tiling only in several geometric and artistic adaptations.”

No Penrose tiling

As a matter of fact, the pattern on the Gonbad-e Qabud lacks any characteristics of a Penrose tiling. First and most eminent, it is not aperiodic. And secondly, it does not implement a self-similar subdivision. The small-scale pattern seen is unrelated to the large-scale major pattern [3].

A simple method how the medieval artists (and it can be argued that in that particular case not even a mathematician was involved in the process of decoration) has been suggested by Lu and Steinhardt [4]. They discovered on what is called now the Topkapı Scroll [5], a 15th century Timurid-Turkmen scroll now in the collection of the Topkapı Palace Museum in Istanbul, that most of the highly complex geometric patterns found on buildings and paintings in the Islamic world can be created seamlessly with the aid of a set of five tiles displaying well-defined decorative ribbons, a decagon, a pentagon, an elongated hexagon, a bowtie, and a rhombus, which they called girih tiles which “[share] several geometric features: every edge of each polygon has the same length and the two decorating lines intersect the midpoint of every edge at 72° and 108° angles. This ensures that when the edges of two tiles are aligned in a tessellation, decorating lines will continue across the common boundary without changing direction. Because both line intersections and tiles only contain angles that are multiples of 36°, all line segments in the final girih strapwork pattern formed by girih-tile decorating lines will be parallel to the sides of the regular pentagon; decagonal geometry is thus enforced in the girih pattern formed by the tessellation of any combination of girih tiles. The tile decorations have different internal rotational symmetries: the decagon, 10-fold symmetry; the pentagon, five-fold; and the hexagon, bowtie, and rhombus, two-fold” [4].

Lu and Steinhardt reconstructed the pattern on the Gonbad-e Qabud with four girih tiles. I have followed the suggestion by Makovicky and have not included a decagon “rosette”.

The Maraghah pattern compared with the decagonal pattern on the west iwan of Esfahan’s Great Mosque

Another suspected site displaying allegedly a “quasi-crystalline” pattern of tesserae is the western iwan of Masjed-e Jomeh in Esfahan. The reconstruction revealed that it is not a Penrose tiling. The “dazzling” appearance turns out to be largely a rosette which can be constructed by use of a set of four girih tiles. There is no self-similar subdivision. In a way, it resembles a bit the pattern found in Maraghah, although there, some irregularities occur, as described above.

The artists who have created the decorations at either site (1197 in Maraghah, mid of the 15th century in Esfahan) did not use color but chose a high degree of abstraction. It is amazing that an intentional reduction of a piece of art to a strict geometric pattern with an unbelievable degree of precision has led to profound confusion among a large number of visitors. The perception of the artistic effort in fact confused even certain scientists who argued that medieval artists could have discovered what became famous as Penrose patterns, 500 or even 800 years before they were described and understood in the West.

Notes

[1] I have posted some pictures about trips in and around Tabriz on Salmiya.

[2] Makovicky E. 800-year-old pentagonal tiling from Marāgha, Iran, and the new varieties of aperiodic tiling it inspired. In: Istvan Hargittai (ed.) Fivefold Symmetry. World Scientific, Singapore 1992, pp. 67-86.

[3] See Lu and Steinhardt’s response to Makovicky’s comment on their paper at Science 2007; 318: 1383b.

[4] Lu PJ, Steinhardt PJ. Decagonal and quasi-crystalline tilings in medieval Islamic architecture. Science 2007; 315: 1106-1110.

[5] Necipoglu G. The Topkapı Scroll: Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture. Getty Center for the History of the Art and Humanities. Santa Monica, CA, 1995.

First published at Freelance.

Dazzling Decagonal

2009-04-09T10:13:00.033+02:00

The most interesting tile decorations and muqarnas, or stalactite vaults, are found on the western iwan of Esfahan’s Great Mosque. While all iwans have been added to the Seljuq mosque after a fire pillaged by the Hashashiyyin sect in 1121 CE, their decorations are Timurid and early or even late Safavid (late 15th till early 17th century). Next to the western iwan the pretty famous Timurid gate had been moved and inserted into the façade. It contains signature and date of its creator Sayyid Mahmud-e Naqash, 1447. A similar, highly decorative floral style can be seen on the south iwan and on the Darb-e Imam, some 300 meters west to the mosque, which is dated 1453.

The date ۱۳۱۷ (1317) translates into 1939, by the way, when restoration had taken place. The Timurid gate near the western iwan of Masjed-e Jomeh leads to a room with a stunning dated (1310) mihrab of sultan Oljatu, the great Ilkhanid Mongolian ruler in northern Iran. The inscriptions are, according to Oleg Grabar in his book about the Great Mosque, not qur’anic, but contain traditions about mosques and about Ali. Amazing that Oljatu in fact converted to Shi’a Islam in 1310.

The western iwan and its counterpart to the east are called the sofe of the student (shāgird) and master (ustadh). Although both iwans were built at the same time as the south iwan (early 12th century), both of them are, “in their visible shape, late Safavid works of the seventeenth and, in case of the west one, even early eighteenth centuries”, as Grabar writes.

