We're now beginning our second panel and I'm going to introduce our next two
speakers and um their topics. So panel number two, Dr. Amy Landau, Director
of Education/Interpretation at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
Dr.Landau's exhibitions have included "Gérôme and His Circle: Travel, Art, and
Business in the Middle East." Another one is "Pearls on a String,
Artists, Patrons, and Poets at the Great Islamic Courts."
Her publications focus on cultural interchange between Iran and Europe and
the Armenian community of New Julfa. Dr. Landau received her doctorate from Oxford in
Islamic Art and Archaeology.
She is currently co-founder and director of “Art, Religion and the City”
at UCL– at Morgan State University and Co-director of Engaging
Lived Religion in the 21st Century museum at the Fowler.
Her topic is "The Waqf of an Armenian Merchant of Early Modern Iran."
Our second speaker on this panel is Dr. Sussan Babaie. She is professor
of Islamic and Iranian Arts at the Courtauld Institute of Art
Her research on the early modern period includes topics on architecture, urbanism,
and urbanity.
I'll name one book, "Isfahan and its Palaces."
Pers-, another book is "Persian Kingship and Architecture", 2015. Uh, her other topics
include trans-cultural conditions of artistic production.
In 2017 she published "The Mercantile Effect: Art and Exchange
in the Islamicate World. " And um most recently, "The Delhi Loot and the
Exotics of Empire."
Other uh, publications and topics
are the transmission of sensory experiences between the visual and the
gustatory.
She's written on cookery and urbanity, urbanity in early modern Isfahan.
She also writes on modern and contemporary arts of Iran.
Her title and topic is "Isfahan is more than Shah Abbas:
Jews, Christians, Sufis and the ‘Others'."
So please let's welcome our first speaker, Dr. Amy Landau.
Thank you very much Susan for that introduction and thank you
to all the organizers, so, Susan, Aomar, and Lamia.
And I would like to say it's an absolute privilege to be on this panel with
Sussan Babie. Um, she has been my mentor and um my guide since I was an
undergraduate.
And I look forward to conversations after our paper. So please chime in.
So my presentation is based on the bequest of
Khwaja Polos Velijanean, a member of one of the wealthiest
Armenian Apostolic merchant families of the 17th century Iran.
The Waqf was dated 1062 of the Islamic calendar and then amended seven years
later. It was originally written in Persian and was translated into Armenian by the 19th
century historian Tēr Yovhaneanc to be included in that
historian's Patmut'iwn Nor Jułayu or "History of New Julfa" published in 1880.
Polo's request with its really dizzying
lists of palatial estates, vineyards, shops, gold, and silverware,
tableware, carpets, porcelain provides a view to the vast possessions that could
be amassed by an Armenian New Julfan mercantile league in Early Modern Iran.
When discussed in the context of New Julfan cultural patronage, this document raises
interesting issues pertinent to our conversations about minorities and their cultural
formulations in the urban context of the Middle East and North Africa.
Due to our, due to the brevity of our time together, my paper is simply an
exercise of presenting information from Polos's will
in the context of the very local context of Isfahani culture and framing points for
conversation among this interdisciplinary group of scholars.
It's becoming increasingly clear that the human realities
of being a minority in Safavid Iran were shaped and continuously
renegotiated through such factors as local governance, socioeconomic standing,
social relationships, and the degree to which the individual and or the collective
participated in spaces such as commercial zones and convivial gatherings
that could actually have the power of reframing minority/majority positions.
These nuances of Safavid, and I'm going to do the air quotes,
"minority histories" unfold in the work of such scholars as Sussan Babaie,
Massumeh Farhad, Kathryn Babayan, and Ina Baghdiantz McCabe
in their publication, for example, "Slaves of the Shah."
And it also unfolds very beautifully in the work of my UCLA
colleague Sebouh Aslanian whose publications reveal in great detail
the very specific experience of being an Armenian merchant of New Julfa.
