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Writer's pictureYahya Nurgat

Ramadan at home and the materiality of prayer rugs

Note: This piece was originally published in May 2020 on the Cambridge Material Culture Forum website (https://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/research/laboratories/material-culture/material-culture-forum).


This year, observing the holy month of Ramadan has been a very different experience for Muslims across the globe [1 2 3 4 5]. Much of what makes Ramadan unique is often observed communally, such as the breaking of the fast and the tarāwīḥ, the special form of ritual prayer (ṣalāt) which is performed in the nights of the holy month. With the closure of mosques due to Covid-19, these activities have become exclusively domestic affairs. For example, while the tarāwīḥ is usually performed congregationally in the mosque or individually at home, many Muslims have elected to merge the two this year, by performing the tarāwīḥ together in their households. In order to transform living room into prayer room, individual prayer rugs are placed together in neat rows facing towards the Kaaba in Mecca, with one rug placed at their head for the prayer leader (see above articles and fig. 1). The sight of these prayer rugs arranged together provides perhaps the sole visual motif connecting a home environment to a mosque prayer hall. In this context, the sacralising, ornamentalising, and aestheticising functions of prayer rugs become just as important as their traditionally important role of ensuring that worshippers are able to pray in a ritually pure environment.[1]

Fig. 1. The Nurgat family prayer rug collection. Illustrations of Kaaba in middle center and bottom right. Illustration of Prophet’s mosque and tomb in middle right. Mecca and Medina panorama on bottom center. The blue rug on the middle left was manufactured and purchased in Medina. (For the imam’s prayer rug at the top of the picture see fig. 2).

Fig. 1. The Nurgat family prayer rug collection. Illustrations of Kaaba in middle center and bottom right. Illustration of Prophet’s mosque and tomb in middle right. Mecca and Medina panorama on bottom center. The blue rug on the middle left was manufactured and purchased in Medina. (For the imam’s prayer rug at the top of the picture see fig. 2).














Fig. 2. An individual prayer rug produced in the same design as the prayer carpets of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina.


















Prayer rugs have long been carefully designed in order to both deepen and enhance the experience of ritual prayer. Muslims place great importance on performing the prayer in a state of reverence (khushūʿ) and attentiveness (ḥuḍūr al-qalb lit. “presence of heart”).[2] Most prayer rugs are adorned with the representation of a miḥrāb, a semicircular niche in the wall of a mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca. Others are illustrated with lamps, a reference to God’s Light, and sometimes with naturistic themes, symbolising the beauty of paradise.[3] Many prayer rugs also carry depictions of the holy sanctuary in Mecca, with the Kaaba at its center, and the Mosque of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina, centred around his tomb. In fact, prayer rugs in the modern era have become a firm fixture in the economy of sacred souvenirs circulating between the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina and Muslims around the world.[4] This means that despite variations in palette and design, prayer rugs are often unified by a connection to these Holy Cities. A more recent development has been the manufacture of individual prayer rugs exhibiting the same pattern as the carpet found in the Prophet's mosque in Medina (see fig. 2).[5] This revives a more established [and enduring] tradition in which the older fabric coverings of the Kaaba and the Prophet's tomb are cut and distributed upon their renewal every year. With the difficulty of acquiring these fabrics in the modern era, replica prayer rugs provide an agreeable alternative as sacred gifts and souvenirs for pilgrims to the Holy Cities. Other vendors sell carpets that have seen actual use in the Holy Sanctuaries, though often at a much greater cost.[6]

The tradition of depicting the Kaaba on prayer rugs is a long-standing one; in 1610, the Ottoman chief jurisconsult (şeyhülislam), Hocasadettinzade Mehmet Çelebi Efendi, wrote to the carpet weavers of Kütahya proscribing the practice. He reasoned that it was improper for worshippers to step on the Kaaba's image with their feet.[7] Perhaps in part due to the şeyhülislam's prohibition, Kütahya instead became a center for the production of ceramic tiles depicting the sanctuaries of Mecca and Medina in the mid-seventeenth century.[8] These were, for the most part, installed in mosques, allowing illustrations of the Holy Cities to continue to play a role in the performance of ritual prayer.

Two rare surviving examples of Ottoman prayer rugs show the Kaaba carefully positioned at the rug’s apex, meeting the worshipper’s gaze while they are standing and connecting with their forehead as they prostrate.[9] One of these, dating to the fifteenth or sixteenth-century (fig. 3), carries a small representation of the Kaaba in between two small lamp illustrations. Various other design elements, most of them floral, are organised around the prominent coupled-columns.[10] Another rug (fig. 4) survives from the eighteenth century, and was kept in the mausoleum of Sultan Alaeddin in Konya. Here, the Kaaba is a much more prominent feature of the rug, and is joined by some of its surrounding structures, as well as the inner porticoes of the Sacred Mosque. If Hocasadettinzade might have disapproved of these Ottoman-era examples, he would undoubtedly be disturbed to learn of their modern-day popularity, which has brought images of the sacred landscapes of Mecca and Medina to worshippers on a mass scale.[11]

Fig 3. 16th or 17th century prayer mat. After Sabih Erken, ‘Türk Çiniciliğinde Kâbe Tasvirleri,’ Vakıflar Dergisi 9 (2006): 297-320.


