“[A] celebrated square panel in the western iwan [which] is one of the most commonly cited examples of complex geometric ornament using writing. It is easy to argue that here is a wonderful example of a simple design rotated 45 degrees which acquires two separate values, one as a carrier of geometric forms filled with (by the time of the panel) antiquarian writing, the other one as a violator of the sequence of both writing and architecture by forcing one into rare contortions to read the writing. And one could argue that here is precisely the use of geometry which gives it the high status so frequently heard and read about. In fact, however, the corner spaces contain the following rather undistinguished pious quatrain: ‘As the letter of our crime became entwined [i.e., grew so long], [they] took it and weighed it in the balance against action. Our sin was greater than that of anyone else, but we were forgiven out of the kindness of Ali.’ The central square is taken up by a signature of one of the most active craftsmen busy repairing the mosque in the seventeenth century. Even though formally related to the angular style of writing on the face of the iwan and in fact much more sophisticated in design, this panel is nothing more than a ‘plug’ for a local artisan.”

The exact construction of a similar “square from three squares” has been described in Abu’l Wafa’s (d. ca. 998) book “On the Geometric Constructions Necessary for the Artisan”. As Alpay Özdural describes it in his article “Mathematics and Arts: Connections between Theory and Practice in the Medieval Islamic World” (Historia Mathematica 2000; 27: 171-201), contemporary mathematicians frequently held so-called conversazione with artisans explaining them how to create new inspiring geometric decorations.

Now let’s turn to what I've called “dazzling decagonal”. I have reported on my stunning first experience with mysterious decagonal tessellations in Esfahan’s old city several times, here on this blog as well as on Freelance. There are suggestions by Peter Lu at Harvard that there had been a breakthrough in creating (almost) Penrose tiling in the 15th century, in particular on the Darb-e Imam near Esfahan’s Great Mosque. In the supplementary material of Lu and Steinhardt’s article, you may find a picture of the western iwan where the authors suggest that the tiling can be subdivided in the same way as the Darb-e Imam pattern(s). You can easily identify the pattern at the inner sides of the iwan’s portal. It is huge, about one meter wide and up to 10 meters high. At first glance the two sites seem to be an anomaly in Esfahan. Lu and Steinhardt also suggest so-called girih tiles to facilitate the incredible precision of the tiling.

For instance, I have mirrored the right part of a picture of the arch borrowed from ArchNet (left part of the panel below) and can demonstrate (right part of the panel) that each tiny tessera on one side (as small as, say, a square centimeter) can be found in exactly the same place on the other side of the vault.

The Southern Iwan of Esfahan’s Great Mosque

2009-03-29T10:48:00.017+02:00

As Oleg Grabar has stressed many times in his book about Esfahan’s Masjed-e Jomeh, the mosque itself is perfectly embedded in the fabric of the Old City. There are no well-defined boundaries of the huge, 170 by 140 meters, complex. The main entrance is rather hidden at the eastern side of the building. Only helicopters and birds (or angels) may get an immediate impression of the huge dimensions of the mosques. I asked the officer near the ticket seller whether I was allowed to climb to the roofs. He declined, of course.

It was very early in the morning, the sun had just risen and the glazed tiles on the mosque’s façades were glowing like gold. It reminded me of the spectacular photos taken by Henri Stierlin. Pigeons were sitting on the South Dome and warming up in the sun. When entering the courtyard, the two domes of the mosque are not visible at first sight. In particular, the northern dome is not visible at all from here, one of the main reasons for having neglected this masterpiece of Islamic architecture during my previous visits. What attracts immediately the attention is the heavily decorated main iwan to the south. The two thin minaret-like towers have never been used for prayer calls.

The iwan contains inscriptions dated 1475-76 by the artist Sayyid Mahmud-e Naqash, who can be considered also responsible for certain decorations on the Darb-e Emam shrine only 300 meters to the west. While the latter was built during the reign of the Qara Qoyunly ruler Jahan Shah, the additions on the southern iwan of Masjed-e Jomeh were done during the time of Uzun Hassan, the great ruler of the Aq Qoyunly dynasty. Both show the highly decorative late Timurid style.

The numerous “elements of Shi’ite Muslim iconography of piety” point to the extensive embellishment during the Safavid era, in particular that of Shah Abbas II (1642-67).

See much more information here.

Approaching the North Dome

2009-03-22T10:08:00.009+01:00

I have reported on last year’s journey back to Esfahan many times on this blog. I had been invited by the Islamic Azad University at Khorasgan for giving a course for postgraduate students and then stayed in the University guest house. I later moved to the Dibaee House in Esfahan’s old city, close to my ever fascinating study object, Esfahan’s Great Mosque. When living in Kuwait, I had once read a supplement to the Arab Times describing the marvels of this gorgeous building, which is not on the must-see list of sights of the common western tourist. I had visited the site whenever in Esfahan, but usually I did not stay inside the courtyard longer than, say, half an hour. This time, I had informed myself in particular by reading the wonderful book about the mosque by Oleg Grabar who had studied the largest mosque in Iran, which some people consider as the Chartres of Iran, in the 1960s and 70s. Before retirement, Grabar was Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art at Harvard. His book is based on a series of lectures at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies of New York University in 1987. I have recently posted another example of his fascinating projects, a virtual walking tour around and into the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, elsewhere on this blog .