So right here, I'm presenting to you just the preamble of the walk. And you've had a
few minutes to look a few minutes to look at it so I'll give you a few
seconds more to read it on your own.
This document continues by detailing the shops, houses, workshops, and public areas
mentioned in this preamble.
With its vast enumeration of objects, public and private architecture,
and indirect references to their decoration,
Polo's request brings to the fore the sociological aspects of ownership
while inviting us to explore how objects, images, and spaces really work in concert
to perform one, a particular Armenian mercantile identity
apart from other minorities of Iran. And two, the alternatives and similarities
with the hegemonic Muslim elite. So Polo's amass possessions should be considered in
light of his being third generation of the Velijanean family residing in
Iran.
Polo's grandfather was from [...], Armenia and was among those who originally
relocated from Julfa along the Ottoman-Safavid border
whose residents were forcibly relocated to New Julfa at the start of the 17th
century.
Julfa's residents benefited from the sale of silk and had well-established
trade connections.
Due to their wealth and mercantile connections, Shah Abbas
repositioned the Julfans within his empire
at Isfahan close to the court and the royal commercial center.
The Velijaneans along with other Julfan-
Armenian merchants profited tremendously from selling
Iranian silk across the globe through a network of New Julfan satellite
communities as painstakingly described by my colleague
Sebouh Aslanian in his various publications.
Through a series of bridges, New Julfa became really an extension of Isfahan's
palace precinct that included the royal commercial node the Maidan-e Naqsh-e Jahan.
Close to one of these passages, close to one of these bridges, namely the [...] bridge.
Polos owned stalls and workshops according to the bequest.
He also bequeathed the shops in Julfa's great Maidan or [...] Maidan described by the 17th
century French traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
as and, I quote, "The beautiful square in which the market is held
entirely surrounded by shops."
The success of these workshops and markets would directly have benefited the Muslim court.
There is mounting evidence that Armenian run and sponsored workshops and marketplaces
supported an urban luxury market which significantly influenced the aesthetics
of the majority culture.
In the Q&A, I would like to return to how we might discuss these Safavid
commercial zones as and, here I quote from the workshop
description, "As places for transfer, exchange, and participation."
I'd also like for us all to think together about religious sites in that same light.
In our retellings of churches, synagogues, mosques and temples, one often assumes a very
inward looking space with rigid boundaries.
Within the context of Safavid, Iran, there is evidence
that these spaces could be porous and that they offered opportunities to
perform religious minority identities not only to brethren
but also to individuals representing the majority culture.
In "Slaves of the Shah," Sussan Babaie documents numerous visits of Safavid Muslim
officials to the churches of New Julfa on such occasions as Easter and the Ascension.
Returning back to Polos, throughout surb Bethlehem
or holy Bethlehem, one can find the names of Polos,
our protagonist and his father Petros who founded the church and these
inscriptions also call uh reference um the mother and the other sons.
In the congregation area of holy Bethlehem, a portrait depicts
Petros wearing dress analogous to that of the Muslim
elite. Resting his left hand on the holy gospels
and holding in his right what appears to be a royal decree,
A [...], perhaps permitting him to build this magnificently large church.
As a dhimmi community, the New Julfan Armenians had to obtain, of course,
permission to build religious structures. Contemporary 17th century
historians such as, for example, [...] and modern-day
scholars alike note that there was significant
investment on behalf of the Muslim court for the New Julfan Armenian merchants to
build such glorious structures.
Both Susan and I have written about artistic parallels between the
decorative schemes of New Julfa's churches and the palaces
of the Muslim elite.
Around the middle of the century, the preferred approach was really a
breathtaking combination of Europeanized styled
murals. And this new style is is referred to as [...] or "the making of European,"
along with gilded stucco decoration, cobalt blue, tiles yellow tiles and
inscriptions.
Bethlehem Church and the other New Julfan religious structures,
including the cathedral Surb
Amenap'rkic, which we're looking at here, were absolutely resheathed in images of
scriptural history.
