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Towards the end of last year, I went to Iran
with Neil MacGregor, irrepressible director of the British
Museum, and the curators of this stunning exhibition. It
felt like a quest of sorts, the aim of which was to discover
the authentic spirit of Shah Abbas I, the great unifier of
Iran in the late 16th and early 17th century, the man who
made Shia a national creed. Visits to Iran are still such a
rarity, for British journalists at least, that there were
other preoccupations: not least to get some sense of the
state of the nation in the months before the 30th
anniversary of Khomeini's revolution.
Our brief tour took us from Tehran to Mashhad in the north
east, Iran's holiest city, destination of 20 million
pilgrims each year, on to Isfahan, Abbas's glorious capital
and spiritual home, and back through Qom, the city of
mullahs and fatwas. MacGregor travels in the spirit of the
great cultural ambassadors; he is a latter-day Robert
Sherley, without the turban and the 5,000 Persian stallions.
His aim, he says, is to "catch the idea of the way the world
might look from over here". When we hear the word "Shia" on
our news, we wait for "militant" or "terrorist"; one of the
triumphs of this show is to offer subtler associations.
Shah Abbas is the third great nation builder that the
British Museum has focused on, in a series that has taken in
the first emperor of China and Roman emperor Hadrian, and
which will end later this year with Montezuma. Like the
others, Abbas inherited a nation in chaos. There were
Ottomans to the left of him, Uzbeks to the right, and there
he was, stuck in the middle, 16 years old. He had other
problems, not the least of which was the fact that his
adopted Shia faith was the doctrine not of settled power but
of permanent argument; at its heart was a distrust of all
secular government; Abbas needed loyalty.
Using alliances where he could, bartering with European and
Mughal interests, the young leader began by driving out
invaders and re-establishing his notional borders. He was
enlightened (sponsoring religious tolerance, where it suited
him) and brutal (murdering one son, blinding two others).
Above all, he set about selling a seductive idea of what
might hold an Iranian nation together in the absence of
secure boundaries. The three cities we visited - which are
also the focus points of the exhibition - represent the
separate strands of that ambition, which still resonates.
Mashhad, home to the shrine of Imam Reza - the eighth of
Shia's original 12 imams, and the only one buried in Iran -
was all about patriotic duty. To bring the Shia clerics
fully behind him, Abbas had it elaborately rebuilt and made
Reza a kind of patron saint, emblematic as much of
nationalism as Shia. Abbas even walked the 1,000 kilometres
to Mashhad from Isfahan, the first pilgrim, to prove his
devotion. In doing so, he established the pilgrimage in
something like the spirit it seemed to exist in today - for
the few an act of religious fervour, for the many a weekend
break.
If Mashhad became the emotional home of the Iranian Shia
doctrine, however, its most glorious expression was
conceived in Isfahan. Religion prohibited Shah Abbas from a
cult of personality - there are only two contemporary images
of him - so he sought a means of expressing his vision
through the art and architecture of his capital. For the
exhibition, the museum has ingeniously converted the centre
of the domed Reading Room to give a flavour of the great
square, the Maidan, in Isfahan. Squint a little and you can
put yourself beneath the tiled domes of the Shah Mosque and
the Mosque of Shaykh Lutfallah, Abbas's personal shrine. The
harmonies of the blues and gold in the decoration, the
towering arches and cool courtyards, expressed a serenity at
the heart of Abbas's power struggles. He gathered artists
and poets to create a Persian renaissance; the style -
exquisite calligraphy and silks and extraordinary
illuminated texts - was exported to the nation's corners and
beyond: the unifying Abbas brand.
Abbas conceived Isfahan's square as a meeting place for all
the world: he entertained visitors from China and India,
Europe and Africa, all memorialised in this show in the
glorious technicolor and gold leaf of contemporary pictures.
At dusk, with the light softening the minarets and the domes
and the mountains beyond, families having picnics still
quietly fill the square's every corner; even in Iran's
current isolation, you could forgive yourself for imagining,
as Abbas did, that this was the indelible centre of global
civilisation.
In the absence of Shah Abbas's genius for harmony, it is
easy to see how his balancing act between Shia doctrine and
the structures of power could fall apart. Qom, birthplace of
the Iranian Revolution, gives you that vision. It has all of
Isfahan's sense of restraint and control, and nothing at all
of its worldliness and lightness. The male and earnest tone
has been set by the dominance of the Islamic seminaries, the
madrasas, some of which Abbas established. When we visited,
MacGregor, ever the optimist, thought the city's ascetic
energy - stern mullahs rushing round clutching legal files -
gave it a resemblance to a great university town. I wasn't
quite so convinced.
Quite rightly, though, it's not this aspect of Shah Abbas's
Iran that dominates the exhibition; the idea that strict
clerics is what the country is about is far too prevalent
already. Rather, you get a wonderful glimpse of the
possibilities and culture of Isfahan, the exquisite cultural
intelligence that is woven into its carpets, the impossible
miniatures of dancers and scribes and poets that capture the
cosmopolitanism of the old capital. This spirit finds its
greatest expression in the perfect curves of the calligraphy
of Ali Riza Abbasi, whose signature tile-work adorns the
Isfahan mosques; and in the luminous sketches of court life
of Riza-yi Abbasi, one of Abbas's many renaissance men.
We too often think of Iran in terms of darkness, as if
through the blackness of the veil. This is an exhibition to
shine a corrective light onto that idea. The mesmerising
magic eye patterning of mosque and manuscript may speak of
piety, but its subtext is vivid with wit and life. In
creating his nation Abbas clearly tolerated the sternness of
the mullahs, but his indulgences were to beauty. The one
contemporary portrait of him in the show has him with a long
sword but with a vivid scarlet tunic, purple boots and natty
green turban. A smile seems to be playing around his lips.
That seems about right. |
