Framing, Performing, Forgetting: The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin
During her 1881 travels in Iran, Jane Dieulafoy (d. 1916) visited the Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin, a mostly Ilkhanid-period (1256-1353) tomb-shrine of a sixth-generation descendant of Imam Hasan (d. 670), the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson and second Shia Imam.[1] Dieulafoy’s photograph of the emamzadeh (a tomb of a descendant of one of the Twelve Imams) captures its dilapidated entrance portal, a conical structure, and the tomb of the saint at the rear (south) (Figure 1). In her 1887 travelogue La Perse, she described how some of the tomb’s luster (zarrinfam) tilework had been stolen and sold in Tehran, and the site was therefore closed to Christians.[2] She and her husband Marcel Dieulafoy (d. 1920) had been granted special access by Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848-96), and upon arrival at the emamzadeh, were met by a mullah and guards with sticks. Dieulafoy’s portrait of these individuals is mounted next to her general view of the complex in a photography album commemorating her trip (Figure 2).[3]
Figure 1. The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin, Iran, c. 1260-1307, on earlier foundations. Photograph by Jane Dieulafoy, June 1881. Bibliothèque de l’INHA, Paris, 4 Phot 18 (1), p. 65. Courtesy of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art.
Figure 2. A Varamin spread in Jane Dieulafoy’s photography album Perse 1. On the left is the Emamzadeh Shah Hossein, and on the right is the Emamzadeh Yahya (see Figure 1) and a portrait of its guards and a mullah (upper left). Photograph by Keelan Overton, March 2022, with the permission of INHA.
Inside the Emamzadeh Yahya, Dieulafoy photographed the twelve-foot tall luster mihrab (niche directing prayer toward Mecca) and the squinch to its immediate left (Figures 3 and 4). Her photograph of the mihrab is the only known image of it in situ and an invaluable resource for seeing its original configuration and setting. Composed of over sixty luster tiles and including twelve sets of Qur’anic inscriptions, the mihrab is dated Shaban 663/May 1265 and signed by Ali b. Muhammad b. Abi Tahir, a master potter from Kashan. It is perfectly framed by a border of luster half-stars and half-crosses and in turn a large stucco inscription that wraps the entire interior and includes Qur’an 62:1-4, the name of the local ruler-patron Fakhr al-Din Hasan (d. 1308), date of Muharram 707/July 1307, and a hadith (saying attributed to the Prophet) (Figure 5). A screen obscures the lower half of the mihrab, and a number of metal objects resembling votive offerings dangle above. Since some of the tomb’s luster tiles had been stolen by the time of Dieulafoy’s visit, we can assume that the screen protected the mihrab. The dangling ex-votos and metal vases with flared rims mounted on the screen’s corners suggest that it might have also shielded the cenotaph, the empty casket symbolizing the saint’s presence and hence the most sacred feature of the tomb. During the pious visit (ziyarat), believers past and present seek an emotional and physical connection to the deceased via the cenotaph.
Figure 3. The luster mihrab and qibla wall of the Emamzadeh Yahya (left) and the adjacent squinch (right). Photographs by Jane Dieulafoy, 1881. Bibliothèque de l’INHA, Paris, 4 Phot 18 (1), p. 66. Courtesy of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art.
Figure 4. The luster mihrab of the Emamzadeh Yahya, dated Shaban 663/May 1265 and signed by Ali b. Muhammad b. Abi Tahir. Photograph by Jane Dieulafoy, 1881, slightly cropped and contrasted (see Figure 3). Bibliothèque de l’INHA, Paris, 4 Phot 18 (1), p. 66. Courtesy of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art.
Figure 5. The mihrab void from the west side (men’s) of the Emamzadeh Yahya. Photograph by Hamid Abhari, October 2021. Compare to Figure 12 and notice the new screen.
