Geballe Prize Winner 2020 | Essay, Arman Kassam

Stanford University
Of Watery Words and Hidden Meanings: Thinking of a Safavid Magic Bowl as an Object of
Mimesis and Innovation
Arman Kassam, class of 2022
Submission for the Geballe Prize, category: essay
History / Art History 202B: Coffee, Sugar, and Chocolate: Commodities and Consumption in
World History, 1200-1800 – Winter 2020
Professor Paula Findlen
18 March 2020

1
Of all the European accounts of the Safavid Empire, the writings of the Huguenot jeweler
Jean Chardin might just be our best window into everyday life in the Empire. Having traveled
extensively throughout modern-day Iran as a royal merchant to Shah Abbas II, Chardin
eventually settled in England in the late 1680’s and began compiling his Voyages, an
embellished record of his life abroad. 1 In one English translation of this record, Chardin
mentions something peculiar about the religious customs of the Safavids: “They believe that all
Men’s Prayers are good and prevalent; therefore, in their illnesses, and in other Wants, they
admit of, and even [use] the Prayers of different Religions: I have seen it practis’d a Thousand
Times.” 2 We should be careful not to take his claims of religious plurality – something he’s seen
“a Thousand Times” – at face-value, but Chardin still captures the spirit of religious life in
Safavid Persia as it intersected with popular medicine. In times of grave illness or epidemic,
Turk and Tajik alike found recourse in a diversity of religious remedies. One such remedy is
connected to an inconspicuous artifact in Stanford University’s Cantor Center: an earthenware
bowl with astrological designs and encircling script, dated to sixteenth-century Persia (fig. 1, fig.
2, fig. 3). This item likely belonged to a magic bowl culture that facilitated spiritual blessings for
the ailing and sinful. Today, these bowls are disproportionately represented by ornately
engraved, prestigious metal objects that belonged to only a minority of political and merchant
elites. The Cantor Center holds what may be one of the few existing Islamic magic bowls that
was crafted from unglazed clay and, by extension, one of the few surviving bowls that likely
belonged to a non-elite milieu. This paper attempts to situate this novel artifact in the history of
1
John Emerson, “Chardin, Sir John,” in Encyclopedia Iranica (Encyclopedia Iranica Foundation, October 13, 2011),
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/chardin-sir-john.
2
John Chardin, Sir John Chardin’s Travels in Persia, ed. Edmund Lloyd, N. M. Penzer, and Percy Sykes (London:
Argonaut Press, 1927), 185–86, https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.169543/2015.169543.Sir-John-Chardins-
Travels-In-Persia_djvu.txt.

2
magic bowls and argues that this bowl presents two distinct processes: popularization and
transformation. This bowl shows that the magic-medicinal culture of Safavid Persia diffused
across multiple strata of society and that, upon diffusion, non-elite communities reimagined the
spiritual practices associated with this bowl’s magic. Tied to this otherwise nondescript artifact,
quietly sitting on a shelf in the Cantor Center, is a story of mimesis and a story of innovation.
A Brief History of Islamic Magic Bowls
Magic bowls do not factor into a typical history of Islamic medicine. Traditional
narratives emphasize the Hellenistic influences that became the cornerstones of medical
erudition in madrasahs, formal schools for physicians. 3 The Galenist understanding which
mainstream scholars like Avicenna and Ibn Ridwān subscribed to guided practitioners to think of
their patients on scales of heat and cold, dryness and moistness. Remedies were composed in
response to the humoral makeup of an individual and their respective illness. “Hot” diseases
could be cured with “cold” remedies, “dry” ailments could be treated with an equal and opposite
dose of “moist” medicine, and so forth. 4 Around the twelfth century, another school of medical
thought began to challenge Galenism; proponents of Prophetic medicine argued that cures to
worldly diseases could be found in the holy texts of Islam, the Qur’an and the Hadith, and not in
the materia medica of the Greeks. This tension between the “professional” Greek study of
medicine and Prophetic knowledge has functioned as the traditional framework for thinking
about medical practice in the Islamic world. 5 However, these dominant narratives essentialize a
3
Michael W. Dols and Ibn Ridwān, Medieval Islamic Medicine: Ibn Ridwān’s Treatise “On the Prevention of
Bodily Ills in Egypt” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 4.
4
Dols and Ibn Ridwān, 15.
5
Andrew J. Newman, “Baqir Al-Majlisī and Islamicate Medicine: Safavid Medical Theory and Practice Re-
Examined,” in Society and Culture in the Early Modern Middle East: Studies on Iran in the Safavid Period (Leiden:
Brill, 2003), 375.

