Essay by Sussan Babaie

Safina: Journeys of Time and Space

Safina, the Arabic term for ship, has acquired multiple meanings in Persian language and its literary and artistic landscape since at least the fourteenth century. It is indeed the vessel for seafaring but it is also a metaphorical vessel for imaginary journeys rep- resented through literary and historical writing and through visual forms especially in the Persian language sphere of culture. Ala Ebtekar’s new body of work, Safina, taps into all those forms, both theoretically and materially. His journeys, visual and concep- tual, traverse time and space in multiple directions, taking ships as much as space ships and aeroplanes as metaphorical vehicles for explorations into forms and ideas. Ebtekar situates his Safina on a journey of aestheticized and intellectualised meander- ings into realms that draw inspiration from the cosmos—accessible to all—as from cul- turally contingent understandings of those worlds anthologised by this Safina.

Safina as a literary-historical genre refers to several textual forms. One consists of an- thologies of texts, a mix of prose and poetry, by different authors, spanning a wide range of intellectual interests: from astronomy and geometry to theology and philos- ophy, from medicine to music, from cosmography to literary criticism. The most fa- mous of these is the fourteenth-century Safina-ye Tabriz, a unique manuscript from the reign of the Ilkhanid dynasty (post-Mongol rulers of Iran and Iraq of today, 1256-1335).1 As its title indicates, this encyclopaedic compilation of texts was under- stood as a carrier, a vessel or treasury of knowledge referencing in particular the city of Tabriz, the principal capital of the Ilkhanids, the site of the gathering of some of the greatest minds of the time, and the centre for the production of knowledge and the arts. Another type, similarly a compendium of a selection of texts consists of miscel- lany of Persian prose and poetry. This form is also known as jong and may be consid- ered as an assortment of texts that have a particular appeal to the time when the vari- ously dated and composed texts are assembled like a collage of knowledge from dif- ferent eras. Safina also literally refers to a travel book, a record of a journey such as the Safina-ye Solaymani, the Persian travel account of an embassy sent by the Safavid Shah Solayman (r. 1666-94) to the kingdom of Siam (today Thailand).2 This seven- teenth-century Safina denotes both the ship that journeyed to Siam and the travel account, a vehicle for the recording and dissemination of knowledge, in this case of a faraway place.

In the visual realm, Safina is both an anthologised form like a jong where samples of paintings, drawings and calligraphic exercises are brought together in the form of an album, and a particular format for a bound manuscript. As a jong or assembly of beautiful works by celebrated artists, the first references to the form are found from royal commissions datable to the middle of the fifteenth century and most famously in an album of magnificent works of art commissioned by the Safavid prince Bahram Mirza (1517-49) and compiled in 1544-45 by the renowned artist and theorist of Persian arts Dust-Muḥammad (active 1510-1564).3

As a book form, safina-type of a bound manuscript adopts a vertical cut; folios of the manuscript are cut into thin rectangular pieces and are bound on the short side of the sheets. As such, this sort of Safina is oblong in format and opens like a reporter note- book allowing for a different visual experience of the text. Most of these Safina are dedicated to poetic texts—sometimes anthologies of texts representing multiple au- thors, sometimes with paintings, and always with a plethora of illuminated patterns— vegetal, floral, geometric—delicately drawn and painted in inks, pigments and gold, as markers of chapter headings and framing devices. The unusual format of a Safina- type of bound manuscript shifts the orientation of seeing and reading from a horizontal scan of each page to a vertical movement of the eye.

The multivocal and multisensory experiences of Safina as a collection or as a format, offered an extraordinary range of possibilities in both literary and visual experiences. Moving the book and turning the pages from right to left when in a rectangular codex format; lifting the page from bottom to top when an oblong rectangle bound on the short side; the Safina as ship and treasury anthologised works of different poets, authors and artists into interdependent encounters with knowledge. Visual or textual, in the form of books, paintings, drawings, examples of beautiful writing, of poetic pas- sages or full literary genres; the Safina in Persian cultural experience is very much a synthesis of all observations on nature and the Cosmos: from the Divine to the hu- man, from the mystical to the tangible. Ebtekar’s Safina is a conceptual rethinking of the historical Safina. And his wide-eyed and unbounded curiosity about everything we know now and we have learned from our collective pasts is encapsulated, perhaps most compellingly, by the image on the cover of this catalogue. Here is, presumably, the poet Hafiz (1325-1390)—whose Divan (anthology of poems) was assembled in the middle of the sixteenth century into a remarkable manuscript with paintings of which only four survive.4 Hafiz, seemingly intoxicated with the wine of love—love of the Di- vine if we take it in mystical terms, or of a more banal variety if taken in the earth- bound realm of experience—is seen holding one of those anthologies, perhaps of his own poetry, bound in the oblong rectangular format. That Safina and Ebtekar’s Safina seem to meet here.

1. The manuscript was compiled between 1321 and 1323 by Abu'l Majd Muhammad b. Mas'ud Tabrizi; see the forthcoming article by Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab: ‘A Glimpse into the Unique Manuscript, the Safineh from Tabriz’, in Sussan Babaie, editor, Iran After the Mongols, The Idea of Iran Vol. 8 (London, 2019).

2. M. Ismail Marcinkowski, ‘Safine-ye-Solaymani’ in Encyclopaedia Iranica. Accessed 30 October 2018.

3. David J. Roxburgh, ‘Jong’ in Encyclopaedia Iranica. Accessed 30 October 2018.

4. The painting with the detail of the poet’s portrayal is from the manuscript, now shared between the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) and the Harvard Museums of Art (Boston); for the full image and further information, see https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1988.430/.