While literacy rates are difficult to measure in the medieval and premodern periods, it is clear that the culture of the Islamic world was highly engaged with literature, with stories passed textually and orally, and certain characters, such as the young lovers Layla and Majnun, figuring prominently in popular culture. This folio, which once belonged to a bound manuscript of the Khamsa (Quintet) of Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (d. 1209), depicts a scene from the story of Layla and Majnun, when the two first meet at school. Although the tale takes place on the Arabian Peninsula, the artists drew inspiration for the architecture and costumes from their own environment in sixteenth-century Shiraz, Iran, and may have also incorporated contemporaneous learning practices. Basic education, both formal and informal, was widespread in Islamic lands, with children offered lessons at home, in village schools, or at local mosques. Here, the students are learning to read from tablets under the direction of a teacher seated at left.
The manuscript to which this folio belongs was disassembled, most likely when it was brought to the art market, and its pages dispersed. LACMA holds seven of these folios (see also M.73.5.418, .421, .423, .424, and .606), including the colophon, which dates the manuscript to AH 924 (1517 CE) and lists the scribe as Muhammad Zarin-Qalam (see M.73.5.604).