3
dichotomy between two systems of knowledge that likely coexisted. 6 Furthermore, this
framework misses the nearly ubiquitous presence of folklore, thaumaturgy, and popular religion
in everyday medical practice. These magical techniques varied from astrology to numerical
squares to incantations, often times invoking “God’s general beneficence,” seeking his
intervention in everything from dealing with shaytāns (demons) to curing disease. 7 These
practices also interwove themselves with Galenism and Prophetic medicine, making it difficult to
discern where orthodoxy ends and heterodoxy begins. The canon Shi’a text Tibb al-a’Immah
refers several times to Quranic verses written in ink on paper, washed with water, and then
consumed to ameliorate sin. 8 Physicians like Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyah (d. 1350), a Hanbali judge
of Damascus, defended writing on talismans as a cure for fever, nosebleeds, and toothaches. 9 Ibn
Ridwān, himself an adherent to Galenism, defended the use of astrology for diagnosis and
prognosis. 10 Contrary to essentialist narratives of Islamic medicine, medical practice from the
Abbasid Caliphate of the eighth century to the Safavids of the sixteenth developed discursively
between multiple domains of knowledge – Galenist, Prophetic, and thaumaturgical.
The twelfth-century ruler of Syria Nur al-Din ibn Zangi was no exception to this medical
pluralism. He both established a famed bimaristan (hospital) that was run according to Galenist
principles and commissioned the earliest known magic bowl in 1167. 11 The ruler subsequently
6
Justin Stearns, “Writing the History of the Natural Sciences in the Pre-Modern Muslim World: Historiography,
Religion, and the Importance of the Early Modern Period: Natural Science in the Pre-Modern Muslim World,”
History Compass 9, no. 12 (December 2011): 925, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00810.x.
7
Peter E. Pormann and Emilie Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007), 144–45.
8
Emilie Savage-Smith, “Magic-Medicinal Bowls,” in Science, Tools & Magic, Part 1, ed. Julian Raby, vol. 12, n.d.,
72.
9
Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 150.
10
Emilie Savage-Smith, “Medicine,” in Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science: Technology, Alchemy and
Life Sciences, ed. Rushdī Rāshid and Régis Morelon, Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science (London:
Routledge, 1996), 954–55.
11
Savage-Smith, “Magic-Medicinal Bowls,” 73.