Dieulafoy’s account of the shrine’s protection and photograph of the qibla wall’s furnishings suggest that the tomb was a living sacred space in 1881, despite the poor condition of parts of the complex. Between circa 1860 and 1898, all of the tomb’s luster tilework was stolen, a fate experienced by at least seven other religious sites. The Emamzadeh Yahya’s displaced tiles include the mihrab, preserved in the Honolulu home of Doris Duke (d. 1993) since 1941; the stars and crosses comprising the dado (Figure 6), dispersed across fifty collections worldwide (Figure 7); and the cenotaph, whose top panel naming the deceased is in the Hermitage but which would have been a sizeable box. Only a handful of the tomb’s tiles remain in Iran, but the site lives on as a sacred emamzadeh, neighborhood cemetery (Figure 8), community park, and protected national heritage (registered in 1933).
“In museums worldwide, such fragments are typically hidden in storage, deemed not good enough for display. The prominence of this sole fragment in the tomb versus the anonymity of countless fragments in museum storage invites us to consider display priorities and privileges.”
Figure 6. The stucco epigraphic frieze, dated 707/1307, and dado on the east side (women’s) of the Emamzadeh Yahya. Some replacement underglaze tiles, c. 1890, are visible. Photograph by Keelan Overton, April 2018.
Figure 7. Panel of luster stars and crosses from the Emamzadeh Yahya on view at the entrance of the Jameel Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photograph by Keelan Overton, September 2021.
Figure 8. Courtyard and entrance façade (north) of the Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin. Photograph by Hamid Abhari, October 2021.
Exploring the mihrab as both a physical object (in Honolulu) and its void left behind (in Varamin), this essay considers how it has been framed, performed, and forgotten both at home and abroad and between the field and museum. Interestingly, the first act of forgetting began with Dieulafoy herself. She did not reproduce the mihrab in La Perse, and it is only thanks to INHA’s recent digitization of her photography albums (Perse 1-6) that it can finally be seen and remembered on its original wall. The INHA release underscores the importance of open-access archives for research, and the hyperlinks included here seek to capitalize on additional online resources, including digitized rare books and crowd-based photography in Google Maps.
At some point between 1881 and 1898, the mihrab was stolen from the Emamzadeh Yahya and taken to Paris for the 1900 Exposition Universelle.[4] In Paris, it was seen by the German scholar Friedrich Sarre (d. 1945) and soon reproduced in his Denkmäler Persischer Baukunst (pl. 77). It also earned its own section in the 1911 travelogue of Henry d’Allemagne (d. 1950), who described it as the focus of “pilgrimage” by “amateurs of Oriental art” (vol. 2, p. 130). The following year, Hagop Kevorkian (d. 1962) acquired the mihrab and offered it to Charles Lang Freer (d. 1919), who ultimately passed. In 1931, it was included in the momentous Persian art exhibition in London, where it was literally on a pedestal and figuratively on the block (Figure 9), and in 1938, it was reproduced in the six-volume Survey of Persian Art, further adding to its global fame. In 1940, after struggling for three decades to find a buyer, Kevorkian sold the mihrab to Doris Duke (d. 1993), then twenty-eight years old, for $150,000.[5] It was installed on the most prominent axis of her Hawaiian home known as Shangri La and remained hidden from public view until 2002, when Shangri La opened as a museum.
Figure 9. The Emamzadeh Yahya mihrab on display in the International Exhibition of Persian Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1931. Royal Academy of Arts, 10/4764. ©Royal Academy of Arts, London.
The Emamzadeh Yahya mihrab is famous as one of six surviving luster examples from the medieval period (see Table 1 in this article). The mihrab from the Emamzadeh Ali b. Jafar in Qom is now in Tehran’s Islamic Museum (Figure 10); the two from the tomb of Imam Reza (d. 818) at Mashhad , as well as a third from an adjacent space, are in the shrine’s Central Museum; and the example from the Masjed-e Maydan in Kashan is in Berlin’s Museum of Islamic Art. All of these mihrabs are now isolated works of art in the museum, but they would have been surrounded by other tiles and decoration. The two mihrabs in the tomb of Imam Reza were flanked by a luster frieze of Qur’anic verses that wrapped the room at eye level and capped a dado of luster octagons and stars combined with turquoise bow ties (Figure 11). In the Emamzadeh Yahya, the epigraphic frieze is stucco, and the dado below was comprised of luster stars and crosses alone.
