Kamal al-din Behzad’s Realism in “The Battle of Camels”

Many scholars believe that Islamic arts do not intend to represent the real world. This view goes back to the Sufi view of Iranian-Islamic art, which emphasizes meaning than appearance. Even though studying an artwork from a religious and mystical view is generally not wrong, limiting the view to the mystical concepts while examining an Islamic artwork may prevent us from considering other aspects of this art. For this reason, Islamic visual artworks need to be analyzed from a variety of perspectives such as realistic. In this article, the painting “The Battle of Camels”, attributed to Kamal al-din Behzad was selected. Camel fighting is popular entertainment in countries such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkey. Therefore, the painting “The Battle of Camels” was examined in a historical-analytical manner hypothesizing that Iranian paintings are not only images specific to texts and manuscripts but also have artistic values and historical and social concepts, Also, to answer the question of how this painting shows the painter’s influence on the real world, similar types of paintings and real photos of this event were studied. Finally, we found that Kamal al-din Behzad probably observed such an event closely and was also influenced by similar drawings. Through his new perspective, he was able to portray this issue in the form of the principles of Iranian painting and managed to include the real aspects of this event in the work by showing realistic details