4
commissioned a series of other bowls, one of which is currently housed in the Metropolitan
Museum in New York (fig. 4). Suras (verses) from the Qur’an decorate the interior of this bronze
vessel while an exterior encircling script offers us a glimpse into the diseases it treated:
This blessed cup is for every poison. In it have been gathered proven uses, and these are
for the sting of serpent, scorpion and fever, for a woman in labor, the abdominal pain of a
horse caused by eating earth, and the [bites of] a rabid dog, for abdominal pain and colic,
for migraine and throbbing pain, for hepatic and splenic fever, for [increasing] strength,
for [stopping] hemorrhage, for chest pain, for the eye and vision [or evil eye], for
ophthalmia and catarrh, for riyāh al-shawkah [An ulcerated skin disorder or stinging
effects of sand-laden winds], for [driving out] spirits, for releasing the bewitched, and for
all diseases and afflictions. [If] one drinks water or oil or milk from it, then they will be
cured, by the help of God Almighty. 12
The script guides the bowl’s users to treat all afflictions as opposed to specific diseases, thus
presenting the bowl less as a conditional remedy (like those found in Galenism) and more as a
panacea. 13 This breadth of treatment reflects the spiritual logic by which these bowls functioned:
barakah, a divine blessing “from objects associated with [the Prophet or saints].” 14 Normally, a
cleric would recite a passage from the Qur’an over a magic bowl inlaid with script. The barakah
of the Qur’an, tapped into by the spoken and written word, would then transfer to the fluid inside
the bowl. A patient, or in some cases a proxy, would consume this sacred liquid either by
ingestion or ablution. 15 These spiritual practices resonate with a panoply of deeply rooted Islamic
traditions: the ingestion of scripture, the orality of recitation, and the sacrality of water, among
others. Finbarr Barry Flood has suggested that participation in the bowl ritual resulted in an
12
Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 152. The Met’s file on this object can be accessed here:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/642251. Accession number: MTW 1443.
13
I contend that compared to other medicine of the day, these bowls functioned similar to panaceas, but Savage-
Smith and Pormann also importantly note that bowls from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries disproportionately
specify that they treat snakebites and scorpion stings. A sub-section of these bowls have also been classified as
“poison cups.” Pormann and Savage-Smith, 153.
14
Finbarr Barry Flood, “Bodies and Becoming: Mimesis, Mediation, and the Ingestion of the Sacred in Christianity
and Islam,” in Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, ed. Sally M. Promey (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2014), 461.
15
Flood, 477; H. Henry Spoer, “Arabic Magic Medicinal Bowls,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 55, no.
3 (September 1935): 256, https://doi.org/10.2307/594826.

5
“ontological collapse” for the participant; drinking the barakah issued forth from the Qur’an was
a fusion of the self with the holy through the sensuality of ingestion. 16 Flood has also claimed
that these rituals stood somewhere in between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between the
“juridically sanctioned practices of ingesting sacred texts” and the “more popular practices of
consuming images and texts for prophylactic or therapeutic purposes.” 17 Flood’s apt analysis
crucially demonstrates that these bowls were a prominent way of rooting the divine in the
corporeal. Comparable examples to this phenomenon can be drawn from across the globe,
including the spices incorporated in European medieval liturgy and the sacred chocolate imbibed
during Aztec ceremonies. 18 In each of these cases, a sensual consumable bridged the sacred and
the profane. Barakah, therefore, was just as much about the body as it was about the ungraspable
holiness tied to the sacred text.
While all magic bowls follow this logic of rooting the sacred in the profane, the bowls
created after the fifteenth century in Safavid Persia and Ottoman Turkey substantially deviated
from their Egyptian and Syrian predecessors. Of nineteen magic bowls that can be traced back to
Safavid Persia, nearly all of them differ from their antecedents by not bearing exterior directions,
featuring central bosses (fig. 5), and emphasizing the script of the Qur’an. 19 Emilie Savage-Smith
has contended that these changes reflect a movement away from “pre-Islamic symbols” found in
the twelfth century and towards a more rigid orthodoxy, though in Hunt for Paradise she later
identifies three different categories of Safavid magic bowls that attest to the still-prevalent
16
Flood, “Bodies and Becoming: Mimesis, Mediation, and the Ingestion of the Sacred in Christianity and Islam,”
482.
17
Flood, 478.
18
M. Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane, Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Cornell
University Press, 2008); P. Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (Yale University Press,
2008).
19
Emilie Savage-Smith, “Safavid Magic Bowls,” in Hunt for Paradise: Court Arts of Safavid Iran, 1505–1576
(Milan: Skira, 2003), 241; Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 153. Shi’i verses can also be
found on some bowls – a characteristic that helps identify Safavid origins.

