An impressive Qajar woven silk panel for Ashura day celebrations

Persia, circa 1860

Footnotes

Provenance
Private UK collection, acquired by the vendor's father-in-law, Bosworth Monck, in Mashad in 1933.

Bosworth Monck acquired the present lot whist travelling by car from Lebanon to India in 1933. The purchase is recorded in a letter written to his wife from the British Consulate in Mashad on the 1st of December 1933, where it is referred to as 'a sixteenth Century silk of Maohmet'.

Inscriptions: in the small cartouches, 'O Aba 'Abdullah al-Husayn!'; in the top long cartouches, a couplet in Arabic attributed to Imam Husayn on being denied water for his son; in the lower long cartouches, two Persian couplets from a tarkib-band of Muhtasham Kashani (d. 1588) on the events in Karbala and being denied water by Kufians.

Muhtasham Kashani (d. AH 996/ AD 1587-8) was known for his poetry on Shi'a themes (Rypka, J., History of Iranian Literature, Dordrecht, 1968, p. 298). His most famous work, an elegy on the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn, remains one of the best-known classical poems to the present day. Verses from this poem are often found on textiles displayed during Muharram ceremonies, such as on a Qajar standard sold in these rooms (see Bonhams, Islamic and Indian Art, 29 March 2022, lot 141). These textiles were produced for Ashura, which occurs annually on the tenth day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar. It is commemorated by Shi'a Muslims as a day of mourning for the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at Karbala in AH 61. The Battle of Karbala (AH 61/ AD 680) was fought between an army sent by the Umayyad caliph, Yazid I, and a small party led by Husayn ibn Ali, resulting in the defeat and massacre of the majority of Husayn's family and followers.

The present panel is a rare example of a 19th century textile depicting Imam Husayn. He is portrayed mounted on horseback. His stead, Zuljanah, was famously white, as seen in the previous lot in this sale (lot 92). The use of brown in the present lot therefore marks an interesting departure from typical representations. Curiously, when conservation was carried out on the textile a number of years ago, some threads above the shield were unpicked to reveal the figure of a child. This child must represent Ali al-Asghar ibn Husayn, the youngest son of Husayn. Often depicted in devotional art, on the day of Ashura, Imam Husayn took the child from his camp to ask the enemy to show mercy and give them water, whereupon the child was shot with an arrow. In this moment, Husayn is unarmed as he leaves the camp, however in the present panel he is depicted with a shield and spear, indicating that our image may represent an amalgamation of moments from the Battle of Karbala.

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