These paintings are largely but not exclusively based on northern European
engravings in, for example [...],
which was printed initially in Antwerp in 1593 and then repeated consistently.
One can imagine the theatrical quality of these paintings, which
with their illusionistic three-dimensional effects
illuminated by candelight and surrounded by sensory notes of incense and also the
sound of liturgy.
This is really the right setting to perform one's beliefs and ritual practices.
I have published and interpreted an excerpt detailing a
lengthy debate that took place in the cathedral between the Armenian theologian,
philosopher, and artist Hovhannes Merkuz and the Safavid Shah, Shah Suleiman,
which is described in the book, quote,
"The book of history made at the marvelous monastery of holy all savior
in New Julfa by Hovhannes, which was written in Armenian and Persian."
Reportedly among the other subjects, among other subjects,
they discuss the cathedral's paintings, specifically
their suitability and function in a place of worship.
This narrative is interesting for our purposes of this workshop
as it describes the site of the Armenian cathedral
as the setting for a representative minority, namely Hovhannes, to explain the reasons
for visualizing sacred histories of the Muslim– to a representative of the Muslim
political elite.
According to Hovhannes, Shah Suleiman asked many questions about the gilded
and colored images.
He inquired, "Why do you paint images in houses of prayer
where it is not appropriate?"
After Hovhannes put forth his argument about the meditative and didactic values
of painted images, Suleiman is said to have responded,
"We honor our writing, our script in the same manner.
Here we have a negotiation as it were of the different ways of representing the
divine in this wonderful setting of All Savior's Cathedral.
Regarding the [...] of religious spaces and our conversations together later or
perhaps next week, I would like to hear about additional
examples of religious sites as places where discussions about
religious beliefs, behaviors, and also experiences of belonging unfold
between minority and majority groups.
So back to Polo's bequest. Let's turn to domestic spaces.
Reading through the latter part of the will, one is astounded by the
the sheer number of properties owned by Polos.
Certain houses were close to Bethlehem Church along with the small
shops that Velijanians built which I referred to earlier,
while others were close or adjacent to other notable Armenian merchant patrons
such as the Sarfraz and the Avetik families.
They may be the same families that are referred to in [...] in the
inscriptions as patrons.
Clearly ownership of property was a good investment. Land ownership is the basis of
wealth. Houses were assets that could be used by or bequeathed to family members.
And in the Safavid context, there's evidence that domestic properties were rented out.
Aside from the economic benefits, however, there was also the sociological aspect
to the amassment of properties on behalf of religious minorities.
And here we could bring into the conversation work that's been done on
the Jews of the Ottoman Empire by a wonderful group of scholars,
including Natalie Rothman.
New Julfan merchants as a relocated Dhimmi community seemed to express their
communal investment and ties to a location in the building of churches,
schools, hospitals, and domestic estates.
Within New Julfa's palatial estates, affluent Armenian families like the
Velijanians received Armenian, European, Russian
merchants as well as members of foreign embassies. 17th century
sources are replete with references to visits on behalf of the Safavid court,
not only to the churches but also to the homes.
Dr. Landau we're almost, we're out of time. So would you be able to
um, summarize. My apologies for intruding. Sure so these domestic spaces
provided the context for um, conversations among merchants, dignitaries and um
people from different backgrounds. And so these oil paintings were basically, they're
quite commonly found in Armenian and households and those of the Muslim elite.
And basically what they're showing is a great deal of foreign objects that were important
objects to be uh circulated within Iran. And I'm gonna stop
there. Thank you, Dr. Landau.
Uh, Dr. Babaie. It is your turn on the zoom.
Uh, good morning to you. Good evening to those of us
on the other side of the Atlantic and I know there are some of us there too.
Okay, so um first, uh thank you to the organizers.
