Mimetic Topographies and Pictorial Shifts: Seeing the Kaʿba at the Shah Vali Khānaqāh in Taft

Writing about a Sufi complex known as the Shah Vali khānaqāh in the southern Iranian town of Taft in 1506, hagiographer ʿAbd al-Razzaq Kermani reports that the fifteenth-century structure was built “according to the style of the house of the Kaʿba” (bar uslūb-i khānā-yi Kaʿba). Taking such common textual comparisons as its starting point, this essay explores the wealth of textual, visual, and material evidence around the Shah Vali khānaqāh to ask how and why the complex was seen as a copy of the Kaʿba. The essay argues for a regionally and temporally specific perception of copying that, while making use of strategies such as measurement, revolved around visual recognition alongside the changing pictorial conventions of representing the Kaʿba.