My fresh knowledge about the history of Esfahan’s Friday Mosque, which I had acquired before traveling to Iran, has been posted as well. While reading Oleg Grabar’s text is, in fact, a great pleasure, the black-and-white pictures of the mosque do not give a good impression of its grandeur (although Professor Grabar would argue that I am still watching the architecture with a tourist’s eye). In the coming weeks I plan to describe the different parts of the mosque mainly based on Grabar’s expert descriptions, and document it with my new pictures. Different parts of the mosque are constantly being restored and tile decorations are replaced. But the contemporary artisans have been meticulous. I suppose that the original tile patterns, in certain areas dazzling tessellations, have largely survived for centuries.

Why is the North Dome of the mosque so mysterious? First, it is perfect. It has survived dozens of severe earthquakes since it had been constructed in 1088 CE, only two years after the South Dome (which can be seen on the first picture) had been built. The southern dome is not really elegant. When constructed, it was regarded the largest dome in the Islamic world. It definitely belongs to the Seljuq mosque. The North Dome, which was commissioned by Taj al-Mulk, an arch enemy of the ingenious vizier Nizam al-Mulk, seems to be excluded from the place of worship. Four years later, Malik Shah, the sultan who commissioned the south dome, died and Nizam al-Mulk was assassinated by the Hashashin sect.

Omar Khayyam, the great medieval mathematician who was born in Nishapur in Khorasan, lived in Esfahan under Nizam and Malik Shah. He was called to the city to build an observatory which has never been found. Without any proof, it is widely believed that Khayyam was involved in the perfect construction of the dome. Mathematician Alpay Özdural presented a fine argument about the special right triangle described by Omar Khayyam (and most probably not the Golden Section, as Oleg Grabar argues), which seem to be present all over the North Dome of the Great Mosque, the Gunbad-e Khaki, or earthly dome. Is it possible that the North Dome is in fact Omar Khayyam's observatory? The last picture has been taken from Özdural's original publication. You may find much more information here.

While wandering through the vaults in the northern parts of the Great Mosque, the looks to the ceiling with its numerous brick cupolas and the plenty of inclined columns are quite breathtaking. Amazingly, I met young and older Esfahanians, who were visiting the site for the first time.

A New Beginning

2009-03-20T10:28:00.002+01:00

A new beginning, indeed

It's Springtime

2009-03-20T04:44:00.003+01:00

On equinox today (astronomically, it occurs exactly at UTC 11:44 am), the sun is setting pretty much across the sund. Amazing to remember great emotions not even two months ago, when sun rose again (and set at the same time) after two long months of darkness at 69˚40’N 18˚56’E.

The March equinox is the beginning of spring (or fall in the southern hemisphere of the world). For Iranians it might be the most significant time of the year. They (and many other people in Central Asia or, for instance, the Turkish Kurds) celebrate Nowruz, the beginning of a New Year (1388 H).

To all of them

Nowruz Mobarak!

Catching Up

2009-03-18T05:34:00.005+01:00

These monkeys from Thailand clean their interdental spaces with human hair and, even more amazing, seem to teach this to their little ones (I have told my students a slightly different technique). There will be more surprises in Darwin Year 2009, I suppose.

Najasat-e Ahl-e Kitab

2009-03-17T06:27:00.008+01:00

When Cyrus the Great freed the Jews from Babylonian Captivity in 539 BCE, some of them did not return to Jeruslaem but eventually settled on the banks of the Zayandeh Rud in Central Iran, possibly founding the city of Esfahan. This is the beginning of Jewish life in Iran which thus started two-and-a-half-thousand years ago. While Cyrus is betoken as ‘the anointed’ in the Book of Isaiah, Jews seem to have lived for centuries in peace with the indigenous Persian populace. Persian religious tolerance was legendary as long as Zoroastrianism was the state religion. The alarming rhetoric in particular of the present president of Iran, who had openly questioned the Holocaust of the Jews by the Nazi’s terror regime in the early 1940s and the very right of Israel to exist, has caused considerable new concern about the safety of the Jews in the Islamic Republic. It raises again the question, what do we actually know about the relationship of Shi’a Muslims and other ‘people of the book’, or Ahl al-Kitab?

Daniel Tsadik is an Assistant Professor at Yeshiva University, New York. He has earned a PhD from the History Department at Yale University. Apparently, Tsadik’s family is still living in Iran. In his new book he tries to illuminate the more than difficult situation of the Jews under the rule of the Shahs of the Qajar-Dynasty, in particular the second half of the 19th century. Iran has seen the Constitutional ... Read the rest of this book review »

Agriculture in the Desert

2009-03-14T08:56:00.028+01:00

The ancient and still inhabited village of Mohammedieh with its huge Sassanid castle is located a couple of kilometers northeast to Na’in. Diligent farmers were working in fruit orchards and on the fields. In the beginning of January, there was a scent of springtime. An old man wanted to show me his carpet loom in his hut. Before taking the picture, he put on his coat and told me he was a mollah. Just kidding, I suppose.

