Prince Harry product placement

breaking news: now that Prince Harry has been outed as having been serving for the last ten weeks in Helmand province, we can reveal his interest in war carpets… Maybe he bought it on ebay? You too can have one just like it for $0.99. There are 21 listed as “hard to find…” Now wait for war carpets with Prince Harry as the subject… And from The Guardian (no pun intended), another view… you can read the text here – and does anyone see the irony in the fact that it’s a “defeat of the Soviets” motif in the war carpet Prince Harry has his foot on?

A most complex iconography…

Here’s a war rug acquired recently by one of our readers which exhibits a very complex set of interactions between image elements – some of which derive from traditional forms, intersected with narrative passages which depict armed conflict.

Some of the mixage of imagery, through different scales in each
register, is really challenging to our “Western” sense of perspective.

We’ve seen animals within animals many times…

…but certainly never a snake emerging from the ammunition
belt of a heavy machine gun…

A war rug from the Khandahar airport market

Here’s a conventional tourist rug bought recently by an ADF Chinook pilot at the Khandahar air base market. Is that a Canadian flag? Catering to the market… Note the unusual detail of a mine-flailer in the centre of the image, and the (somewhat subversive?) opium poppy border.

Najibullah under pressure from all sides

Leyli and Majnun – another interpretation

This most unusual of “prayer rugs” has previously been interpreted by the Australian artists Hossein Valamanesh and Nasser Palangi.

The second rug is from Max Allen’s collection. Now, an Iranian visual arts student from Newcastle University, Maryam Rashidi, has offered the following analysis, which adds a further dimension to some of this rug’s more ambiguous dimensions. Follow her text below:

I see the text on the left side of the image differently. The text on the right obviously says “Leyli Majnun” whose stories have been explained to some extent on your website. But on the left, I think it says “Barekat Asheghan Arefan.”… “Barekat” means “blessing” or “bliss” (as explained by others as well)… “Asheghan” means “Lovers” and “Arefan” means “theosophists (or gnostics).

(I think Mr Palangi may have mistaken the word “Arefan” with “Karavan”, which does not seem to make much sense in the context of the image).

In addition, to translate “Leili Majnun” (which has been written on the carpet) into “Leili and majnoon,” we need a “Va (=and)” (in farsi) in between the two names. But this “Va” is missing in the text written on the carpet. So, I am guessing that if we are translating “Leyli Majnun” as “Leili VA (=and) Majnoon,” we perhaps can translate “Asheghan Arefan” into “Lovers VA (=and) Theosophists”. Thus, the text can be translated as something like “Blessings be with Lovers and Gnostics” or, if we relate the texts of the two sides together, the translation could be something like “Leili and Majnoon [were/are] the blessing (or it could perhaps be even interpreted as symbols?) for/of Lovers and Gnostics…

Leyli and Majnun in the modern world

Max Allen in Toronto sends us another version of this ambiguous representation of the Leyli and Majnun story. If the mujahideen figure is identifiable, who might it be? My copy was sold to me as a “portrait” of Osama bin Laden, but I was always very sceptical of this attribution. There’s further discussion of this in our other posts considering Leyli – the images appear when you click on the post titles.

When you compare the two, while some elements are missing from the image below, many are reproduced quite carefully, such as the profile of the male figure, which is surely distinctive enough to be reccognisable?

Rostam and Akvan

Nasser Palangi (an Iranian artist living in Canberra) has an extensive collection of early lithographs, and has sent us some images to fill out our earlier posts which help locate the iconography of this rug, from the Peter Bellas collection in Brisbane, Plate 1 in The Rugs of War catalogue.

Compare with these 19th century lithographic illustrations to find the origins of this reconfigured story – now located in a field of elements signifying the contemporary conflict.

Other posts and examples are here; click on the post titles to open the images.

Translation

Nasser Palangi, (an Iranian artist living in Canberra), has also given me a translation of the text on the image of the Leyli and Majnun rug. The updated posts are here; click on post titles to see the images.

The Battle of Rostam and Ashkabus

This is the second antique Azerbaijan “war rug”, sent by Vugar Dadashov. He tells me this one was made in Tebriz, in the beginning of 20th century, and is now in a Moscow collection.

Other posts and examples are here; click on the post titles to open the images.

Rostam and the White Div Akvan

Thanks to further correspondence from Vugar Dadashov here’s a snapshot of early 20th century precursor from the Baku Carpet Museum in Azerbaijan. It is titled “Rostam is killing Div”, and was made in Tebriz (Southern Azerbijan). So here’s the origins of this scene which we find in war rugs (a passage from the Shahnameh (the Book of Kings), where Rostam defeats the evil White Div) to the depiction of such imagery in carpets. See this post below…

Another related rug has now been posted here.