2025 Calendar - Textiles from the Islamic World
- Arts & Culture
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Written by Sumru Belger Krody, The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum
All photographs courtesy of The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum
Textiles have played many vital roles and carry immense significance across the vast Islamic lands from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. They take myriad of forms, as they span centuries of diverse ethnic backgrounds, across huge swathes of geographic space where the Muslim faith has dominated for over a millennium.
Textiles take on countless forms, designs and shapes by the agency of artists and their culture. They reflect the artists’ interest in many aspects of the natural world through floral decorations or representations of the fauna—whether rendered in a naturalistic or stylized manner. Additionally, as in other forms of art across cultures and visual vocabulary, abstract creations occupy an important place.
Textiles cast a light on the multifaceted and diverse identities conveying layers of owner history, from gender and ethnicity to spiritual beliefs and political affiliations. In decoding the messages embedded in the fabrics—materials, colors and designs—we can understand the esthetic richness and expressive potential of textile arts while unfolding the fascinating stories of human life and creativity. In many cultures, people differentiate both textually and verbally between one type of textile and another in detail; thus, this extensive, specialized vocabulary some Muslim societies employ to distinguish types, textures and functions of textiles points to their primary importance.
As clothing, textiles fulfill the desire for beautification and self-expression, conveying personal and group identity. Variations in weight and fineness of weave distinguish fabrics for daily wear or ceremony in different seasons. For centuries in predominantly Muslim societies, textile possessions indicated the wealth of individuals. Many bridal trousseaux contain textiles of many forms, forming more than half of a bride’s wealth and standing equal to cash.
Certainly, the Islamic courts of the medieval and early modern periods contained the largest textile assemblages. The sumptuous regalia of dignitaries in court ceremonies symbolized the superiority of their rulers and the wealth that power could muster. Outside court circles, men and women wore their clothing in layers. They donned similarly tailored garments fitted with draping and accessories that differentiated each gender.
The earliest apparel reflected the three distinct cultural zones where Islam had spread in the early centuries of the religion: loose, untailored garments of Arabs suitable for their desert climate; tunics and wraps worn in Hellenistic cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean; and tailored and fitted-sleeved robes including trousers worn by nomadic horse-riding Turkic- Iranian Central Asians. The types of clothing established in the early Islamic period still predominate in the same regions where the religion is practiced today. As furnishing, textiles have kept people warm or cool, depending on the climate, as well as afforded privacy and a feeling of security and belonging while enhancing the esthetics of the home environment. Textiles convert multipurpose rooms according to need. A bedroom transforms to a dining room by stacking mattresses, pillows and quilts on one side and spreading cloths and napkins on the floor.
Textiles have also functioned as domiciles, creating walls, doors and roofs of tents nomadic people have dwelled in for centuries, from Mali to Central Asia. In the medieval and early modern periods, some Muslim rulers and their retinues relied on movable housing beyond the nomadic function of shelter and shade. Tents emblemized royal authority. The wealth of dynasties deployed royal progressions, wars, hunting expeditions and diplomatic receptions in these domiciles. Carpets, cushions and hangings with lavish decorations using expensive material covered every corner of these tents for prestige and reflected the elevated status of the ruler. Textiles played an active role in diplomatic gift giving practiced among rulers. This required vast textile resources for each court, and their imperial treasuries housed thousands upon thousands of costly fabrics. These included not only the clothing worn by rulers and their retinues, and gifts for foreign dignitaries but also furnishing fabrics and tents for receptions.
Throughout the Islamic world, textiles have also featured prominently in religious observances. Prayer rugs render everyday spaces appropriate for communion with Allah, while those such as the white plain cloth ihram worn by men during Hajj imbue wearers with spiritual and sacred legitimacy. Symbolic or narrative patterns, and even verbal inscriptions, express spiritual beliefs in tangible form while heightening the sensory experience of worship or ritual. Although the patterns in the textiles were most often secular, some textiles included Arabic script and verses from the holy Qur’an.
Tiraz is a term referring to the inscribed medieval Islamic textiles bestowed upon worthy individuals by caliphs and rulers. Tiraz inscriptions contain blessings, and many include the contemporaneous caliph’s name and his honorifics. Fabrics created for use in Islamic religious contexts often represent the technical and esthetic apex of the textile arts at the time of their creation. While costly materials and superior artistry embody the devotion and respect of believers, they also strongly proclaim the prestige of the owner, institution or patron. The best example of this type of textile is the kiswah, the fabric highlighting Qur’anic verses covering the Ka’ba, the holiest site in Islam.