A qanat is a sort of artificial spring. The aquifer had been invented in ancient Persia and spread throughout the Middle East as far as Africa and Central Asia as far as China. Deep water tables at the foothills of mountains are approached by vertical access shafts and horizontal channels. They finally reach the surface and a small artificial runlet will transport the water miles into the desert for agriculture. Constructing qanats is a dangerous task and nowadays strictly regulated by the government. You may find the well-like openings and runlets as well as so called ab anbars (huge domed water reservoirs) in the vicinity of wind towers (badgirs) all over Iran’s deserted countryside, especially in Yazd and Na’in.

Bricks and Stucco Rather than Tiles

2009-03-02T07:20:00.021+01:00

The most significant building in Na’in is certainly its more than 1000-years old Friday mosque, build in 960 CE. Its single minaret without any ornaments has an octagonal ground plan and tapers. It is built on a small hill somewhat outside of the old city’s center. Nearby, a guard will open the doors of a small museum which is part of a Safavid traditional house with a small sunken garden.

The mosque itself, one of the oldest in Iran where still Friday prayers take place, is Abbasid/Buyid, as the remains of the Jurjir mosque in Esfahan. Brickwork and carved stucco especially of the mihrab and surrounding bays are superb and well-preserved. There is no iwan, which is in fact a development of the later Seljuq rulers of Iran.

The bazaar in the old city is a museum, too. The shops had been closed long time ago when the owners moved to the modern part of the city.

Another Trip through the Desert of Central Iran

2009-02-22T11:46:00.005+01:00

The course at Islamic Azad University in Khorasgan was over and I had a free week for some traveling in Iran before returning to the Arctic. Hamadan, the Achaemenid capital (Ecbatana in ancient times) and home of Esther and Mordecai at the court of Artaxerxes (or one of his successors on the throne) would be one of my favorite destinations. But it was far away and most probably also too cold this time of the year. It has to wait for a future visit to Iran. I decided to go to Na'in, halfway to the other desert city Yazd, which I had visited in 2004. The German couple that I met in the breakfast room of the Dibaee house in the old city of Esfahan (he was interestingly enough a diplomat at the German Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan) planned to go further to Yazd. When I suggested taking a bus rather than a taxi for the after all more than 300 km, they were not interested.

To get to the Jey minibus terminal east of Esfahan’s city center you must take a taxi which will cost you more than the 140 km bus trip afterwards (IR 15’000, if I recall correctly, about $1.5). The bus would go in half an hour. So I bought the ticket and sat down on a bench of the small concourse of the terminal. There were many students who, after the weekend, made it to Na'in’s other branch of Islamic Azad University.

East of Esfahan (which is in fact a huge oasis, located at the banks of one of Iran’s major rivers, the Zayandeh Rud) the desert of central Iran stretches for hundreds of kilometers. Every now and then caravanserais can be seen along the highway. The bus terminal in Na'in was very close to the excellent traditional tourist inn with its beautifully renovated, two-storey rooms (IR 30’000, or $30). The receptionist gave me a brochure of the city and I started my sight-seeing tour.

Na'in is not a tourist hub. I met a Chinese group that had hired an Iranian driver. They, too, were on their way further to Yazd, which is bigger and definitely more famous. Na'in itself is charming. Not really a ‘one-horse town’, but slumbering and a bit provincial. Most interesting is its historical old city, which, sad to say, is more a museum now since most people had moved into other areas. Huge water reservoirs and wind towers (badgirs) everywhere. An enormous castle, known as Narin Ghaleh, dominates the center of the ancient buildings’ fabric. It originates from Sassanid times.

No carpets from here. Although very popular in Iran and in the West, there are several aspects which I do not appreciate very much in Na'in carpets.

Opportunities

2009-02-16T20:00:00.003+01:00

Two weeks ago, Iran had launched its first satellite into orbit. It is hoped (and Iranian officials are not getting tired to emphasize) that Hope (the name of the satellite, omid in Farsi) will increase our knowledge and eventually lead to more harmony and peace on Earth.

Its inhabitants do well (especially when considering the most recent underestimations of what is called global warming) when taking a search for alternative places to live into serious consideration. One extraordinary and most beautiful area (although barren and yet icy cold) might be the Victoria Crater on Mars, an impact crater at the Meridiani Planum near the equator of the planet. The crater is about 800 meters in diameter and had been visiting by Mars roboter Exploration Rover Opportunity. That little sojourner of our second nearest neighbor in space can actually be seen on the image TRA_000873_180 which was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft on October 3, 2006. After 2 ½ years, Opportunity (the robot) had just arrived at the rim of the Victoria crater after a drive of more than 9 kilometers. Provided high resolution, it can be seen roughly at the “10 o’clock” position along the rim of the crater. Whether it has crashed into the crater in the meantime is not known to me.