Figure 10. Mihrabs on view in the Islamic Museum, Tehran. On the right is the luster mihrab from the Emamzadeh Ali b. Jafar at Qom, dated 1 Ramadan 734/5 May 1334 and signed by Yusuf b. Ali b. Muhammad b. Abi Tahir. Photograph by Keelan Overton, 2016.
Figure 11. Luster tilework in situ in the tomb of Imam Reza, Shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad. Visible is the mihrab dated Rabi II 612/August 1215 and signed by Abu Zayd and Muhammad b. Abi Tahir. Photograph by Stephen H. Nyman, 1937. Courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, W687813_1.
Field versus Museum
During my visit to the Emamzadeh Yahya in April 2018, the mihrab void was filled with a number of signs (Figure 12). The most prominent was a large genealogy of Emamzadeh Yahya, and the most practical were arrows that served the same function as the mihrab (indicating the qibla) while slightly correcting it. The genealogy was flanked by a collage of images visible on either side of the gender-segregated space (Figure 13). On top were two prints from Dieulafoy’s La Perse, including her general view of the Emamzadeh Yahya.[6] Below were two photographs of the tomb’s tiles on display in the Hermitage, one of which captures a man photographing the top panel of the cenotaph while the photographer seems to point toward it. The memory of the luster was reinforced by a tiny fragment of a cross remounted at the top of the void (Figure 14). In museums worldwide, such fragments are typically hidden in storage, deemed not good enough for display. The prominence of this sole fragment in the tomb versus the anonymity of countless fragments in museum storage invites us to consider display priorities and privileges.
Figure 12. The curation of the mihrab void in the Emamzadeh Yahya. Photograph by Keelan Overton, April 2018. These signs have since been removed (compare to Figure 5).
Figure 13. Detail of the collage in the mihrab void (see Figure 12). Photograph by Keelan Overton, April 2018.
Figure 14. A tip of a luster cross remounted at the top of the mihrab void. Visible above are imprints of luster half-stars and half-crosses that once framed the mihrab (see Figure 4). Photograph by Hamid Abhari, October 2021.
“If a London museumgoer only sees the original building as abandoned, the next thought might be: well, thank goodness its tiles are preserved here.”
While nothing could replace the exceptional luster mihrab, this curation of the void was a refreshingly local response to the elephant in the room—the missing tiles—and the shrine’s global resonance and consumption from 1880s France to contemporary Russia. The individuals responsible for this curation were far from the first or last to leave their mark in the tomb. Among the most fascinating responses are the graffitos (mementos, or yadegari) written in minute black script on some of the letters of the stucco frieze. These inscriptions within an inscription are a rich collection of prayers and poems and yet another way in which the walls ‘speak.’
Whereas the mihrab in absentia can retain its essential function, the cenotaph must exist in three dimensions. The current example is bathed in a hue of green light, covered in black fabric and devotional items, and enclosed in a pierced screen (zarih), a configuration common in many Iranian Twelver Shia tombs, whether urban shrines or rural emamzadehs (Figures 15 and 16). The hexagonal zarih sits in the center of the chamber, and the believer leans against it, expresses her wishes to the saint, and may offer paper bills. Afterwards, she might move into the carpeted ambulatory, turn toward the mihrab void, and conduct her prayers and prostrations, placing her forehead on the clay tablets (mohr) of Karbala. For the performance of prayer toward Mecca, the mihrab need not be physically present. For the performance of devotion toward Emamzadeh Yahya, the cenotaph must exist but not necessarily in the form of medieval luster tiles. While the cenotaph-screen is the holiest part of an Iranian tomb, it is the mihrab that is often fetishized in museums as the exemplar of Muslim piety. The resulting narrative is simplistic at best and often at the expense of the veneration of holy figures central to Twelver Shiism.