6
influence of folklore: bowls with magic numbers and letters, bowls with zodiacs, and bowls with
magic squares. 20 In fact, despite the rise of strict Prophetic medicine and the suppression of
Sufism and other subaltern sects, thaumaturgy proliferated throughout Safavid Persia. 21 On one
hand, practices including illuminationist doctrine and gnosis acquired legitimacy after being
shepherded into the fold of Shi’ism. 22 On the other hand, the Safavid Empire sustained itself
through contractual obligations that permitted regional differences in belief. Andrew J. Newman
notes, for example, that “considerable political autonomy at the central and provincial level was
the norm and individual discourse, especially of the broadly construed ‘cultural’ nature – artistic
and religious, for example – however discordant, was tolerated.” 23 We also find that rulers like
Shah Abbas (1571 – 1629) made concessions to popular religion, especially in terms of
Muharram ceremonies that melded sanctioned devotion with folklore. 24 In short, magic bowls
found room to flourish in Safavid Persia in part because of a heterogeneous spiritual landscape
and official laxity towards thaumaturgy.
Diffusion across Strata: A Story of Mimesis
The Cantor Center’s earthenware bowl exemplifies this prevalence of magic in Safavid
Persia and coincides with aesthetic changes found on other Safavid bowls, but this artifact also
challenges our understanding of how far and by what routes its material culture disseminated.
20
Pormann and Savage-Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 153; Savage-Smith, “Magic-Medicinal Bowls,” 78;
Savage-Smith, “Safavid Magic Bowls,” 241.
21
Hossein Nasr, “Religion in Safavid Persia,” Iranian Studies 7, no. 1–2 (March 1974): 272,
https://doi.org/10.1080/00210867408701466.
22
Nasr, 272.
23
Andrew J. Newman, Safavid Iran: Rebirth of a Persian Empire, Library of Middle East History (London:
Bloomsbury, 2006), 8.
24
Jean Calmard, “Shi’i Rituals and Power II. The Consolidation of Safavid Shi’ism: Folklore and Popular Religion,”
in Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society, ed. C. P. Melville (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996),
143.

7
Like other Safavid bowls, this one does not feature exterior directions and emphasizes what are
presumably suras from the Qur’an. It fits into the evolution of bowls already mapped out by
Savage-Smith, but its earthenware composition and crude design betrays its creation and
implementation in non-elite circles, adding another dimension to this evolution. This bowl is a
testament to the possibility of cultural dialogue between circles of magically-inclined clerics who
served shahs and princes, as well as religious authorities in humbler settings whose communities
would not have had access to the products of guild-trained coppersmiths. To be sure, many other
magic bowls made in the Islamic world were not composed of metal; one small agate Shi’i magic
bowl was made in 1606 in India and several others were made of porcelain in seventeenthcentury
China. 25 However, these artifacts still likely belonged to prestigious, urban circles. Our
earthenware bowl’s crude design suggests that in Safavid Persia, a non-elite community attained
a cultural memory of magic bowls and their use as facilitators of barakah.
Two questions surface from this discovery: how did magic bowls operate in non-elite
settings, and how exactly were they introduced into these settings? In regard to the former,
communities that could not access Galenist physicians sometimes consulted a class of itinerant
geomancers, astrologers, and prognosticators for their worldly pains. 26 It’s plausible that this
bowl may have been possessed by one of these pseudo-physicians. 27 Additionally, the Safavid
Empire not only attained a top-down regional diversity of spiritual practices, but also a bottomup
local diversity. Hossein Nasr has suggested that alongside mujtahids (Shi’i jurists who were
endorsed by the government), local leaders were chosen from and within a community to
25
Savage-Smith, “Magic-Medicinal Bowls,” 78.
26
Savage-Smith, “Medicine,” 953; Dols and Ibn Ridwān, Medieval Islamic Medicine: Ibn Ridwān’s Treatise “On
the Prevention of Bodily Ills in Egypt,” 35–36.
27
Savage-Smith, “Magic-Medicinal Bowls,” 70–73.