Crater Victoria has a distinctive scalloped shape of its rim. Erosion and material having fallen down the crater walls can be seen on the picture. The very special sand dunes in the center of the crater remind of similar structures in the Rub’ Al Khali of the Arabian Peninsula or the Dashte Lut in Iran.

Thanks to John Baez for attracting my attention to the beautiful crater.

First published at Freelance

Happy Valentine

2009-02-16T10:45:00.010+01:00

A Saudi-Arabian man was shown in the Al Watan newspaper earlier this week trampling on a bunch of roses in a flower shop, making clear that he despises Valentine's Day (February 14). Bad for him. My first thought which came to my mind was the pogroms about 70 years ago in Nazi Germany when Jewish shops were demolished ("Kristallnacht"). These fundamentalists threaten people who they urgently need for running their societies, for instance, Philippinos.

It is quite a shame that Arabs still need some extra lessions in humanity, tolerance, love and peace.

I was also wondering whether Saudi Arabian men wear winter dishdashas these days. Could it be that the picture had been taken in Kuwait? I suppose, many Philippino flower shop owners in Kuwait were scared last week as well.

Strolling from Khan-e Dibaee to Naqsh-e Jahan and Back

2009-02-15T17:10:00.020+01:00

The Dibaee House in Esfahan's Old City

2009-02-15T09:17:00.040+01:00

The course at Khorasgan University near Esfahan had been postponed a couple of days due to the holiday Eid-e Ghadeer which is celebrated all over Iran, commemorating the (by Sunni Muslims heavily disputed, of course) appointment of Imam Ali as successor of the Prophet Muhammad. I took it, therefore, easy when slowly approaching Esfahan this year. From Imam Khomenei International Airport I traveled three days by bus and taxi, first to Qom, then Kashan. In a way, I repeated my 2005 trip through Central Iran.

Where should I move after my course, which I was supposed to give at Khorasgan University, was finished? Well, a Kuwaiti blogger, who turned out to be Iranian, kindly directed my attention to a new choice for accommodation in Esfahan, a carefully restored “traditional house” in the old city center. She also provided me with some contact information, and I sent an email to the owner of the building.

So, after two weeks of teaching I moved very close to my study object this year, Esfahan’s mysterious Masjed Jomeh. You may find more information here, here and here.

Hidden, well, extremely hidden, was my first impression when I followed Khanum Sufi’s advice and entered Khiaban-e Haruniyeh where the almost 50 meters tall single Seljuq minaret of the Ali mosque is a landmark which cannot be missed in Esfahan. The Dibaee house can actually not be seen from the labyrinthine lanes. I had to ask. The men responded to ‘hotel’ and showed me the direction. A chador-wearing old lady was a bit afraid when a stranger asked her but finally showed me the entrance door. I knocked (all over Iran there are different knockers for men and women so that inside the building it can be decided who will open the door) and it took some time until Mdme Sufi welcomed me.

I loved to stay in the Dibaee house. Especially the interesting discussions in the morning with rather eccentric people, Westerners, of course, who wanted to escape Christmas and had made it to Iran. Individualistic travelers, as I am. Excellent ‘continental’ breakfast and lots of tea and brewed coffee (!) were served.

I loved also the neighborhood, especially a very proud cock which took care of his huge harem in what I would call a scrapheap. Masjed Ali was more or less renovated during the Safavid era. The brick decorations on its minaret are superb. There are other single minarets in Esfahan’s old city, in particular in the former Jewish quarter. I have pictured the 50 meters tall, 12th century Monar-e Sareban and the even older Monar-e Chehel Dokhtaran (the minaret of the 40 virgins) somewhere else on this blog.

By This River

2009-02-07T07:40:00.054+01:00

A couple of months ago, a friend sent me a picture of the Zayandeh Rud in Esfahan which which had more or less vanished at that time. A dam west of the city had been closed in the summer because of the severe drought in recent years. The water, which in any case evaporates in the desert in the Batlaq-e Gaykhunia, a huge marsh area about one hundred kilometers east of Esfahan, was urgently needed for agriculture. When I visited Esfahan in December, the riverbed was filled again, even though not to levels I had seen before.

The bridges over the river are world-famous. The river banks are carefully gardened, beautiful parks in the tradition of Persian Paradise gardens. They invite to stroll, rest, meet other people, let the children play, have a picnic. In fact, you may see married and even unmarried couples (although, you'll never know).

It is a six kilometers walk from Marnan Bridge in the west to Sharestan Bridge in the east, but when the weather is fine, a very pleasant trip.

Esfahan's centrepiece is, of course, gorgeous Si-o-seh Pol, the bridge with the thirty-three arches. It was built around 1600. Unfortunately, the marvellous tea houses at either end of the bridge have been closed down recently (I suppose because of drug problems). The bridge (and dam) was built by Allahverdi Khan, a favourite general of Shah Abbas I, in order to link the northern part of the new city's main boulevard, Khiaban-e Chahar Bagh-e Abbasi, with its southern half, Chahar Bagh-e Bala.

The next Safavid bridge is Chubi with twenty-one arches and two parlors. It was built by Shah Abba II in 1665. Sad to say that the tea houses have vanished, too.