Figure 15. Looking through the zarih into the current cenotaph of Emamzadeh Yahya. Photograph by Keelan Overton, April 2018.
Figure 16. View upon entering the Emamzadeh Yahya, looking south. Directly in front is the screen dividing the space by gender. Still of a video by Hamid Abhari, October 2021.
On any given day in the Emamzadeh Yahya, one might observe believers pressed against the zarih, praying toward the mihrab void, or just resting against the bolsters lining the dado. Outside in the courtyard, residents may sit quietly next to the graves of their loved ones (see Figure 8). During holidays, the tomb is cloaked in appropriate fabrics (see Figures 7, 8, 13, 21 of this article) and the courtyard filled with the sounds and smells of ritual. Such performances of piety, devotion, and community are tangible to many regardless of religion or religiosity but rarely communicated to audiences outside of Iran. On MIT’s Archnet, a site familiar to Iran-based audiences, the Emamzadeh Yahya is described as a “naked tomb shrine” and “victim of over one hundred years of looting,” and two of the three photos, dated 1960 and 1984, capture the tomb in a decrepit state. A similar image is included in a loop of photographs of source buildings in the British Museum’s display of tiles from Iran and Central Asia (Figures 17 and 18). While this photograph is an accurate record of the façade roughly four decades ago, it does not reflect its current dressing in lights, flags, and many other signs of use and may inadvertently perpetuate savior complex. If a London museumgoer only sees the original building as abandoned, the next thought might be: well, thank goodness its tiles are preserved here.
Figure 17. Luster stars and crosses from the Emamzadeh Yahya (lower left) on view in “Architectural Tiles from Iran and Central Asia,” Albukhary Foundation Gallery, British Museum, London. Photograph by Keelan Overton, September 2021. The monitor on the right shows photographs of the source buildings.
Figure 18. The photograph of the Emamzadeh Yahya in the British Museum display (see Figure 17). The video overlays one of the tomb’s luster stars, visible in reflection in the upper left of this photograph. Photograph by Keelan Overton, September 2021.
This might have been the mindset of a visitor to Shangri La in August 2018, whose portrait is one of the first images that comes up when one googles “Shangri La mihrab.” A comparison of this photograph to the one of the Hermitage cenotaph panel in the mihrab void (see Figure 13) underscores profound differences in the museum pilgrimage and memorialization. Taking one’s photo in relation to a museumized mihrab or cenotaph is not an inherently bad or disrespectful exercise, but the photograph can move from the benign and documentary to the problematic depending on the object’s location and the photographer’s positionality. Your reaction to the blogger’s portrait may be shaped by her accompanying text: “An Australian on our tour asked if having the mihrab was offensive to Muslims or Middle Easterners. The tour guide said the museum is sensitive to that, but the usual reaction is one of happiness and acknowledgement that if it had remained in Iran, it probably would have been destroyed.” While we will never know what would have happened to the mihrab had it stayed in Iran, we do know this: four of the six surviving luster mihrabs were transferred to Iranian museums, and medieval luster tilework can be appreciated in over twenty Iranian museums. Moreover, of the thirty-six Iranian sites once decorated with this revetment, twenty-five are still standing (about 70 percent), according to Hossein Nakhaei.
Like many Iranian tombs, the Emamzadeh Yahya has experienced several stages of care and repair over the centuries. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the tomb’s dado was clad in new underglaze tiles (see Figures 5-6), the entrance portal and conical tower were demolished, and the tomb was ringed by a new perimeter of lower domed rooms and ayvans (vaults open on one side) and set in the middle of a rectangular courtyard. Under the Islamic Republic (1979-present), the emamzadeh has received new features like the entrance gate and current zarih and been the focus of urban renewal and at least two stages of conservation (early 1980s and as we speak). As with any living religious monument in Iran, negotiations between the shrine’s many stakeholders—pious users, residents, conservators, the cultural heritage office, waqf authority—can be complex.