Uh and I am most grateful to be party to this uh workshop. And I'm taking it as a
workshop essentially. I also wanted to say that with uh uh
Amy's, and thank you Amy for all those shout outs, and I will remind you of something you
were supposed to do when you were an undergraduate student but
thanks to Amy for setting up the scene, if you will,
for me. Uh, what I'm gonna do is essentially talk about, I mean, the title is a come
on kind of a thing.
My point about this is that um something of a methodological issue
in our historiographic approaches to material culture, urban development, and
so forth of which I am also a guilty party.
This was brought up in the in the discussion by Ruba uh, who so aptly
pointed to the fact that we tend to
look through and for the evidence that is or has been dominant in the discussions around
Islamic arts in general. I also want to make a point about the
fact that we need to define what is medieval Islam,
if we were to make such uh discussions come to life.
And what I think is crucial here to understand
Isfahan, Istanbul, Delhi for instance, in a different context than earlier
periods of Islamic histories.
But also, to be much more careful in terms of situating the questions and the evidence
in fact.
So I'm as guilty as anyone for having done uh art history top down, thinking about
the building of Isfahan which has been my obsession uh for most of my career uh
and thinking about the ways in which the imperial command, essentially wishes, are
uh uh are behind the sort of master planning of Isfahan and many
other cities that are actually in Safavid, Iran.
And while as a concession to that,
I must say, uh, the work that Amy uh referred to on the [..]. this is the [...] of
the Safavid Period, and I do want to underscore the sort of conceptions of slavery
to be differently understood in Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal, uh context. So
how else do we look at these? So we look at for instance the making of Isfahan
through the lens of all these [...] who happen to be of Armenian, Circassian, or Georgian
background.
But also to think about them as elites of the society, not as the, as the
lower levels, if you will. Or the ones whose traces are not
found anywhere. I want to point out to this great uh early 20th century map of
Isfahan to highlight the fact that even today uh but more importantly in a post-Safavid
sort of understanding of Isfahan of the 17th century in particular,
the location of neighborhoods, of quarters, of clusters, of
communities, collectives is less visible to us. So it's hard to find on a map such as this
a recognition of the Jewish quarter, of the Zoroastrian quarter,
of the uh Armenian quarter though very prominently placed. Okay,
So I am sorry that this wasn't working the way I thought it is working. The mysteries of
zoom.
Alright so I can move on actually. I don't need to keep you
looking at all of these but the Isfahan picture is significant because it does convey
something of this uh, hegemonic uh perspective that is the way uh oftentimes, we
look at this uh material uh and the fact that a map such as a 1924
map of Isfahan ignores the position of all these different communities,
including even the New Julfa one. What I wanted to basically focus on is to really ask
who constitutes a majority or the majority?
Who is the minority? Are there in fact such understandings to be extracted
from the evidence on the ground, something that that I think Amy was hinting at as well.
That erasures of evidence may very well be in between us and what we as
historians, as researchers are in fact searching for. So, um this is about how to recover
those groups. Are Sufis, for instance, a minority given that they represented a
a rather esoteric, if you will, uh practice of Islam and certainly in the Safavid
period they become increasingly marginalized that do they represent
a minority or in fact, given the fact that they're uh the craftsmen and
merchants and small people of the bazaar tended to be staunch followers of many
of these Sufis.
Uh, does that put them in a different category of social strata?
They certainly were absorbed into the royal household if you will, physically
brought into the the royal precinct by the placement
of this bast or this octagonal building which was a refuge
specifically geared towards the members of the [...],
towards the members of the Sufi orders that were kind of
recognized and embraced within the Safavid context. Others like Zoroastrians
have left very little evidence in Isfahan. But we do know from 17th century
references to, for instance, neighborhood which was a Zoroastrian or Gabri
neighborhood– that was the pejorative term still used uh in or used in that period
but one that in fact does not go back with that same connotations in terms of
history as such as when uh Shahnameh was written in the 10th, 11th centuries. But that we
know that that there was a neighborhood uh near the
the [...] and and the uh
Allahverdi Khan Bridge that eventually becomes the site of some of the palaces
on the south side of the river. How do we account for the fact that this is
amongst the oldest communities within the Isfahan uh structure, structure of
the city actually and people who make up that uh that city?