The next highlight is, of course, Khaju Bridge. The 17th century Safavid bridge, which was built by Shah Abbas II, also serves as a dam holding the water. It is a wonderful meeting place for lovers of all ages. Young men are spontaneously making music (but beware of the religious police and some fanatic chador-wearing women, either self-named or official guardians of public morals, who are keeping a jealous watch). The bridge is 132 meters long and has two levels of arcades which are beautifully decorated with paintings and tiles. At both sides, a marble lion is watching its counterpart on the banks of the river. At night, you may see the eyes of the beast on the other side of the bridge glowing, an ingenious construction using the reflection of light coming from somewhere.

Sharestan bridge in the east is the oldest one, probably from the 12th century. The bridge is spoiled a bit by a permanent fair ground. At night, all bridges are beautifully illuminated. They might then even more invite couples for romatic encounters.

Ghalamkar

2009-01-31T09:53:00.013+01:00

Hand-printed cloth can be seen everywhere in Iran (and you will also find them in Kuwait in the Iranian Market in Ray or downtown, in the Souq Mubarakia). They are used as bedspreads, tablecloths, or simply for wall decoration. Wooden blocks, or models, are used to print colored patterns onto beige cotton cloth in several design steps.

The finest ghalamkar may later be painted. Old and antique pieces are highly sought after. They are not cheap at all. Although the (natural) colors have been fastened by washing already, I wouldn’t dare to remove the slight stain from these two pieces I recently bought in Iran. One has the design of a prayer mat and was surely used for that purpose. As you can see, the calligraphy on top interestingly mentions Muhammad after ’Ali!

Buyid Architecture in Esfahan

2009-01-30T12:57:00.022+01:00

Older than what is now visible in Esfahan’s Great Mosque (although the first mosque there was built in the 7th century) is what has remained of the Jurjir Mosque. The fragmentary façade of the Jurjir Mosque had been discovered during restoration work at Masjed-e Hakim in 1955. The fragment had been hidden for centuries behind a mud wall. The beautiful Hakim mosque itself is a Safavid mosque from the 17th century.

The Jurjir façade is the only remains of a 10th century mosque which was commissioned by the Buyid (Buwayhid) vizier Al-Sahib ibn Abbad (d. 995), a Mutazilite scholar. The Buyid Dynasty, who ruled in Iraq and Iran, effectively brought the Abbasids era in Baghdad to an end. Although the Abbasids retained the caliphate, they were deprived of all secular power. Buyids were originally Zaydi, or Fiver Shi'as. They later began to lean closer to the nowadays dominating Twelver Shi'a branch of Islam. In general tolerant in religious matters, the Buyid rulers in Baghdad even employed Christians for administrative tasks. Science once again culminated during the late 10th and early 11th centuries under the Buyid rule. Eminent mathematicians were, for example, Abūl Wafā' Būzjānī (d. 998) and Omar Khayyám (d. 1122) who conveyed, in so-called conversazioni, their knowledge to architects and artisans committed to building and decorating the religious and secular buildings.

Similar as on the court façade of the congregational mosque in Na’in (I will report on that later), the typical Buyid decorative technique can be seen on the portal. Small bricks are used to form a geometric relief of lozenges, diamonds and other geometric shapes. The entrance had been enlarged into a monumental portal. In the eastern Islamic world, the Jurjir is the first example of such a monumental portal on a mosque.

Pir Bakran

2009-01-25T13:00:00.005+01:00

Si-o-Seh Pol at night in Esfahan is really a beauty. But if Venus, the crescent of the moon, and mercury are illuminating the scenery, it's just amazing. You have to click on the picture and carefully examine the inflated image to see Mercury in the center of the right side in the sky. I could watch the rapidly moving innermost planet on several evenings when recently visiting Iran.

One obligation of my trip was to visit again the Jewish cemetery in Esfahan's vicinity. The 2000 years old site is difficult to find. At least on my map of Iran Linjan is not explicitly mentioned. Go to the southwest, the taxi driver will most probably know. In Linjan, which is a larger town, you should ask for the Jewish cemetery. We called a local by mobile phone who immediately showed and turned out to be a Muslim (!) guide of the site. He was a friend of the Jews in the town, he told us. I remembered last year's visit. The narrow room again showed recently burnt candles.

Our guide immediately mentioned the tomb of Sarah, daughter of Asher, son of the Patriarch Jacob (Genesis 46: 17; Numbers 26: 46; I Chronicles 7:30). The shrine was a major pilgrimage site for Iranian Jews. According to a midrash, Sarah never died. A popular tradition among Iranian Jews held that she arrived in Esfahan with the exiled Jews from the tribe of Judah. Miraculous stories and pious legends surrounding this figure were common in Jewish circles. See more information here. The same dog as last year was keeping watch in the courtyard of the small synagoge. Jews have not an easy life in Iran. I met many Muslims this time who consider them as good people. In Esfahan, they have some shops in Khiaban Chahar Bagh and close to the Meydan-e Shah. They themselves see their situation more critical. There seems to be a constant suspicion of Zionism. Jews (not more than 25'000 have stayed), who are said to have built Esfahan after having been freed from the Babylonian Captivity by Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE, live a secret life in Iran. I have not made serious attempts to visit the main, rather hidden, synagoge in Esfahan, which is close to the Enqelab-e Eslami Square (the point, where the first picture was taken).