Artistic Response
In 2021-2022, the Emamzadeh Yahya’s mihrab appeared in several performances in 8 x 8, an online exhibition of Hawaii-based artists responding to the “concept of place” and “theme of connection” at Shangri La. In Kilo (2021), multi-disciplinary artist Nawahineokalai Lanzilotti performs a somber piece on the cello in the Mihrab Hallway. In an accompanying podcast, she acknowledges being “daunted by the history and the sacredness” of the mihrab and states her desire to move beyond it as “a dazzling piece, a backdrop” and reactivate its “displaced text.” The mihrab’s Qur’anic verses are not mentioned or filmed in a way that facilitates their reading, however, and the discussion of its place-ness centers on the fact that it does not face Mecca. This fact is deemed “a desecration” by Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio in her three-minute poem “A Call to Prayer” (2022) and a “violent misdirection” in her accompanying statement.
Countless mihrabs in Iranian and global museums don’t face Mecca, and the performers’ emphasis on orientation obscures the far bigger “desecration” at hand: the complete plunder of the Emamzadeh Yahya’s tilework. A similar degree of distraction typifies the interpretation of the tiles that once comprised the Qur’anic frieze wrapping the tomb of the Sufi saint Shaykh Abd al-Samad (d. 1299) at Natanz, a contemporary Ilkhanid-period shrine also looted during the second half of the nineteenth century. Many museum labels emphasize how the birds decorating the frieze tiles were “chipped” or “beheaded” during a personal act of iconoclasm. This emphasis on bird heads the size of a dime evades the systematic looting of the tomb’s luster tilework—not just the frieze but also the dado and mihrab (now broken up) (Figure 19, Video 1). Today, Shaykh Abd al-Samad’s tomb is dead as a sacred space, but its unplastered walls remain very much alive as visceral reminders of its vandalism and critical guides to its reconstruction.
Figure 19. Imprints of the luster tilework (mihrab, epigraphic frieze, dado) that once decorated the tomb of Shaykh Abd al-Samad at Natanz, 707/1307-8. Compare to Figure 11. Photograph by Keelan Overton, 2016.
The Shangri La 8 x 8 performances must be appreciated on their own terms (a local project of engagement during a global pandemic), but they raise a number of important questions. What is at stake when an architectural element’s life abroad eclipses its centuries of existence in its original building? In the case of the Emamzadeh Yahya’s mihrab, we are dealing with forty years on the market and eighty years in Shangri La versus over six hundred years in Varamin. While Osorio acknowledges the mihrab’s “certain plunder” and “un-consenting company,” she frames it through Hawaiian sacred concepts, consumes it in the islands’ painful history, and ultimately renders it place-less. “A Call to Prayer” inspires many to remember Hawaii’s brutal colonization and sacred culture, but the mihrab’s own religious context and the Emamzadeh Yahya are forgotten in the process. If the tables were turned, if an Iranian artist used a Hawaiian sacred object (say, a healer stone) in a Tehran museum as a springboard to express her Iranian identity, resulting in the erasure of its Hawaiian-ness, how would this be received?
The Shangri La performances inspire us to consider Iran-based responses to its displaced heritage. A fruitful comparison is Abbas Akbari’s take on the 623/1226 luster mihrab once in Kashan’s Masjed-e Maydan and now in Berlin. A potter and professor based in Kashan, Akbari’s creative process entailed not just making a new luster mihrab but also producing a thirteen-minute educational film. “An Oriental Devotion” opens with him walking through the mosque and ultimately zooms in on “The Vacant Site of Mihrab” (see 1:31), a large white void next to a tiled minbar (pulpit). The film then shows his making of the piece and concludes with its installation in Tehran’s Aun Gallery while Dr. Ata Omidvar recites the azan (call to prayer). Like the Shangri La performances, Akbari is interested in the relationship between sound and materiality and flows between the sacred and profane, but the end result is a Kashani response to a Kashani loss and a careful acknowledgement of the source building.
