One theme that characterizes secular Islamic manuscripts is portraits of rulers and society's elite. Portraiture became a significant genre of painting in the Islamic world in the seventeenth century. Rulers were generally not accessible to the public, so when their images were distributed widely, they provided a level of contact between the ruler and his subjects.  Contact with Europe brought more interest in the naturalism of portraiture, an art form that had been popular in the Western Mediterranean since Greek and Roman times.  

Secular Islamic manuscripts feature a variety of themes-some of them fantastic and mythical-illustrating popular literary and poetic works. Other manuscripts represent the lives and daily activities of the people who commissioned them-royal and elite patrons who populated the court in the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

The imagery in these secular Islamic manuscripts mirrors the lives of people in the upper levels of society and depicts their favorite pastimes. The images display a high degree of fantasy: court figures and rulers are represented in an ideal form, as they wished to be seen rather than the way they actually were. A certain tension exists between the real and the imaginary. One cannot be truly certain if what one sees is historically accurate.