The cemetery in Linjan itself was quite breathtaking. It is said that inscriptions on tomb stones are from the second century CE. Some of the ruined buildings look really old. When in Esfahan, try to find the place. It's really worth a visit.

A significant mausoleum in Lanjan is that of Sufi Pir Bakran. The 14th century building was closed (as it was last year), but some internal decorations could be seen from the outside's windows.

So What

2009-01-25T09:10:00.005+01:00

Barack Obama will not come up to our expectations. So what?

Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, fifty years ago.

Al-Haram Al-Sharif

2009-01-24T17:47:00.017+01:00

The current, as ever marvellous, January - February issue of the Saudi Aramco World Magazine contains a virtual tour through the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, a site of great significance for Muslims (and maybe Jews and Christians, as well). For the first time, I could see the intricate and intriguing calligraphic inscriptions on the inner octagonal arcade, which are considered as belonging to the oldest Islamic inscriptions ever. It contains, apart from verses from the Holy Qur'an, strong polemic against Christianity, while stressing at the same time the Qur'anic doctrine that Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, was a true prophet. German scholar and professor for semitic and arabic languages Christoph Luxenberg had recently claimed that the text may in fact point to the Christian origin of the building.

From the January - February 2009 issue of Saudi Aramaco World:

"One hundred and fifty years ago, in 1859, M. J. Diness made the first known photographs inside Jerusalem's Al-Haram Al-Sharif ('Noble Sanctuary'). Ever since, photographers have sought to convey some of the rich spiritual, historical and esthetic meanings of the sanctuary complex and its more than 40 monuments. Digital panoramic imaging, which places the viewer inside a sperical photograph, now allows him or her to 'explore' by panning, zooming and looking up and down at leisure, and then moving on to the next panorama. The route of this 'Virtual Walking Tour', ..., enters the walled sanctuary precinct (the Haram) from the west to aproach the platform of the Dome of the Rock from one of its eight stairways. After visiting inside the Dome of the rock, it explores the northern end of the Haram, and from there it takes you to the Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa, the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

"Inside the Dome of the Rock, the tour offers seven panoramas, ..., of the decorated ceilings of the two concentric arcades that ring the Rock that lies at the center beneath the Dome. These coffered, gilded ceiling designs, made of wood and leather, highlight the building's history that is, like that of the entire Haram, both layered and, at times, uncertain: These are late-20th-century re-creations of Mamluk patterns dating from the 13th and 14th centuries that presumably replaced an original Umayyad ceiling from the late seventh century.

"According to Islamic doctrine, the single unhewn rock around which the Dome of the Rock is built marks the location of the Prophet Muhammad's 'isra ('night journey'), in which he miraculously traveled in one night from Makkah to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and, after leading Abraham, Moses, Jesus and other prophets in prayer, ascended from this Rock into heaven, to within 'two bowlengths' of the very throne of God. The Rock is also the spot where, according to tradition, Islam's second caliph, 'Umar, prayed in 637 following the largely uncontested Muslim conquest of the Byzantine-controlled city. Later, his successor, 'Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, patronized the shrine's construction. Underneath the Rock lies this small cave, now used for prayer.

"The Virtual Walking Tour ends at the southern terminus of the center aisle of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Here is the ornate qiblah wall indicating the direction of prayer toward Makkah, with its marble mihrab, or prayer niche. In the first years following the revelation of Islam to the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims actually prayed in the direction of Jerusalem until later revelation changed the qiblah to Makkah, and to this day Jerusalem is known to Muslims as 'the first of the two qiblahs'."

Sola Tilbake

2009-01-23T06:39:00.004+01:00

Is it dawn or dusk? Well, probably both. Sun is back and quickly rising now. The equinox is already on March 20 this year, and another nine weeks later, the midnight sun will shine for two months. It is a strange part of the world. Mentalwise, I managed better this year during the dark period. One might get used to it.

At the Foothills of Karkas

2009-01-17T18:00:00.029+01:00

The new town and old village of Natanz have received considerable international attention since 2003 when the first centrifuges for Uranium enrichment had been installed in a huge subsurface complex close to the highway between Kashan and Natanz. The nuclear facilities, which are top on any list of possible targets for Israel’s and even the United States’ bunker busting weapons, can be seen when traveling by bus to Esfahan. Taking pictures is, of course, not allowed. Not so well-known is that especially the ancient village of Natanz is very beautiful and absolutely worth a visit. Tourists are rarely seen in the small bazaar in the center, where interesting handicrafts are sold. The other ‘must’ is, of course, the lovely Abyaneh at the foothills of Kuh-e Karkas, the 3800 meters high mountain massif in Central Iran. I have reported on a visit there in 2005 somewhere else on this blog.

My host, the Dean at Khorasgan University in Esfahan, had invited me and some of his former students for a trip to a cottage in another small village. After heating up the rooms, we had a breakfast and then went to Natanz and took pictures of the impressive 14th century Masjed-e Jomeh. As in so many other old villages, really old dwellings are now abandoned. People have moved to more modern buildings.

