Paradise as a Parable

The image of Paradise is based upon terrestrial forms and institutions. Like a mirrored image, it is an inverted form, the contradiction of this world, and
yet it reflects a certain material reality. While at the same time gardens and royal tombs were invested with the ideal image of Paradise as a means of conferring political legitimacy, Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī used the image of a heavenly voyage as a poetic pretext for his literary ideas and criticism. This paper tries to show that like al-Maʿarrī, some painters may have invested their illustrations of paradise with concrete historical references or modelled them on terrestrial realities. Thus a material object, the gate, heavily loaded both with political, moral and spiritual symbolism, became a necessary part of the artist’s image of paradise.