Textiles envelop people and environments in such abundance that they create an esthetic affecting the decorative elements of other media, from architecture to metalwork. Furthermore, they affect ideas and communication by providing a standard to judge tangible and intangible objects. Because of their fragility, many such textiles have failed to survive to this day compared to how many once were produced. Nevertheless, a considerable number now stand preserved in museums and continue to display the grandeur and power of Islamic textile manufacture in the medieval and early modern periods. They are exhibited, published and available for studies. These historical textiles have inspired many contemporary artists and craftspeople, such as fashion designers, working across various media, enriching contemporary and future textiles.
For more information about The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum, and its programs and exhibitions, visit museum.gwu.edu.
The Hijri Calendar
In 638 CE, six years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, Islam’s second caliph, ‘Umar, recognized the necessity of a calendar to govern the affairs of Muslims. This was first a practical matter. Correspondence with military and civilian officials in the newly conquered lands required dating. Pre-Islamic Arab customs identified years after the occurrence of major events. But Persia used a different calendar from Syria, where the caliphate was later based; Egypt used yet another. Each of these calendars had a different starting point, or epoch. The Sasanids, the ruling dynasty of Persia, used the date of the accession of the last Sasanid monarch, Yazdagird III, June 16, 632 CE. Syria, which until the Muslim conquest was part of the Byzantine Empire, used a form of the Roman Julian calendar, with an epoch of October 1, 312 BCE. Egypt used the Coptic calendar, with an epoch of August 29, 284 CE. Although all were solar calendars, and hence geared to the seasons and containing 365 days, each also had a different system for periodically adding days to compensate for the fact that the true length of the solar year is not 365 but 365.2422 days.
In pre-Islamic Arabia, other systems of measuring time had been used. In South Arabia, some calendars apparently were lunar, while others were lunisolar, using months based on the phases of the moon but intercalating days outside the lunar cycle to synchronize the calendar with the seasons. On the eve of Islam, the Himyarites appear to have used a calendar based on the Julian form, but with an epoch of 110 bce. In central Arabia, the course of the year was charted by the position of the stars relative to the horizon at sunset or sunrise, dividing the ecliptic into 28 equal parts corresponding to the location of the moon on each successive night of the month. The names of the months in that calendar have continued in the Islamic calendar to this day and would seem to indicate that before Islam, some sort of lunisolar calendar was in use, though it is not known to have had an epoch other than memorable local events.
There were two other reasons ‘Umar rejected existing solar calendars. The Qur’an, in Chapter 10, Verse 5, states that time should be reckoned by the moon. Not only that, but calendars also used by the Persians, Syrians and Egyptians were identified with other religions and cultures. He therefore decided to create a calendar specifically for the Muslim community. It would be lunar, and it would have 12 months, each with 29 or 30 days.
This gives the lunar year 354 days, 11 days fewer than the solar year. For the epoch of the new Muslim calendar, ‘Umar chose the Hijra, the emigration of the Prophet Muhammad and 70 Muslims from Makkah to Madinah, where Muslims first attained religious and political autonomy. Hijra thus occurred on 1 Muharram of the year 1 according to the Islamic calendar, which begins the hijri era. (This date corresponds to July 16, 622 CE, on the Gregorian calendar.) Today in the West, it is customary, when writing hijri dates, to use the abbreviation ah, which stands for the Latin anno hegirae, “year of the Hijra.”
Because the Islamic lunar calendar is 11 days shorter than the solar, it is therefore not synchronized to the seasons. Its festivals, which fall on the same days of the same lunar months each year, make the round of the seasons every 33 solar years. This 11-day difference between the lunar and the solar year accounts for the difficulty of converting dates from one system to the other.
Converting Years and Dates
Online calculators can be found by searching “Gregorian-hijri calendar calculator” or similar terms. The following equations show how the conversion is made mathematically. However, keep in mind that in each case, the result is only the year in which the other calendar’s year begins. For example, 2024 Gregorian begins in 1445 hijri and ends in 1446; correspondingly, 1446 hijri begins in 2024 Gregorian and ends in 2025.
Gregorian year =
[(32 x Hijri year) ÷ 33] + 622
Hijri year =
[(Gregorian year – 622) x 33] ÷ 32
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