Fig 4. Prayer mat from Alaeddin’s tomb, eighteenth century. Turkish and Islamic Art Museum, Istanbul, no. 287.[12]
















Prayer rugs portraying one or both of the sanctuaries in Mecca and Medina provide worshippers with the potential to visualise and contemplate on the Kaaba and the mosque and tomb of the Prophet Muhammad, thus heightening the devotional meanings and significances of the ritual prayer. Images of these holy landscapes have long had the power to captivate devotees, and to connect worshippers horizontally with each other and with actual landscapes over great distances, vertically with the Divine and the cosmos, and temporally with the past, present, and the future.[13] As Juan Campo has argued, mediated images of the holy landscapes of Islam, in both medieval and modern media, orient viewers physically and perceptually, and create relationships that both transcend place and put in place.[14] Fabrics sourced in the Holy Cities are imbued with greater sacrality by virtue of their place of purchase. Even if lacking in illustrations of the holy sanctuaries, and even if manufactured elsewhere, prayer rugs from Mecca and Medina plug Muslims into a spiritual community, with the shared direction of prayer and object of pilgrimage at its centre. In a time where even the ordinarily overflowing sacred centres of Islam are closed to the public, prayer rugs from Mecca and Medina continue to play an important role in the worship of Muslim believers.

[1] As well as the place of prayer, one’s garments must also be ritually pure, or at least free of any large amounts of polluting substances. The ritual prayer consists of a series of motions, accompanied by extracts from the Quran, praises of God and supplications. Prayer movements include standing upright, the bowed position, prostrating oneself in a kneeling position with the forehead touching the floor, and sitting upright with the hands on the knees. These movements form one prostration cycle, and the tarāwīḥ usually consists of twenty such cycles. See Marion H. Katz, Prayer in Islamic thought and practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 23-25. [2] Katz, Prayer in Islamic thought and practice, 56-62. [3] For more on Islamic carpets, including prayer rugs, see Top of Form Walter B Denny, How to Read Islamic Carpets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).Bottom of Form [4] Pilgrims often bring back holy water from Mecca, dates from Medina, and prayer beads and prayer rugs from both of these cities. For more on the hajj and souvenir and gift giving, see Venetia Porter ‘Gifts, Souvenirs, and the Hajj,’ in Luitgard Mols and Marjo Buitelaar (eds.), Hajj: Global Interactions Through Pilgrimage (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2015): 95-111. [5] As well as fig. 2, see also https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alrawda-RS04-Premium-Royal-Madinah/dp/B079KG68B5 and https://www.theprayermatcompany.com/product/green-authentic-haramain-rawdah-prayer-mat-rug-carpet-madinah/. [6] See for example: https://rumisgarden.co.uk/collections/carpets-from-the-holy-kaaba-and-blessed-rawdah. This practice also raises important questions, though beyond the scope of this essay, about the commodification of religious practice, and the impact of globalisation on circulation of prayer rugs as both luxury and cheaper objects. [7] Mustafa Uzun, ‘Kâbe: Türk Edebiyati,’ TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: İSAM, 2001): 24: 23-26. Cited in Suraiya Faroqhi, A cultural history of the Ottomans. The imperial elite and its artefacts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 46. [8] Charlotte Maury, “Depictions of the Haramayn on Ottoman Tile: Content and Context,” in The Hajj: Collected Essays, ed. Liana Saif and Venetia Porter (British Museum Press, 2013), 143–59. [9] It is worth noting here that many Shīʿites perform prostration on earth from Karbala, the site of the martyrdom of Imam Ḥusayn. This takes the form of a small disk of clay, positioned so that the forehead is pressed upon it in prostration. See Katz, Prayer in Islamic thought and practice, 23. [10] For a similar example, minus the Kaaba, see: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2015/carpets-textiles-n09323/lot.51.html [11] See also the digital archive of the ‘The Prayer (Mat) We Share’ exhibition: http://virtual-display.co.za/aahmed/ [12] Image after Hanna Erdmann, “Die historische Entwicklung des türkischen Teppichs; Zur Technik des Knüpfteppics,” in Türkische Kunst und Kultur aus osmanischer Zeit, 2 vols. (Aurel Bongers, 1985): 2:193-220, at 220. Cited in Suraiya Faroqhi, A cultural history of the Ottomans. The imperial elite and its artefacts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 46. [13] Juan E. Campo, “Visualising the hajj. Representations of a Changing Sacred Landscape Past and Present,” in The Hajj: Pilgrimage in Islam, ed. Eric Tagliacozzo and Shawkat M. Toorawa (Cambridge University Press, 2015): 269–87, at 269. [14] Ibid., 270.

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