8
represent the “religious needs of the populace.” 28 This affirmation of local religious identity and
the existence of a class of traveling pseudo-physicians begin to explain how an earthenware
magic bowl like the one in the Cantor Center may have circulated.
In regard to this bowl’s provenance, it’s plausible that non-elite communities informed
elite circles of bowl culture and that the subaltern originated these magical practices, not the
elites. This historical scheme for thinking about alternative medical practices and magic at-large
is generally accepted, though barely substantiated by material evidence. Unfortunately, we don’t
have enough bowls to confirm an origin point in the subaltern. However, if we consider that this
bowl culture proliferated among the ruling classes of Seljuk Syria – not Persia – more than three
centuries before our earthenware bowl was made, it seems probable that this specific artifact was
at least partly inspired by the productions of elites. This bowl particularly appears to have been
imitated off of a more prestigious metallic artifact, such as one kept in the Khalili Collection (fig.
6). Both bowls present the twelve zodiacs around their exteriors, are covered in an internal script,
and feature an anthropomorphized icon at their centers. In addition, it appears that imitation
among these bowls was not necessarily disparaged. Some of the earliest Syrian bowls bear
inscriptions that state that they were copied off of objects in royal treasuries, “implying that such
an association would increase their validity and potency.” 29 Unusually, the mimicry implied in
the production of these bowls did not jeopardize, but rather enhanced their potential for
singularization. 30 Regardless, whether or not the producers of the earthenware bowl recognized
the prestige of mimesis, their bowl closely resembles other, more prestigious objects, suggesting
28
Nasr, “Religion in Safavid Persia,” 276.
29
Savage-Smith, “Magic-Medicinal Bowls,” 73.
30
Throughout this essay I describe objects using the schema of “commodification” and “singularization” put
forward by Igor Kopytoff. Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commodization as Process,” in The
Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge University Press,
1988), 64–90.

9
that channels for cultural borrowing existed between the strata of Safavid society. Generally
speaking, scholars have had to make cautious forays into extending their analyses of magic bowl
culture to the subaltern because there is little surviving material evidence that directly supports
their claims. 31 I suggest that this bowl provides a first concrete step in confirming the
popularization of magic bowls beyond the upper stratum of society, and furthermore, in
confirming that magic bowl culture diffused dialectically between elite and non-elite
communities.
Hidden Meanings: A Story of Innovation
Just as a story of popularization emerges from this bowl, so too does a story of
transformation. As the magic bowl operated within a different community, that community
reimagined the object and gave its cultural biography a new trajectory, which we can locate on
the thing itself. 32 The earthenware bowl aesthetically deviates from its more prestigious
counterparts in both its emphasis on script and the type of script it displays. A typical
astrological magic bowl like the sixteenth-century model in the Khalili collection (fig. 6) depicts
both the twelve zodiacs and all seven classical planets – Jupiter, Venus, Mars, Mercury, Saturn,
the Moon, and the Sun at center – while the earthenware artifact keeps only the zodiacs and a
31
Flood writes that “practices of ingesting Qur’anic texts and other efficacious matter are attested both among elite
communities and popular milieus” while Savage-Smith states that “The reliance at times on astrology and magic can
be seen at all levels of the society… though it is most evident among the lower strata of society, especially in rural
areas.” Flood, “Bodies and Becoming: Mimesis, Mediation, and the Ingestion of the Sacred in Christianity and
Islam,” 481; Savage-Smith, “Medicine,” 953.
32
This logic of examining objects to unravel their social lives is borrowed from Arjun Appadurai: “We have to
follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed on their forms.” Furthermore, there is a striking
parallel between the adoption of new magic bowl forms by the subaltern and the concept of “transculturation”
coined by Cuban historian Fernando Ortiz. The same mechanics and schema used to explain modernity, colonialism,
and creolization may be aptly implemented to discuss Islamic spiritual phenomena that crossed boundaries of
prestige. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 5.