Uh, the uh the oldest sort of core of Isfahan is indeed the Jewish quarter.
Uh what becomes Yahudiya, that becomes the center of development of medieval
Isfahan around the old uh uh congregational mosque in the
in what was the [...] city and that traces of that,
traces of the homes of the Jews of Isfahan and their places of worship are
still in the neighborhood of that bashed [...] and that
bits and pieces of that sort of a presence is there, although for instance
on the street if you ask a child, they would say point to the building of a synagogue as
the the mosque of the Jews or [...] as a kid told me at some point.
These scattered bits and pieces however
point to a very deep engagement and presence.
The kind of exchanges and interventions
that we may look at in terms of marginalia, if you will,
of Safavid society. But it is crucial for us to take note of these in more systematic
way.
And I'm here referencing to the fact that uh the great,
I'm sorry, the the bible, Shah Abbas Bible, of which one page is at LACMA-
at Getty, I'm sorry, is indeed a manuscript a hugely important
document of exchange between Europe and Safavid, Iran. But also internal
to Safavid Isfahan where uh most likely the Jewish community of Isfahan,
as my colleague Vera Moreen has shown, had been in involved in the emendations in
Judeo-Persian on the pages of this manuscript which
followed the Persian emendations which followed the Latin ones. And the
the corrections are increasingly uh uh uh intensified until we get to the
Judo-Persian ones. That the Jewish community of Isfahan was
actively involved in patronage of manuscripts such as a page on the lower
right hand side and manuscripts that
were cast in light of knowledge of what is the local. So to say,
Persian or Islamic manuscript.
It really um begs the question
of what do we tell our students which is something I'm particularly concerned with when I
talk about the Armenians, and the Jews, and the
the Zoroastrians. And then come to Persians or Muslims
or the majority. How do we make these
cases really cognizant of the realities on the ground where
various communities, minority communities, as we recognize them now,
may actually include the Sunnis for instance and the Sufis.
And so this minority majority becomes a
concern in terms of how do we distinguish the
fabric of society and the city at large. So a map like the one on the left with the
marking of where the houses are located clearly indicates
that there are certain categories. The Jewish quarter, the quarter where the
sort of the elite of the clergy, the learned
occupied quarters, where the merchants call uh occupied quarters, where Armenians
obviously, uh were particularly present.
And turning to that, it's this intervention at its deepest with the Armenian community
best documented, but perhaps not necessarily the only one. And I and I'm not quite
sure how methodologically we can access material that has been erased. So those
destructions are particularly
uh crucial, especially through those expressions of
built environment, of material culture, of books, of paintings, of buildings of
houses. So in the Armenian context, this was my marker, but I'm going to take
one more minute if I may.
In the Armenian context, the evidence is extraordinarily important as Amy just
pointed out where for instance, evidence of a library
stamp of the Minassian family in Isfahan marks the same Arabic gospel
of the Medici Oriental Press as having reached Isfahan. we know that
that was part of a gift. But to have it stamped by an Armenian
family of obviously 20th century origin here
marks the point about the intensity of the presence of material culture that
Armenians in particular have preserved and indeed in the
architecture and urban fabric of New Julfa
which is very cognizant, very much in line
with what we understand to be a general Safavid
taste. That's what Amy was referring to and I want to underscore the fact that
these styles of the europeanizing styles or
technologies are going back and forth and traveling between
the Armenians of New Julfa and Armenian agents and networks
in say Aleppo or in Surat and so forth.
And indeed they go into the houses of Isfahan, of the clergy, of the
[...] Islam, of the [...] and so forth
while also being of Armenian origin like the one on the right hand side.
The ones on the left belonging to the high-ranking clergy of Isfahan.
And that they link up much larger communities than the one that we particularly focus
on in Isfahan. Thank you very much, I hope uh I didn't take more than I should have uh
in time. Well uh, thank you to both speakers.
