Adorning the King of Islam

I've adorned a garden of delight from which friends can pick flowers whose fresh blossoms, with every breath, perfume the lovers' senses.Neither freeze nor hail will cause it to wilt; nor the winds of autumn bring its leaves to fall.With this poem, the fourteenth-century historiographer ʿAzīz ibn Ardashīr al-Astarābādī concluded a nearly eight-hundred-page history of his patron's reign. 1 While the literary adornment of such a text has a measure of timelessness, its visual adornment and illumination, including the painted rosettes surrounding the poem above, are the first things lost and changed in its copying.The visual and material features of a book, even when seemingly arbitrary, play an important role in how its text is approached and experienced.While faithfulness to an original is typically important in the transmission of a book's text, the choices that shape its appearance are where the contextual specificity of the act of transmission is most palpable.These choices, despite their material constraints, always suggest a particular framing that refigures and repurposes a text so that it performs a new meaning for a new audience.In what follows, this article traces Astarabadi's text, Bazm wa Razm (Feasting and Fighting), from fourteenth-century Anatolia through its various Ottoman-era recensions down to the modern period, examining how each era visually refigures this textual manifestation of his patron, Burhān al-Dīn Aḥmad (r.783-800 AH/1381-1398 CE), for a new purpose.Starting from its first instantiation as a "garment" for a living "shadow of God" in the illuminated manuscript that was produced while he was still alive, the choices that undergird its visuality are intimately tied to the Sufi-inspired ideal of Islamic monarchy imbued in its text.As a book that embodies the presence of a living "king of Islam," it was made to be seen, heard, and experienced in court so as to convince others that Burhan al-Din was a locus for the manifestation of the entirety of God's attributes, the equilibrium in which all opposites are gathered.This latent power is clear in the afterlife of the manuscript: after its patron's death, it remained in elite hands but was not circulated despite its influence on Timurid and later Ottoman historiography.Much later, from the seventeenth century onward, recensions of the text transcribed for Ottoman elites, based on a manuscript tradition that I argue is rooted in Astarabadi's draft, reveal how routine visual and material changes cancel the power of that initial performance, thereby reframing a once-powerful figure into a contemplative lesson on time, power, and bygone generations.Lastly, seemingly arbitrary visual choices made in two editions of the text printed in the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries embed and encapsulate the worldview of nation-states, casting Burhan al-Din as a step in the progress of either Turkish or Iranian-Islamic nationalism.With every twist of this story, the visuality of the book and the choices that produce it frame how it is seen, read, recited, and approached, distilling for its audiences the norms and expectations of Islamic power, past and present. Burhan al-Din's Life and ContextBurhan al-Din, remembered in Turkey today as Kadı Burhaneddin, has long been considered a minor king.He ruled for almost eighteen years over a part of eastern Anatolia during the political fragmentation of the post-Mongol age. 2 From Astarabadi's history we learn that he was born in 745/1345 to a line of judges in Kayseri and that he received a standard scholar's education in Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz during his youth.After returning to Anatolia and serving as a judge for some years, he became, in 780/1378, chief minster to the last Eretnid sovereign, ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad (d.782/1380), whose dynasty ruled eastern Anatolia after the breakup of the Ilkhanate in the early fourteenth century. 3Upon the latter's death, Burhan al-Din maneuvered against several rivals and ultimately took the throne in 782/1381.During his rule, Burhan al-Din faced multiple insurrections from urban and nomadic elites, and he likely commissioned this chronicle in an attempt to refashion his image for the former group at his court in Sivas.Yet soon after its completion, in the summer of 800/1398, he died at the hands of a former vassal, ʿUthmān of the White Sheep (Āq Qūyūnlū) Turkmen.His capital, Sivas, was destroyed by Timur four years later.Burhan al-Din is exceptional as one of the first kings who verifiably studied and directly engaged with the work of the Sufi theoretician Muḥyī al-Dīn Muḥammad Ibn al-ʿArabī (d.638/1240).According to Astarabadi's narrative, sometime during 791-792/1389-1390, likely in response to his legitimacy problem, Burhan al-Din sent a gift of two precious carpets to the shrine of Ibn al-ʿArabi's son-in-law, Ṣadr al-Dīn Qūnawī (d.673/1274), in Konya.The caretakers of the shrine, in turn, sent a copy of one of Ibn al-ʿArabi's main works, Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam (Ringstones of Wisdom), written in Sadr al-Din's hand, to Burhan al-Din. 4While they sent it with the intention of Burhan al-Din deriving blessing (baraka) from simply seeing Sadr al-Din's handwriting, Burhan al-Din not only studied it, but "sincerely sought to acquire and master this craft." 5This mastery is corroborated by other sources, such as a series of letters preserved by his companion and teacher, Yār ʿAlī Shīrāzī (d.814/1411), which show his deep engagement with Ibn al-ʿArabi's metaphysics and cosmology. 6Yar ʿAli himself was an important Sufi theoretician of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, embedded in larger networks that spanned from Anatolia to other centers of Islamic power. 7 He was also a key member of Burhan al-Din's retinue and served as his ambassador multiple times, including when the aforementioned carpets were sent to Konya.In these letters, Burhan al-Din capably debates the finer points of Ibn al-ʿArabi's thought with Yar-ʿAli, displaying a knowledge of its main texts and themes as developed after Ibn al-ʿArabi's death.This move to master Ibn al-ʿArabi's work coincided with a period of military and diplomatic confrontation with the Ottoman Bayezid I (r.791-805/1389-1403) and Timur (r.771-801/1370-1405), as well as a larger turn toward literary production from 796/1393 to his death in 800/1398.This turn culminated in Burhan al-Din's own authorship of three works, including an Arabic treatise wherein he demonstrates his

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