Gifts that travelled

This lesson asks you to assess the broad significance of historic cultural developments and the influence of one culture’s art on the art of others. The museum offers two cases: the arrival of coffee in Damascus, and the spread of manuscript illumination from Arab calligraphers to Iran, Turkey and India. Developments of other groups, such as those the curriculum lists, are for your class to add. ¹

For each case ask who welcomed the thing, who opposed it, and what the receivers added.

Read one proclamation closely. The record of Coffee abolished at Damascus says that the judge of Damascus, Shams al-Din Muhammad ibn Abd al-Awwal al-Ja'fari al-Tabrizi, agreed with Shaykh Qutb al-Din ibn Sultan and Shaykh Yunus al-'Aythawi that coffee is forbidden ². He proclaimed its prohibition, and then presented the prohibition to Sultan Suleiman, whose order to ban it came in Shawwal 953 AH, and the proclamation was made widely known ². Put the steps in order: the opinion of two shaykhs, the judge's proclamation, the appeal to the sultan, the sultan's order, and the crier's cry through the city. The record gives no reasons for the opinion and no words of the order itself, so a reader must ask what else would be needed to know why it was forbidden.

Coffee met more than one reception in Damascus. The record says it had appeared about twelve years earlier, when Shaykh Sa'd al-Din ibn Iraq made its drinking known during his stay there, and from that time its shops multiplied ³. His father had been among those who denounced it ³. The first permission did not last long before it met formal jurisprudential opposition that ended in the sultanic order, before the matter later settled on its permission ³. The record names the jurists who forbade it and the shaykh who made it known, and gives the opinions as theirs; it does not say what arguments either side made.

Both cases of this lesson rest on a single author's account. The coffee ban is reported from one passage, pages 337 to 338 of Shadharat al-Dhahab by Ibn al-Imad al-Hanbali, and the record says only what that passage says ³. Illumination is reported from Norah Titley's catalogue of the British Library collections: it is Titley who traces its origin to the decoration of vowel marks and verse-dividing circles in the Qur'ans of Arab calligraphers, and Titley who derives the arabesque from square Kufic ⁴. The route she gives, from Tabriz to India under Humayun and to Istanbul after 1514, is hers too ⁵.

The record says the first permission of coffee in Damascus ended in a sultanic order, before the matter later settled on its permission ³. Does an official ban show how a society received a new thing, or only how its officials did? Take a position: how would you answer the objection that the shops multiplied before the order?

• Coffee abolished at Damascus: who agreed, who proclaimed and who ordered, as the chronicle gives it.
• Manuscript illumination (tadhhib): how the art passed from Arab calligraphers to the academies of Shiraz and Herat, then to Tabriz, India and Istanbul, as Titley tells it.

Read Coffee abolished at Damascus and Manuscript illumination. Write two sentences on each: what arrived, and what changed.