Falnama is a book of
omens
An omen (also called ''portent'') is a phenomenon that is believed to foretell the future, often signifying the advent of change. It was commonly believed in ancient times, and still believed by some today, that omens bring divine messages fr ...
used by
fortune tellers
Fortune telling is the practice of predicting information about a person's life. Melton, J. Gordon. (2008). ''The Encyclopedia of Religious Phenomena''. Visible Ink Press. pp. 115-116. The scope of fortune telling is in principle identical wi ...
in Iran, India and Turkey during the 16th and 17th centuries. Individuals seeking insight into the future would engage in a series of
purification rituals, turn to a random page in the Falnama, and interpret the text and drawings thereon for good or ill. Falnama manuscripts were primarily created during the 16th and 17th centuries as the
Islamic calendar
The Hijri calendar ( ar, ٱلتَّقْوِيم ٱلْهِجْرِيّ, translit=al-taqwīm al-hijrī), also known in English as the Muslim calendar and Islamic calendar, is a lunar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months in a year of 354 or ...
was approaching the year 1000.
The Dispersed Falnama was an illustrated Falnama that was commissioned by
Shah Tahmasp
Tahmasp I ( fa, طهماسب, translit=Ṭahmāsb or ; 22 February 1514 – 14 May 1576) was the second shah of Safavid Iran from 1524 to 1576. He was the eldest son of Ismail I and his principal consort, Tajlu Khanum. Ascending the throne after t ...
in mid-1550s-early-1560s.
Many of the paintings involve
Ali
ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib ( ar, عَلِيّ بْن أَبِي طَالِب; 600 – 661 CE) was the last of four Rightly Guided Caliphs to rule Islam (r. 656 – 661) immediately after the death of Muhammad, and he was the first Shia Imam. ...
, who was considered the first
Shi'i Imam and central to the
Safavid
Safavid Iran or Safavid Persia (), also referred to as the Safavid Empire, '. was one of the greatest Iranian empires after the 7th-century Muslim conquest of Persia, which was ruled from 1501 to 1736 by the Safavid dynasty. It is often conside ...
Empire's state ideology. In the "Coffin of Imam 'Ali" painting, Ali is depicted with a
flaming halo which was a technique of the preexisting
Zoroastrian
Zoroastrianism is an Iranian religion and one of the world's oldest organized faiths, based on the teachings of the Iranian-speaking prophet Zoroaster. It has a dualistic cosmology of good and evil within the framework of a monotheistic on ...
art in Iran.
External links
*
Falnama: Book of Omens
References
{{Authority control
16th-century books
17th-century books
Early Modern literature
Divination
Turkish literature
Persian literature