And of course your talks overlap so my first thought would be, would you have
questions or thoughts for each other. Uh, Dr. Landau for Dr. Babaie.
Dr. Babaie for Dr. Landau. Would you like to pose questions or
consider the overlap between your two talks?
Uh, yes. Um, Amy would you like to start or
do you want me to say something?
You say something.
I think the point that uh that Amy raised about uh reframing in fact what is the
minority, what is the majority is one of the key issues for us to consider in terms of uh,
in terms of thinking about historical locations of various communities.
I always wonder and I wonder what you think about this one,
that for instance, uh an Armenian origin [...], was he thinking of
himself as separate from the Armenian community, as an example.
Yeah, I mean those shades and those differences, because
that also gets lost as you say when we talk about minority
and majority, but also when we talk about Armenian experience or Jewish experience, etc.
Because it breaks down so much within those categories.
For Armenian Christians, it would break down in terms of a collective identity
between the Apostolic Armenians but also the Catholic Armenians who are also living
in New Julfa. Um and also it breaks down in terms of those
Armenians living in New Julfa as well as those Armenians
living in other parts of the empire, I think. Um
and those are like the variations that bring up some fantastically
interesting issues because that's where, like the crossover between
ethnic, religious, linguistic groups really materializes.
Yeah and I think what you're pointing out, which is really crucial
is uh, in terms of especially in the early modern period where so much emphasis has been
on the imperial centers actually and this sort of an imperial command uh, the hegemonic
view, that um you know to look at say uh the Armenians of [...] and [...] which I
assume has not been particularly forthcoming, kind of a research.
Or the Jews of Kerman whose presence is recorded for a long time. But
in the end, one of the issues that remains is, I fully sympathize and
understand for instance what um what uh Lamia was suggesting about
how to tease out from uh from these tidbits of information
even when you cannot be absolutely sure that the color of skin is really not
a convention of the paintings in a particular manuscript for the period. But
nonetheless, attempting to tease out the kinds of information that one
uh, that one otherwise cannot uh securely position in order to look at the
uh the sort of the marginal aspects of social structures.
Uh so it's it's really um uh uh very uh compelling, what is there for the Armenians.
And of course textual material for the most part,
for instance the Jews of Isfahan or the Jewish community of Iran in the Safavid period.
But as you well know Amy, you were
supposed to work on Judo-Persian manuscripts.
I couldn't, they were eyesores. I'm sorry, they're difficult.
They're not as beautiful as the material
I ended up working on. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating though.
No, but it is really interesting with the Jewish material evidence right because
there's such a difference between those few examples we have
of the tile work in the New York Jewish
Museum, for example, which are phenomenal. Yeah. And then there's just a gap of evidence
really and a huge gap between the level of that art, what that's suggesting in terms of
architectural investment, and then the Judeo-persian manuscripts. Yeah.
Except, except that, if I may go back, it's um perhaps, we
we have forgotten how important it is to look at the work, uh
just just making a uh making a comment about the fact that
so much of the work that belongs to uh communities that may not be
with the sort of investment that the
majority or the mainstream, if you will, may have. That
the aesthetic valuation perhaps is part of the problem.
Uh and to think that uh, did uh you know slaves also depict
themselves or leave some marks?
The mastery of those Mosul craftsmen is crucial. It's the mastery
that that is part of that identity, I think.
And I imagine that uh maybe Ruba can speak to that as well a bit more.
But aesthetic uh valuation may very well be part of the problem that we cannot
quite um situate, the the sorts of categories of works of art
or of material culture. Let's not call them works of art, but material culture
uh, because they don't fit into the museums and major collections.
It's just one thought on that one.
Okay, I have a question here from Aomar Boum and uh again my profound thanks
to these wonderful um panels, the panelists, the papers, the generative thinking. To CNES
for organizing it and to my colleagues for coming up with this wonderful topic.