AKPIA-Medieval Studies Joint Lecture

Christiane Gruber (University of Michigan), A Safavid Multi-Text Compendium: The Codex as a Communal Gathering of Riddles. Co-sponsored by the Harvard Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture and the Committee on Medieval Studies.

A Safavid multi-text manuscript, copied in 1687 CE and held in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard University, offers a brilliant example of the Persian tradition of assembling various textual and visual materials into a single jung, or compendium of texts. Among others, it includes treatises exploring the mystico-philosophical and occult sciences as well as manuals on number plays and verbal riddles. The latter suggests a mature audience conversant in the intricate points of esoteric thought and delighting in the fine art of deciphering verbal and visual conundra (mu‘amma), the latter also known in Persian by the playful rhetorical question “what is it?” (chistan). This talk aims to explore the Harvard jung’s formal contents and its diagrams to decode some of its more enigmatic and ambiguous content. These visual conundra, it is argued, result not so much from knowledge that is lost to today’s contemporary scholar but rather because they are “baked” into the very purpose of the manuscript. In other words, these mysteries appear to have been crafted purposefully as educational riddles meant to cause puzzlement (ta‘ajjub), thus transforming the codex into a communal gathering of riddles, or majlis-i mu‘amma.