Allegory in the Islamic Mystical Art and Its Effect on the "Salaman & Absal" Painting of Jamie`s "Haft Awrang"

his article tries to investigate the concept and usage of "Allegory" in Islamic mysticism, literature and art. Art is a vise way to represent the meaning and what are not tangible, which is used by a mystic or an artist. They choose an allegorical language to represent what they have figured out intuitively.Jami has written the poetry of "Salaman & Absal". He chose such allegorical story to convey the mystical and theosophical meanings. About a century later an Iranian painter illustrated the image of Salaman & Absal`s poetry. The relevance of the thoughts of the mystics in the poems and the artists’ work, also the importance of allegory in Islamic mysticism and art, persuaded this research to study the illustrator of the "Salaman & Absal on the heavenly Isle". It may let us know how the illustrator has used allegory in painting this image. The questions of this article are:
•What is the role and sign of using allegory in the Salaman & Absal paining?
•What is the role of allegory in the thoughts of Jamie as the poet and the creator of the Salaman & Absal painting?
•Which elements explain the Salaman & Absal painting as an allegorical artwork and which ones explain the main relation with the original story?
"Mysticism" is an intuitive divine and "art" is the materialistic form of the intuitive divines. Mysticism is inspired to enunciate it`s essence and is conveyed through allegory. Imagination function is to diminish denotations from the upper world to sense configurations. Since the revelations of Sufism are further than logical language, there is no language to convey the meaning directly. So, they try to explain their revelations. In Islamic art, in order to achieve the vision stature, an artist should pass the levels of mysticism that a Sufi should pass. Sufi`s opinion on art had an instrumental essence to convey the denotations. The artist who tries to re-present and convey the denotations, shall be familiar with fundamentals of though, conventional principles and common regulations of this realm. Sometimes a speaker or a writer says his thoughts and words undercover and use secret and allegory.
A poet had been used allegory whenever he tried to present a poetry which contained complicated meanings. In this way, although it was hard to conceive it`s mystic meanings, it would be accepted by the public as a comprehensible story. It is assumed that the painter of "Salaman & Absal" was aware of the allegorical thought of the "Salaman & Absal" poetry, so he also used allegorical elements to illustrate the poetry. Several books and articles have been published about "allegory" which most of them explain "allegory" in literature and logics. It is hard to find a text which be perused about "allegory" and its effects on visual arts, especially iranian-islamic painting. It is tried in this article to consider all facts and thoughts which have been perused about "allegory" in past and use them to peruse one specific painting to find the effects of allegorical thought in it.