Sufi orthopraxis: visual language and verbal imagery in medieval Afghanistan

Abstract

By the late fifteenth century, the remarkable rise in popularity of mysticism following the Mongolian invasions had penetrated literary manuscripts being commissioned for illustration in the eastern Islamic world. The article focuses on the literary and visual cultures of Sufism during this period, emphasizing the intersection of the verbal imagery of poetic description and the visual language of pictorial representation in these illustrated manuscripts. It traces the advent of an emphatic style of allegorical depiction in Persian painting, which emerged through a contemporary discourse of Islamic mysticism and an intertextual system of signification uniting literary discourse and esoteric religious practice. Initiated at the court of the last Timurid prince in Afghanistan, the phenomenon continued to affect both literary and visual production in Iran, central Asia, Mughal India, and the Ottoman territories over a period of centuries.