10
single, central figure, effectively making more room for the painting of script. 33 This central
figure also presents remarkable artistic deviation from typical anthropomorphized depictions of
the sun, especially because the heavenly body is portrayed as an elaborate woman, defined by a
round face, dark hair, eyes that jut off to the side, and – crucially – a unibrow. 34 This icon bears
a striking resemblance to the popular Persian symbol of khorshid khanoom (“the lady of the
sun”), a modern motif that ties together themes of fertility, femininity, maternity, and solar
warmth. Her unibrow reflects the cultural association between eyebrows and radiance that even
Jean Chardin notes in his Voyages: “the thickest and largest Eye-brows are accounted the finest,
especially when they are so large that they touch each other.” 35 Since Safavid times, khorshid
khanoom had been extracted from its astrological context and gradually accepted as a traditional
aesthetic for tableware (fig. 7), and the name now generally refers to a beautiful woman. 36 Sparse
literature exists on khorshid khanoom and her spiritual significance, and more research into this
subject may reveal even greater artistic innovation in the creation of this bowl, but for our
present purposes, what is important is that the producers of this bowl prioritized script over other
visuals.
Remarkably, none of this script is legible in any traditional sense – the bowl is covered in
pseudo-script. 37 These letters might resemble some combination of Aramaic and Pahlavi,
languages that had faded out of both vernacular and writing by the early modern period, but they
33
Savage-Smith, “Safavid Magic Bowls,” 242.
34
Savage-Smith discusses another Safavid bowl with an anthropomorphized sun at its center that may have
preceded the earthenware bowl. Savage-Smith, “Magic-Medicinal Bowls,” 88.
35
Chardin, Sir John Chardin’s Travels in Persia, 216–17.
36
I am indebted to my mother and grandmother, Mojgan Besharat and Mahin Eslami, for helping me explain the
concept of khorshid khanoom. My mother also pointed out, to my delight, that “Khorshid Khanoom” is a famous
song by the Iranian singer Ebi.
37
That the bowl’s designs are pseudo-script has been confirmed by three Stanford community members who
generously offered their expertise: Dr. Shervin Emami, Fyza Parviz, and Abdul Omira.

11
certainly do not reflect their grammar. 38 The pseudo-script could be a testament to the illiteracy
of its users, but even if its creators and consumers were illiterate, they would have undoubtedly
been exposed to the Arabic naskh script that pervaded Islamic society. In all likelihood, this
pseudo-script is an intentional design choice which ties into broader traditions of obscuring the
divine. During the medieval spread of Islam, Jewish silversmiths fashioned charms and talismans
that retained pseudo-Hebraic for their Muslim clientele. 39 Some scholars have suggested that
foreign texts, or at least scripts that were not immediately legible, were often treated as more
spiritually potent than Arabic. 40 From a different angle, Arabic scripts like Kufic were gradually
schematized, divorced more and more from legibility as they were engraved into magical
objects. 41 Pseudo-scripts even appear alongside Arabic scripts like thuluth on other magic bowls,
as is the case for one bowl in the British Museum (fig. 8). However, unlike most other extant
bowls, our earthenware model takes the application of a pseudo-script to the extreme by offering
its audience nothing but illegible letters. The isolated symbols of this bowl, utterly unlike typical
Arabic, also connect to another scriptural phenomenon discussed by the Islamic scholar
Annemarie Schimmel; in a handful of texts there are “unconnected letters which precede a
considerable number of Koranic Suras and whose meaning is not completely clear.” 42 The
indecipherability of these letters, their mystery, is precisely the source of their power because it
reflects the essence of the divine. Arcane pseudo-scripts also seem to approximate the same logic
38
John R. Perry, “New Persian: Expansion, Standardization, and Inclusivity,” in Literacy in the Persianate World,
ed. Brian Spooner and William L. Hanaway, Writing and the Social Order (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012),
76, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhh4r.8.
39
Don Aanavi, “Devotional Writing: ‘Pseudoinscriptions’ in Islamic Art,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin
26, no. 9 (May 1968): 354, https://doi.org/10.2307/3258400.
40
Venetia Porter, “The Use of the Arabic Script in Magic,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies,
Supplement: The Development of Arabic as a Written Language, 40 (July 24, 2009): 132.
41
Porter, 138.
42
Annemarie Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs of God: A Phenomenological Approach to Islam (State University
of New York Press, 1994), https://www.giffordlectures.org/lectures/deciphering-signs-god-phenomenologicalapproach-islam.

