The Islamic rule against graven images did not prevent early-modern Muslims from developing capacious traditions of representational art. It merely required them to develop an extra measure of creativity. Some artists kept to the prohibition’s letter (so to speak) by adapting the acceptable, even praiseworthy, art of calligraphy to the goals of the painter. Calligrams, drawings comprised of skillfully curved and interwoven Arabic verses, first appeared in Islamic art at least one thousand years ago. By the early modern period artists had developed the form to a high level.
One skillfully executed calligram, drawn in 1766 CE (A.H. 1180) by Abd al-Qadir Hisari, now reposes in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In it, golden Arabic letters trace out the hull, gunports, and windows of a three-masted Ottoman galleon. The artist has drawn in grey the sails, rigging, and two other warships in the background. Tiny “dust-letter” inscriptions in Ottoman (Arabic letters, Turkish words) run around the outside of the painting and adorn the edges of the waves, describing there the art and vicissitudes of sailing. The ship itself bears the monographic seal (or tughra) of Sultan Mehmet III, and a flag at the stern bears the Quran’s “throne verse,” which reads, in part, “Allah is He besides whom there is no god…His knowledge extends over the heavens and the earth; the preservation of them both tires him not.” The flag declares the ship’s owner a humble servant of God and invokes the supreme being’s protection.
"Calligraphic Galleon," Metropolitan Museum of Art
It is not the only protective device in the painting: the calligraphic letters that form the ship spell out the names of the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” righteous men whom the Abrahamic deity protected by immuring them asleep in a cave. To some early-modern Muslims, including the artist, these names (which appear in the Quran) had almost magical protective powers; the Sleepers served the same function as saints in Christianity. Hisari’s painting is thus both aesthetically pleasing and practical: it twice asks for God’s blessing upon the sultan and his fleet.
God, it seems, helps those who help themselves, and reserves much of his aid for the prudent and humble. Mehmet III did not number these traits among his virtues. In 1768 the sultan, incensed by Russian troops’ border violations and goaded by his French allies, declared war on neighboring Russia. Mehmet perhaps believed that Ottoman forces would fare as well in this conflict as they had in the 1714-15 campaign against Venice or in the 1735-39 war with Austria and Russia. If so he believed wrongly. At the Battle of Cesme (1770), Catherine II’s Mediterranean fleet sank an Ottoman naval force twice its size. Four years later, facing ongoing Russian incursions and Russian-inspired rebellions in Greece and the Levant, the Porte and the Empress signed a treaty ceding the Crimea to Russia (first as a protectorate, later outright) and ending Turkish dominance of the Black Sea. There’s only so much that good art can do.
