Paradise on Earth

In Islamic culture there is likewise a literary tradition of direct depiction of paradise, most typically represented by Mir Haydar's Miraj-nama (Book of the ascension), a fourteenth-century poetic description of the Prophet's mystical journey to heaven and hell, which takes much of its imagery of paradise directly from highly descriptive scriptural passages of the Koran. The most famous illustrated manuscript of the poem, created for the Timurid ruler Shah Rukh in Herat in about 1435, depicts a paradise with triple gates, four flowing rivers of water, milk, wine, and honey, and flowering trees, among which the houris engage in games and provide refreshments. In a fal-nama or "book of divination" manuscript created in Istanbul around 1600, a famous miniature depicts Adam and Eve expelled from paradise along with the serpent, as an astonished angel and a peacock look on.

In the complex metaphorical imagery of Persian poetry, the drinking of wine in the setting of a garden combines secular cultural praxis with the mystical notion of divine intoxication. For this reason, illustrations to the texts of poets such as Hafiz often show couples or individuals drinking wine in a garden, or even, in one famous example painted around 1529 by the Tabriz artist Sultan-Muhammad, a sort of half-earthly, half-heavenly saturnalia of elderly sheikhs and heaven-sent angels.

While paradisiacal imagery is found in many different Islamic arts, from ceramics and metalwork to miniature painting, some of the most memorable evocations of the heavenly garden are seen in textile arts. Many of the most famous Islamic carpets created under the Safavid dynasty in Iran in the sixteenth century are in the form of what one scholar has termed a "paradise park" format, in which an outer border symbolic of the surrounding wall encloses a lush vision of paradise that often includes depictions of the drinking of wine, the royal sport of hunting (itself often a metaphor of the soul's search for paradise), and lovers enjoying the floral ambience of the garden. The same motifs grace many of the famous figural Safavid velvets, in which the images of lovers in a garden are conflated with the idea of the soul's love of God. The two celebrated Ardebil carpets, probably woven in Kashan around 1537, depict the reflection of the sun's medal-lion—a metaphor for God as the giver of light—in a dark blue formal pool filled with countless floating lotus flowers on scrolling stems. Other Islamic carpet forms, such as the sajjadah or prayer rug, often depict a gateway to a tree-and flower-filled paradise, while one carpet form, the garden carpet, actually depicts a traditional Islamic garden with its cruciform axial watercourses (often filled with fish) and rectangular plantings, in a woven form that conveniently remains in bloom throughout the year.

Detail from Edward Hicks's Peaceable Kingdom (c. 1833; oil on canvas). Many of Hicks's paintings were illustrations of scenes in the Bible, such as his famous Peaceable Kingdom, which was based on a prophecy from the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament. © BURSTEIN COLLECTION/CORBIS

In the Islamic world, the combination of a pre-Islamic form of walled garden from Iran known as a char bagh—literally a "fourfold garden"—and the imagery of the Koranic texts combined to foster a long tradition of princely garden building in which religious ideas formed a sort of symbolic overlay. The four long pools arranged in cruciform fashion that divide the garden into four represent the four heavenly rivers; a pavilion set in the middle of the garden might then take on equally heavenly symbolism, as in the Hasht Bihisht ("eight heavens") Safavid palace from seventeenth-century Isfahan. Among the countless Islamic attempts to create an earthly paradise, two gardens have achieved unusual historical prominence. The earlier of these, known today as the Court of the Lions, graces the fourteenth-century Nasrid Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain. Its four streams, fed by a central playing fountain in a basin borne on the backs of twelve sculpted lions, recall the heavenly rivers of the Koran, together with the fountain Salsabil that graces Islamic paradise (Koran 76:12). The other Islamic garden of special prominence is the great char bagh arrayed before the Mughal royal mausoleum known as the Taj Mahal, created in the mid-seventeenth century in Agra, India, by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. The inscriptions of the Taj Mahal itself stress the metaphor of an earthly depiction of heavenly paradise, in which the mausoleum itself is a symbol for the throne of God. The popularity of the char bagh in Islamic cultures from India to Iberia is a strong testament to its Islamic religious associations with paradise, as well as to the astonishing persistence of pre-Islamic forms in Islamic art.