12
as the ninety-nine names of God, the asma al-husna, that the faithful knew were all inferior
compared to “the greatest Name of God [which] must never be revealed to the uninitiated, as
someone who knows it would be able to perform heavy incantations and magic.” 43 The pseudoscript
of our bowl links to common, longstanding threads of affirming divinity through mystery –
a mystery that draws one in, confirms the potency of the recited sura, and reminds its audience
of their minuteness in the face of an unknowable sublime. In other words, it is because the script
cannot be entirely understood that the bowl itself is a powerful conduit of divine blessing.
This pseudo-script, a token of the transformations that occur when an object filters into a
new community, also reflexively nuances our understanding of barakah. These bowls certainly
root the divine in the profane, but a pseudo-script materializes a bridge between these worlds
even further. The script simultaneously appears concrete, much like passages from the Qur’an,
and yet it is utterly unknowable, much like the hundredth name of God. In this single aesthetic
choice, we find that barakah is facilitated not just through the tension between the sacred and the
profane, but more specifically between an unknowable sacred and a graspable profane. It is a
tension in epistemology, a tug-of-war between the known and the unknown, that makes this
script what Flood calls the “[efficacious] word made manifest.” 44 Furthermore, Flood previously
identified magic bowls as an intersection between the orthodoxy of consuming the Qur’an and
the heterodoxy of thaumaturgical practices separated from their purely Prophetic contexts. In this
object, we find that orthodoxy and heterodoxy redefine one another. This bowl co-opts the
written word’s authenticity as a vessel of higher meaning while shedding the exactness of the
Qur’an. In turn, the holy text becomes mystical, arcane, and profoundly universal. In effect, the
43
Schimmel.
44
Flood, “Bodies and Becoming: Mimesis, Mediation, and the Ingestion of the Sacred in Christianity and Islam,”
485.

13
sanctioned holy text cannot live without the magical obscurity that makes it divine, and the
magical obscurity cannot act on anything but a discourse as universal as the holy book. The
orthodox cannot be divorced from the mystical.
Conclusions
Recovering the cultural biography of this bowl has turned into unraveling all of the
dichotomies of its history and use. Between mimesis and innovation, this bowl suggests that the
material culture of magic bowls spanned the social strata of Safavid society far more widely than
we could have imagined, and that in spanning so widely, the magic of this bowl became
innovated in a way that reflected the popular uses of mysterious script. In the end, the processes
of popularization and transformation are useful categories for what may be a unified
phenomenon. Perhaps the bowl proliferated so widely because it was malleable enough to
transform and make one’s own, just as commodities often become commodified because they
bear the potential for singularization, to borrow from Igor Kopytoff’s schema. This bowl also
forces us to reckon with a dichotomy between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. At this stage, even the
somewhat misinformed Jean Chardin, who declared that Safavids resorted to the “Prayers of
different Religions,” decently captures the blurriness of the boundaries between conformity and
heresy. 45 Like the Galenist physician Ibn Ridwān who advocated for astrology or the ruler Nur
al-Din Ibn Zangi who promoted both hospitals and geomancy, this bowl relied both on the holy
Qur’an and the mysticism of its script. The bowl more broadly represents Islamic medicine and
spirituality as inextricably tied to codependent discourses that appear to be at odds with one
another only from a distance.
45
Chardin, Sir John Chardin’s Travels in Persia, 185.

