SHOW OF MIGHT AND TOLERANCE
By Neville Hawcock

FT
February 19 2009 23:11

Shah ‘Abbas: The Remaking of Iran, British Museum, London

‘Shah ‘Abbas I and a pageboy’, Muhammad Qasim (1627) You enter
this show through a dark, curving corridor before emerging into the
glorious space-within-a-space of the British Museum’s old reading
room with its fine Victorian dome, a setting used for the museum’s
previous empire-builder blockbusters on China’s first emperor with
his terracotta retinue and on the Roman emperor Hadrian. But it seems
particularly apt in the case of Shah ‘Abbas I, the Safavid ruler of
Iran who in 1587 ruthlessly ousted his weak and half-blind father to
take over a failing state riven by civil strife and squeezed by the
Ottomans to the west and the Uzbeks to the east. By the time of his
death in 1629 he had created an imperial power stretching from the
Tigris to the Indus, with unified rule of (religious) law of which he
was nonetheless absolute arbiter, healthy commercial and diplomatic
ties with Europe, and flourishing arts and architecture.

The show soberly takes us through a sequence of impressive achievements
– ‘Abbas’s nurturing of trade ties with the west; his removal of Iran’s
capital to Isfahan, which he duly embellished with magnificent mosques;
his charitable bequests to the country’s great shrines – as one20would
expect from an exhibition resting so heavily on loans from Iran.

But more human particulars, sometimes lurid or eccentric, keep
breaking through – the sorts of details that an orientalist critique
would treat as strictly haraam. We learn for instance that, on the
advice of the court astronomer, ‘Abbas once abdicated the throne for
three days when a comet was sighted; his stand-in, a dervish from a
supposedly subversive sect, was hanged for his trouble.

Chinese flask, c1403-35 Yet in spite of such cruelties (‘Abbas also
blinded two of his sons and killed another for fear of a coup against
him, leaving his throne to his grandson) one gets the impression of
a tolerant, outward-looking culture.

Many treasures here here are not obviously Persian. Richly illuminated
Armenian gospels are the legacy of ‘Abbas’s nurturing of an Armenian
merchant class in Isfahan to corner the lucrative silk trade. Chinese
vases and dishes, highly prized in 17th-century Iran, are on show
because they were donated by ‘Abbas to the shrine of Safi, the Sufi
founder of the Safavid dynasty.

Especially arresting are a pair of 17th-century English portraits
of the adventurer Robert Sherley and his wife Teresia, he in rich
Iranian attire, she, though of noble Circassian birth, in a lustrous,
voluminous English dress and, oddly, holding a pistol – a reference,
one theory has it, to two occasions whe n she saved her husband from
attack. Sherley and his brother Anthony were freelance ambassadors
for ‘Abbas; also on show is a letter from Robert to his "Moste
deere brother", who is berated for not fulfilling his duties. Can a
mini-series be far behind?

Portrait of Shah ‘Abbas, attributed to Bishn Das, c1618 There is,
of course, some exquisite Iranian art: one a superbly understated
portrait, on brown tinted paper, of a kneeling scribe. The folds
of his robe- long sleeves wrinkled up by his hands – his lined and
alert face, his luxuriant black beard, the tufts of hair poking
out from his scruffy turban, are rendered in clean, confident ink
lines counterpointed by touches of colour – deep blue on his turban,
undershirt and ink-bottle, red on the slippers next to him. Perhaps
he produced some of the glorious calligraphy nearby is his, great
fluid sweeps of nasta’liq script – a style perfected, we are told,
by a scribe who dreamt of flying geese – against opulent grounds of
twining flowers and swirling golden arabesques.

Modern, theocratic Iran owes much to ‘Abbas, who consolidated Shia
Islam as the state religion and encouraged clerics to establish the
country’s framework of law. He built mosques – a slideshow of some
of the most impressive is a welcome chance to sit down – and walked
the 600 miles from Isfahan to Mas hhad on a pilgrimage to the shrine
of Imam Riza. Yet one of the most striking portraits here shows
‘Abbas, recognisable by his droopy black moustache, cosying up to a
pageboy and enjoying a flask of wine. Though it seems to have been
intended for a personal album, it testifies both to the human side of
a formidable ruler and to the fact that piety is not always cloaked
in fundamentalism.

The exhibition runs until June 14 In partnership with the Iran Heritage
Foundation