Among the holdings endowed to the shrine of Imam Reza by Hājj Hoseyn Āqā Malek is a slim calligraphic album, the Pandnāma-yi Luqmān Hakīm jahat-i farzand (Counsels of Luqman the Sage to His Son), now in the Malek National Library and Museum in Tehran. Its lines were written by Mīr ʿImād al-Hasanī Sayfī Qazvīnī, which places the album in Safavid Iran, in the late sixteenth or seventeenth century.
Mīr ʿImād and the Safavid Art of the Written Line
In Safavid Iran the written line carried the prestige that painting held elsewhere, and Mīr ʿImād stands at the center of that tradition. Later connoisseurs treated his nastaʿlīq as the standard against which every other hand was measured, and sheets bearing his name were collected, mounted, and bound into albums long after his death.
Khatāʾī Flowers and Figures Between the Lines
Every page is illuminated, its surface worked with khatāʾī floral motifs — a manner the album’s modern editors associate with the school of Tabriz, though the attribution rests on no published study. More unusual are the outlined siyāh-qalam drawings of men and women set between the lines of text, reported on eight pages, where the ornament gives way to figures.
The Counsels of Luqman
The text belongs to the Persian literature of andarz, moral counsel transmitted from father to son. It is organized around three measures a person must learn to take: the worth of God’s blessings, the worth of created beings, and the worth of oneself. Advice meant to be remembered was here given a form meant to be looked at.
We have 1 facsimile edition of the manuscript "Counsels of Luqman the Sage to His Son": Pandnāma-yi Luqmān Hakīm facsimile edition, published by Matn Publications, 2009
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