Tulipomania - Mike Dash [4]
It is impossible, at this remove, to be sure how widespread was the cult of the tulip among the Ottomans who swarmed across the Balkans in the first half of the fifteenth century. The Turks of this era generally obeyed Islam’s proscriptions against the public display of realistic portraits of living things.* For this reason there are no representations of the tulip in Ottoman manuscripts of the period, and no contemporary paintings, vases decorated with flowers, or tulip-emblazoned tiles appear to have survived—if any were ever made. Nevertheless, we know that gardening was a well-developed art in Persia by this time. Indeed, the garden is central to the Muslim vision of paradise. Christian clerics told their flocks that heaven was a shining city on a hill; the Arab founders of Islam, a religion that had after all sprung originally from the desert, looked forward to an endless garden of delight, full of pavilions and fountains, carpeted with flowers of a beauty unequaled on earth. Pious Muslims treated flowers almost as holy relics and often wore blooms in their turbans.
The Turks told a story to explain why gardens were so important to them. When Hasan Efendi, a famous dervish holy man, was preaching one day, one of those who had come to hear him speak passed him a note. It inquired whether any Muslim could be certain he would go to paradise when he died. After Hasan had finished his sermon, he asked if there were any gardeners present. When one member of the congregation stood up, Hasan pointed to him and said: “This man will go to heaven.”
Immediately the dervish was surrounded by a press of people demanding to know what the gardener had done to be certain of a place in paradise. But Sheikh Hasan explained that he was merely quoting from the hadiths—the oral traditions of the prophet Muhammad—which state that people will do in the afterlife what they most enjoy doing on earth. Because all flowers belong to heaven, gardeners will surely go to paradise to continue their work.
The tulips of the Persians and the Turks were still wildflowers. Even when they were planted in gardens, they were not yet cultivated in the sense of being systematically bred, crossed with other strains, or otherwise improved by man. As late as the early sixteenth century, when the Turkish warlord Babur counted thirty-three different varieties of wild tulip as he passed south through Afghanistan, the old nomad peoples do not seem to have encountered any garden hybrids. When Babur—who overthrew the kingdoms of northern India and established the dynasty of Moguls, whose name remains a byword for luxury and opulence—planted tulips in the innumerable formal gardens he created, the bulbs he sowed were wildflower bulbs.
Yet of all the blooms in a Muslim garden, the tulip was regarded as the holiest, and the Turkish passion for this flower went far beyond mere appreciation of its beauty. For the Ottomans as for the Persians, it had a tremendous symbolic importance and was literally regarded as the flower of God because, in Arabic script, the letters that make up lale, the Turkish word for “tulip,” are the same as those that form Allah. The tulip also represented the virtue of modesty before God: When in full bloom, it bows its head. After the proscription on images of living things was finally relaxed, in the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, tulips were often depicted in Ottoman illustrations of the Garden of Eden, blossoming beneath the fruit trees where Eve was tempted. Turks who willingly gave their lives in battle, believing that death in the service of Islam was the surest passport to a paradise of meadowlands where divinely beautiful houris would serve them the wine they were denied on earth, fully expected to find their heaven strewn with tulips. To an Ottoman gardener, therefore, it was one of the handful of flowers of the first value, and only the rose, the narcissus, the carnation, and the hyacinth were worthy to be classed alongside it. All other blooms, however rare, however beautiful,