A welcome address to the Qajar Shah

Barkatallah, Mohammad, Indian Muslim political writer (1864-1927). [Manuscript on the geopolitics of Iran].

€ 15,000.00

An early unrecorded witness to Muhammad Barkatallah's pan-Islamic political imagination, composed in England as a Persian poem and accompanying prose address in praise of Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar, apparently prepared for a projected royal visit to London that ultimately took place in the summer of 1902.

The illuminated headpiece advances a deliberate programme of Islamic solidarity: a camel between palm trees beneath the Ottoman imperial arms and the Qajar Lion and Sun with Kiani crown, surmounted by the Quran verse 49:10 ("the believers are but brothers"), turning the manuscript's very first image into an emblem of supra-imperial unity at a moment of heightened Anglo-Russian-Ottoman rivalry.

The poem adopts the prestige form of classical Persian panegyric while pivoting to a reformist argument: it contrasts European scientific and technological advance with perceived Islamic stagnation, urging renewal through knowledge, industry, and cohesion. The two hand-coloured maps amplify the geopolitical consciousness of the text by visualizing contemporary Barkatallah, Mohammad. [Manuscript on geopolitics]. 4to (210 x 265 mm). (1), 22, (1) pp. Persian manuscript on paper watermarked "T & J H / Kent" (Thomas and John Hollingworth). Black nasta'liq script with important words and footnotes in red ink, borders in gold. With an illustrated headpiece and two hand-coloured maps in the text. Bound with a red silk ribbon. Most probably intended for educational purposes and reflecting the geopolitics of the Middle East at the end of the 19th century, it was produced by a certain Muhammad Barakah in 1318 A.H., year 1900 (according to the colophon).

It consists of 22 numbered pages. The first page features a decorative flowery vignette, highlighted in turquoise and gold, with a medallion depicting a camel between two palm trees, surmounted by a verse from the Qur'an. Below the vignette is a dedication to Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar (1853-1907).

The book includes two hand-drawn maps, annotated in Persian, illustrating the geopolitical and commercial networks stretching from Europe and Africa to Central and East Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.networks of commerce and power across Europe, the Ottoman domains, Iran, Central Asia, and India, foregrounding caravan routes, railways, the Suez Canal, and transcontinental connections. Iran is presented not as on the periphery but as a strategic hinge within Afro-Eurasian exchange.

Written on late 19th-century English paper and explicitly dated in the colophon, the manuscript captures Barkatallah's London decade (1893-1903) at a formative point on the trajectory that would later culminate in his anti-imperial activism.