The painting of Māhān Kūshyār is a folio from the Haft Paykar section of an illustrated manuscript of the Timurid Khamsah (846 AH / 1442 AD, British Library, MS 25900). This painting is considered a visual allegory of Ibn Sīnā’s ʿālam-i mithālī (the imaginal world). In the tale of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, Ibn Sīnā describes the Oriental Realm as a transcendent realm and a liminal space between the material and intellective realms—a realm where spiritual realities manifest in sensible forms. Furthermore, by choosing the merchant’s name (Māhān Kūshyār), Niẓāmī Ganjavī makes a deliberate and double-edged reference to Kūshyār-i Munajjim (Kushyar the Astronomer) in order to establish the āfāqī dimension of the concept of the Oriental Realm as a setting for the protagonist’s anfusī journey. Hence, the objective of this study is to decode the symbolic and metaphorical structure of the Māhān Kūshyār painting from Niẓāmī’s Haft Paykar (846 AH / 1442 AD, British Library, MS 25900) by drawing upon the concepts of Sīnavī philosophy (the Oriental Realm and the Imaginal World).

The problem of this research is the lack of a deep and structural analysis of the Māhān Kūshyār painting that could reveal its hidden philosophical-mystical layers. This research gap persists despite the fact that only a single descriptive-historical study of this painting has been conducted by Barbara Brend (2022), leaving its mystical dimensions completely unexamined. The question is: how does the symbolic structure of the Māhān Kūshyār painting encode the concepts of Sīnavī philosophy (the Oriental Realm), and how can its systematic analysis explain the link between the āfāqī and anfusī systems as well as the key ambiguities of the painting (such as the seven-headed horse)?

Using a descriptive-analytical method and a comparative approach, this study analyzes the symbolic elements of the painting within the āfāqī and anfusī systems. The statistical population consists of all paintings depicting the story of Māhān Kūshyār. Only two paintings have been found: the first is housed in the British Library with the shelfmark MS 25900, f. 188r, dating to 846 AH / 1442 AD from the Timurid period; the second is in the Harvard University Library with the accession number 9.2015.224, dating to 894 AH / 1489 AD from the Āq Qoyūnlū period. The sample studied is the work preserved in the British Library. The reason for selecting this work is the abundance of details and a manner of expression that closely resembles Ibn Sīnā's description in Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān and the visualization of the liminality of the Oriental Realm. The tale of Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān was chosen because it describes the stages of the anfusī journey, the faculties of the soul (quwā-yi nafs), and the position of the Active Intellect (ʿaql-i faʿʿāl) in such a precise manner that ultimately allows for a direct correspondence with the visual elements and the spiritual path of Māhān Kūshyār in the painting. The allusion Ibn Sīnā makes to the Orient represents the very first step toward the awakening of the seeker, and it can be understood as the primordial Oriental Realm.