Demons, Saints and Black Pens

Anyone who read Maurice Sendak's book, “Where the Wild Things Are,” as a child was surely captured by the imaginative illustrations within and will probably be happy to be introduced to his spiritual forefather, the 15th-century Turkic painter Muhammad Siyah Qalam, AKA Muhammad of the Black Pen.

Almost nothing is known for sure about the painter's life. Most of his known works are situated in the Topkapi Palace's library and are collected in albums known as murakka.

The murakka albums are collections of calligraphy and illustrations from separate sources, which achieved popularity in the Islamic world starting in the 16th century. Due to the fact that these pieces of art were usually gathered from all around Dar al-Islam, researchers occasionally find it extremely challenging to determine their exact dating and origin. This is particularly true regarding the works of Siyah Qalam.

Despite the initial obscurity, modern research commonly dates Siyah Qalam's time and place to the 14th or 15th century in Khorasan, although some dispute this notion and place him in 16th-century Shiraz. In addition, it is hard to determine whether Siyah Qalam was indeed a real person or actually a school of art joined together around a common style; nonetheless, these illustrations are nothing less than magical.

A style without precedent

The unique Siyah Qalam style had no precedent in anything done before in the Islamic world, both in regard to painting techniques as well as the themes in use, and these include a delightful blend of nomadic life scenes, Sufi dervishes, and an array of monsters and demons, perhaps representing remnants of local Central Asian pre-Islamic folklore.

The Siyah Qalam style apparently represents mostly East Asian material culture and physical features, but it contains Middle Eastern and Hellenistic influences as well. These mixed sources of influence are a unique product of the rare cultural-historical time frame brought forth by the Mongol Empire. This massive empire, arriving at its peak in the late 13th century, had generated a colossal momentum of intercultural exchange, shifting products, ideas, technologies, and entire populations from one end of Eurasia to the other. The Siyah Qalam style represents a sheer example of the Mongol Empire's Eurasian melting pot.

As an example of these continental exchanges, the Siyah Qalam demon drawings hold a striking resemblance to the Tantric Buddhist guardian demons, known as dharmapāla, as well as to Tang dynasty tomb guardians. This renewed encounter between Buddhism and Islam, five centuries after the eventual diminishing of Buddhism in Central Asia, could have never occurred without the Mongol horde's shattering of Eurasia's cultural boundaries.

Wine, fiddles and manacles

The image at the head of this essay truly represents the unique Siyah Qalam style, depicting a couple of demons, where one of them is playing an Iranian kamanche (a spiked fiddle), while the other is apparently pouring wine from a distinctly Chinese blue-and-white porcelain vessel. Oddly enough, both of them are wearing jewelry and chained in stylistic manacles — strange days in post-Mongol Eurasia.

It is important to point out that the now-iconic Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, best known for its Ming dynasty specimens, could not have come into being without the import of cobalt blue oxide technology from Iran to China under the great Mongol exchange. Moreover, the representation of this artifact in a Siyah Qalam painting enables us to date it to a period no earlier than the 14th century.

Many of the Siyah Qalam illustrations depict a Central Asian world that is very much a pre-Islamic one. It is a world of wandering storytellers, roaming about under the steel-gray sky and between dusty yurt camps, telling their fables which bind history and imagination, humans and demons, reality and dream.

Dervishes at the edge of the steppe

Despite the strong pre-Islamic influence, some of the paintings represent scenes from the lives of Sufi dervishes who wandered between the borders of the vast steppe and the sedentary world to the south. One of the most active Sufi orders (Arabic: tariqat) in the Transoxiana and Khorasan region was the Qalandariyya tariqa.

The origin of the Qalandariyya was lost through the mists of time, but it seems that its birth is linked to that of another mystical group known as the Malamatiyya. This movement, originating in 9th-century Khorasan, represents one of the earliest stages of Islamic mysticism; in fact, during the first phases of its existence, its members were not even regarded as Sufis by the major Sufi groups centered in Baghdad, but as an entirely separate group. This movement, as well as the later Qalandariyya, are examples of Central Asian mystical traditions which might have been influenced by non-Islamic sources, namely Shamanism, Buddhism, and others, all present in the Central Asian crossroads of the time.

The Malamatiyya's spiritual path held that the lower layers of the human soul, the nafs (نَفْس) — corresponding with today's modern idea of the ego — may even intensify under the influence of the mystical path, with all the self and social esteem that accompanies it. Therefore, only attacking the nafs by constant guilt and blame (malâma, ملامة) will eventually eradicate the stone-hard ego.

The Qalandariyya, flourishing in Central Asia starting in the 11th century, was mostly active outside the scholarly centers of the Iranian cities and the Middle East. It inclined toward an unorthodox approach, decentralized organization, and even accepted into its ranks runaway slaves, convicts, and other lowly members of society. These colorful bands roamed around the margins of the Islamic world, practicing unorthodox methods which included music, dance, wine drinking, and other obscenities for the purpose of spiritual elevation. These practices were obviously disapproved of by the orthodox Muslim clergy of the day, as well as among members of other Sufi tariqat, such as the later Naqshbandiyya, which strongly opposed the Qalandariyya's “drunk” Sufism.

The Siyah Qalam paintings vividly depict these vagabond mystics practicing music, dancing ecstatically, conversing, or simply submerged in meditation, and it appears that the artist or artists knew their world intimately, perhaps actually being one of them.

What remains unread

Unfortunately, while lacking any textual description, Muhammad Siyah Qalam's art has remained vague to us, and we can only assume the mythological and symbolic world they describe. This faded world of demons, shamans, wandering Sufis, and nomads — a world of lost Turkic epics and forgotten musical tunes — has remained blocked to our modern ears.

We can only hope that someday in the future, perhaps in some dusty library in Istanbul, Delhi, or Tabriz, there will be discovered an old manuscript that will shed some new light on those ancient depictions of Central Asian life, which faded long ago.