Love stories are abundant in Persian literature. Often, they are devoted to grand love stories, tragic love or impossible love, unrequited love, suicide for love, patricide, filicide and incest. Often lovers meet only once or in the next world. However, some love stories do have an Hollywoodian ending. These oral stories enjoyed vast popularity and patrons often commissioned calligraphers and painters to produce books depicting these amorous turbulences between rulers and princesses, rulers and slaves, stepmothers and sons, prophets and married women and puppy love.

When carefully read these stories often reveal a deeper mystical meaning hinting at a different kind of love, not necessarily mundane rather the love of a believer to his Lord. These stories also depict women not necessarily as passive players rather as strong and assertive wise women.

We’ll attempt to decode the miniatures attached to these stories and to decipher their embedded system of values and the interaction between the word and the image.