Essay by Elizabeth Rauh

“We open [Hafiz’s] book and see what happens in our future.” Thus spoke the Afghan poet and diplomat Masood Khalil about the predictive powers of opening a Divan-i Hafiz. Infamously, on September 8th 2001 Khalil read aloud from a printed book of the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz’s poems to his friend, military leader and political activist Ahmed Shah Massoud, a random verse forewarning the two friends would never see each other again. Fulfilling the prophecy of the presaged fal, or divination from written text, the following day Massoud was assassinated by the Taliban.

The art of bibliomancy has been a popular tradition throughout Islamic history and is a continued practice in Muslim and Persian communities today. Besides the Qur’an, one of the most common texts for augury is Hafiz’s collection of Persian-language poems (Divan).1 Artist Ala Ebtekar credits historical and contemporary fal practices for stirring his interest to create a contemporary fal-i Hafiz. Drawing upon everyday rituals around the poetic verses, Ebtekar opened, disassembled, and mounted pages from an 1867 lithograph volume of the Divan-i Hafiz to produce his artwork Coelestis (After Hafiz). The word coelestis stems from the Latin caelum, meaning “heavens” or “sky,” and hints at how bibliomancy offers written insight from the celestial realm and the world of the unseen.

By assembling found pages from a nineteenth-century Divan-i Hafiz into a large-scale artwork, Ebtekar offers the chance for a calligraphic Persian line to randomly strike the viewer’s eye and foretell the future. Celestial heavens are invoked in Coelestis (After Hafiz) through the integration of Islamic manuscript illuminations across the openly displayed and pasted lithograph pages. Underscoring the traditions of falnameh (“book of divination”) manuscripts, Ebtekar added a radiant overlay across the printed texts. Based on traditional decorative designs in Islamic bookbinding and carpet weaving, he applies watercolour pigments, black ink, and gold floriated vines blooming around a starburst mandorla.

The central medallion is awash in an ultramarine blue flecked with white radiances that depict a field of stars lying beyond the painted portal. Conveying the transcendental potential of pre-modern Persian book arts, this illuminated cosmic gateway also points to the historically rich cosmological works by Persian poets and philosophers, including the Sufi poet Hafiz (d. 1390) and the Illuminationist mystic al-Suhrawardi (d. 1191).

Such intimate world-making is a common thread in Ebtekar’s artistic practice with “as-found” texts, whether such texts are drawn from Persian poetry or English sci-fi fantasy novels. Above all, his artwork encourages viewers to look closely at the transcendent structures of global visual and literary practices.

1. See Christiane Gruber, “The ‘Restored’ Shi‘i Mushaf as Divine Guide? The Practice of fal-i Qur’an in the Safavid Period,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 13, no. 2 (2011): 32; Jan Schmidt, “Hafiz and Other Persian Authors in Ottoman Bibliomancy: The Extraordinary Case of Kefevi Huseyn Efendi’s Razname (Late Sixteenth Century),” Persia 21 (2006–2007): 63–74; Hafiz, Matn-i kamil-i fal-i Hafiz ba ma‘ni (Tehran, 1383/2004).

2. See Sara Raza, “Nostalgia for the Future: Ala Ebtekar in Conversation with Sara Raza,” Ibraaz (May 29, 2012).