On our return to the cottage, we passed Tarq with its citadel from Sassanid times and had some stunning views of the Karkas Mountain. Afterwards, we had a barbeque of delicious chicken kebab and went back to Esfahan late at night. Earlier that evening, I have seen Venus and Mercury, and on our way back, we stopped at the highway and I saw, maybe for the first time in my life, the Milky Way among thousands of twinkling stars.

Dasht-e Kavir

2009-01-10T17:44:00.038+01:00

“You might see here landscapes you have never seen before.” My young friend Mojtaba, who had been waiting in vain for my return to Kashan in 2006, had emailed me pictures he had taken with other Westerners on trips to the desert and the Daryacheh Namak, the great salt lake northeast to the small desert city. That time, I couldn’t get a visa to Iran. I was still living in Kuwait and officers at the Iranian Embassy were not really friendly then. International tensions about Iran’s nuclear program, I had assumed.

When traveling to Esfahan this year, I planned a stopover in Kashan. I didn’t meet Mojtaba, but made new friends. Hami and his twin sister Hoda took me to Dasht-e Kavir, and in fact, I saw breathtaking sceneries very much different from the desert in Kuwait.

Dasht-e Kavir, the northern desert of Iran’s two major deserts (the other is Dasht-e Lut), is huge. It stretches about 800 km from west to east and is 350 km wide, making up altogether more than 77’000 square kilometers. We saw a few camels and traces of small animals. The Asiatic cheetah, which still lives in certain reservations of the Dasht-e Kavir, did not show. Although considered extremely arid, rain had fallen the previous night. So, the salt marshes were rather wet. What can be seen on one picture is salt, not an iceberg.

There is an old caravanserai at the southern shores of Daryacheh Namak, a lake of the size of Lake Constance in Germany. You may see it in the upper left corner of the satellite image above. We met a group of Iranians who also had chosen the holiday for a desert trip. Huge dunes and views into endless sand seas. Another group from Tehran had come with a bus.

The next day, 10 cm of snow covered the alleys in Kashan. That happens only once in a lifetime here, I was told by the receptionist in the Sayyah hotel.

Ashura

2009-01-07T08:02:00.012+01:00

Today, on the Day of Ashura, grieving for Imam Husayn culminates in Iran and other Shi’a communities with bloody rites. I have reported about the sad events in Karbala in 61 AH elsewhere on this blog. The first ten days of Muharram people in Iran prepare for the holiday. Black flags and banners with Abol Fas, Husayn, Ali are sold, and stalls in the bazaar decorated for the mourning. Religious songs proclaiming ‘Ya Husayn!’ were heard everywhere. I attended several Hosseiniyehs, one on my trip to Nain. In Esfahan, every night, in a tent people gathered in front of the Masjed Shah. Interesting, but plenty of basij and hundreds chador-wearing women created an atmosphere of, in fact, subliminal menace. These events were completely organized, plenty of buses took the participants later home.

Last Friday, nation-wide demonstrations against the incredible atrocities of Israel to the people in the Gaza strip reached Esfahan with almost a thousand basij and pasdaran entering the maidaan. The square was closed-off. I could enter after a body check. Other Westerners, I was told later, were prohibited to watch the demonstration. Again, the perfect organization was obvious with numerous buses waiting for taking the soldiers back home.

Dizzi

2009-01-06T12:59:00.010+01:00

Restaurants in Iran are often disappointing. Penetrating neon light illumination, furniture as borrowed from the next railway station, very few locals. And only kebabs in numerous varieties. I know that more sophisticated dishes are prepared at private homes. Something like fesenjun, one of my favorites: chicken breast in a thick but juicy sauce made from grated walnut and pomegranate sirup. Dizzi appears sometimes on the card but is not always available. It is the perfect meal for the numerous older men in Iran with hardly more than certain single teeth left in the mouth. You might easily eat it even if edentulous.

What is it? Take a chunk of fatty mutton (better lamb) and cook a soup together with peas, onions, and potatoes in an iron pot in the oven. Then serve it firy hot together with a fitting mortar, a metal bowl, and Iranian bread, nan. But how to eat this stew? You won't believe it, but first pour the soup (without the ingredients) into the bowl and add pieces of nan. That tastes already quite okay. Afterwards, take your mortar and mash everthing in the pot into a thick paste. Pour it into your bowl and enjoy.

Dizzi is reliably served in simple tea houses where, after work, young men smoke their qalyan, drink very sweet tea, and chat.

Hope (Yes We Can!)

2009-01-04T17:55:00.003+01:00

Flags in a renovated 'traditional house' in Esfahan/Iran.

Arg-e Bam

2008-12-26T06:36:00.003+01:00

Bam was hit by an earthquake of the magnitude of 6.6 early in the morning of December 26, 2003. First, the death toll was assumed to be beyond 80'000, but the official number of casulaties was given as 56'000, and the latest estimates were about 26'000.

See the official website of the movie Bam 6.6 here.