The most influential literary work in the Islamic world was the Shahnama, or Book of Kings. Based both on oral transmission and written tradition, the Book of Kings consists of stories about the lives of legendary and historical kings of Persia. In the early eleventh century, the author Firdawsi compiled these stories into a work of sixty thousand rhyming couplets. From then on, knowledge of the Book of Kings was an essential element of Islamic-Iranian culture for rulers of the Islamic world, most of whom were of Turkic origins. Associations with past Persian rulers provided political legitimacy for rulers who were foreign to the lands they conquered.

The Book of Kings consistently recounts events and activities such as battles, feasts, death scenes, hunts, and imperial audiences, but it also concentrates on the extraordinary exploits of heroic figures like Rustam, Bahram Gur, and Alexander. Shahnama manuscripts from the fourteenth century on were often lavishly illustrated, and a wide repertoire of images related to the tales in the Book of Kings exists.

Islamic writers in the Middle Ages and early modern period (ninth to nineteenth centuries) practiced a number of prose genres—history, biography, and travelogue among them—but poetry in the Persian language was considered the highest form of literary accomplishment. Persian was the language of high culture in the Islamic world, and many royal courts used Persian as their official language. Poetry was associated with venerable Arabian oral traditions as well as the poetic quality of the Qur'an, and mastery of this genre in Persian or Arabic required extensive knowledge of languages and texts. Poets were important members of royal courts, holding much higher positions than painters, for example. In the relationship between art and literature in the Islamic world, the word always took precedence over the image. Only in the modern period do visual artists achieve the same level of fame and fortune as their literary counterparts.

In Islamic manuscripts, images serve mainly to illustrate the texts provided, which does not mean that the images were not enjoyed as artistic creations themselves or that the work of painters was completely derivative. This situation simply indicates the working conditions painters faced in the Islamic world. As an adornment to the excellence of Persian poetry, Persian painting achieved great fame in the visual arts. And like poetry, Persian painting was exported across Islamic lands, with famous poets and painters collaborating to create luxurious, lavishly illustrated literary manuscripts.