“When it comes to time, we must ultimately ask: When does a building’s history supposedly end, who decides, and how can we better engage with the present?”
Alternative Museology
In the age of ongoing reckonings with museum collections and narratives of all kinds, many institutions and platforms, including this one, are rethinking how to present architectural sites to the public. It is one thing to write histories of sites that are in ruins and preserved mainly as tourist attractions, but it is an altogether different challenge to study living sacred spaces that are dear to many and have been used and abused by more. In addition to expanding our visual repertoire to include videos and 3D modeling, it is critical to date our photographs and move beyond the singular façade shot. In doing so, we keep pace with the personal photographs shared on outlets like Google Maps, capture buildings as evolving works in progress, and avoid freezing them in the Orientalist cliché of the historical ruin. When it comes to time, we must ultimately ask: When does a building’s history supposedly end, who decides, and how can we better engage with the present?
These questions and methods are at the heart of a virtual exhibition in progress devoted to the Emamzadeh Yahya. Among the goals of this interdisciplinary project are to share knowledge of the shrine across audiences, balance the prevailing emphasis on its museumized tiles with the site itself, explore it as an Ilkhanid monument and a living emamzadeh, and trace its evolution from about 1860 to the present through crowd-sourced photography and oral histories, thereby expanding voices and perspectives. Why frame this as a virtual exhibition? The online interface is theoretically more accessible to global audiences, skirts the potential limitations and conflicts of interest of the physical museum, enables the constant updating and uploading of content, and will hopefully facilitate an interactive appreciation of an ever-evolving shrine.
Acknowledgments: I am indebted to Thomas Galifot for directing me to Dieulafoy’s albums in INHA and sincerely thank Farshid Emami, Peyvand Firouzeh, Amir-Hossein Karimy, Arash Khazeni, and Sepideh Parsapajouh for feedback on drafts. Thanks also to Hamid Abhari, INHA, Harvard, and the Royal Academy for kindly sharing images and to the many who offered anonymous opinions.
Notes
[1] Scholarship on the Emamzadeh Yahya cited here includes Tomoko Masuya, “Persian tiles on European walls: Collecting Ilkhanid tiles in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Ars Orientalis 30 (2000): 39-54; Sheila Blair, “Art as Text: The Luster Mihrab in the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art,” in No Tapping around Philology: A Festschrift in Honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70th Birthday, ed. Alireza Korangy and Daniel J. Sheffield, 407-436 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014); Sheila Blair, “Architecture as a Source for Local History in the Mongol Period: The Example of Warāmīn,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 26, 1-2 (January 2016): 215-228; and Keelan Overton and Kimia Maleki, “The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin: A Present History of a Living Shrine, 2018-20,” Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World 1, no. 1-2 (2020): 120-149.
[2] Jane Dieulafoy, La Perse, la Chaldée et la Susiane: relation de voyage (Paris: Hachette, 1887), 148.
[3] My article on Dieulafoy’s week-long sojourn in Varamin is forthcoming: “Jane Dieulafoy in Varamin: Ilkhanid Architecture between the Text and Photograph, Ruin and Reality.”
[4] Detailed discussions of the site’s different waves of looting and complicit actors are forthcoming. For background, see Masuya and Overton and Maleki.
[5] Blair, “Art as Text,” 417.
[6] The second print (upper left) depicts the mihrab in the Emamzadeh Shah Hossein (see Figure 2).
Citation
Keelan Overton, “Framing, Performing, Forgetting: The Emamzadeh Yahya at Varamin,” PLATFORM, September 19, 2022.
