Hilali and Mir ‘Ali: Sunnis among the Shi‘is, or Shi‘is among the Sunnis between the Shaybanids, Safavids and the Mughals

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1788 Ephraim Pote, a British merchant in Patna, sent a large portion of the manuscript collection which formerly belonged to Colonel of the East India Company Antoine Polier. Among those manuscripts there was a Divan by Badr al-Din Hilali, who was executed by the Uzbek Sultan ‘Ubaydallah right after the conquest of Herat in 1529. The calligrapher responsible for compiling the impressive selection of Hilali's Divan was the famous Mir ‘Ali Haravi. He produced it in fond memory of his perished friend and their beloved Herat, when he was already working for ‘Ubaydallah in Bukhara, where he had been brought as part of the Sultan's intellectual booty. The manuscript is exceptionally important from various points of view: history, literature, artistic decoration and provenance. It is not only the earliest surviving copy of Hilali’s Divan, but allows the siege of Herat to be attributed with more chronological precision than was possible before. When the manuscript arrived to Delhi by the time of Emperor Shahjahan, it had spectacular marginal decorations of arabesque, floral and animalistic motifs in gold and polychrome. This makes the manuscript a brilliant example of intercultural communication between Persia, Central Asia and India in the sixteenth century.