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Lastly, the bowl guides us to think about spiritual objects that oscillate between
dichotomies of sacred and profane, known and unknown. Like the previous dualities, these pairs
are also mutually informative. It is through their tension that spiritual auxiliaries like our bowl
become useful and captivating tools for experiencing the sublime. It was mysterious letters that
acted as a fulcrum between the supernatural and sixteenth-century life, and it was these same
letters that drew me in when I first stumbled upon the artifact five hundred years later. At first, I
hadn’t realized that this earthenware bowl would invite me to rediscover my own history.
Whenever I would go to mosque with my father growing up, a mukhi would recite a passage of
the Qur’an over a bowl of water before sprinkling that water on my face. For my father, it was
the ritual of niyaz during firman, but for seven-year-old me, it was just an ordinary (and
sometimes inconveniently wet) part of the ceremony, a convention that veiled a millennium of
mimesis and innovation. Back then, I could feel its effect despite never being able to explain it,
not so different than my first encounter with the earthenware bowl. In both the mosque and the
museum, it was only watery words and hidden meanings.

15
Figure 1: The earthenware bowl with “khorshid khanoom” at center, the Cantor Center.
Figure 2: Side view of the earthenware bowl.

16
Figure 3: Opposite view of the earthenware bowl.
Figure 4: One of the earliest known magic bowls, made in 1169-70, the Metropolitan Museum.

17
Figure 5: A seventeenth-century Safavid bowl with a central boss, Backman Ltd.
Figure 6: A sixteenth-century Safavid bowl with the seven classical planets, Khalili Collection.

18
Figure 7: A nineteenth-century Qajar platter with “khorshid khanoom” at center, the State
Hermitage Museum at St. Petersburg.
Figure 8: A magic bowl with Syriac pseudo-script at top-left, the British Museum.

19
Primary Materials
“Decorated Bowl,” terracotta, sixteenth century, accession number: 1975.56, (The Cantor Arts
Center at Stanford University), Cantor Arts Center, last modified 3/17/2020, Stanford
University, http://cantorcollection.stanford.edu/objects-
1/info?query=Creation_Place2%3D%22sub%3A%3A272%3A%3APersia%20(now%20Iran)%2
2&sort=61&page=21. Description: “16 th century, Asia, Persia (now Iran), by (primary) Artist
unknown. Medium: Terracotta. Credit Line: Gift of James L. Born, M.D.” (Figures 1, 2, and 3).
“Magic bowl,” Cast brass magic bowl with Thuluth and pseudo-Syriac inscriptions, N/A,
OA+.2603, (The British Museum, London), reproduced in “The Use of the Arabic Script in
Magic,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, Supplement: The Development of
Arabic as a Written Language, 40 (July 24, 2009): 134, fig. 3. (Figure 8).
“Magic Bowl Dedicated to Nur al-Din Mahmud b. Zangi,” copper alloy; cast, turned, engraved,
formerly filled with a white substance, MTW 1443, (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York City), The Met Museum, accessed 3/17/2020,
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/642251. (Figure 4).
“Magic bowl, flat bottomed, with astrological figures,” copper alloy; cast and turned, with silver
inlay, early sixteenth century, MTW 1378, (Khalili Collection, London), in Hunt for Paradise:
Court Arts of Safavid Iran, 1505-1576 by Jon Thompson and Sheila R. Canby, (Milan: Skira,
2003), 242, no. 9.2. (Figure 6).
“Tray, first third of 19 th century,” Gold; forged and painted in enamels, first third of nineteenth
century, no. VZ-751, (The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg), in The Lost Treasure:
Persian Art by Vladimir Lukonin and Anatoly Ivanov, (New York: Parkstone Press, 2012), 242,
no. 197. (Figure 7).

20
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