A Second Discussion of the Star-Shaped Islamic Tiles

As I return to the Islamic tiles that I briefly discussed one month ago, I am approaching them with a new, more informed mindset regarding Islamic scribal work and material culture. In my previous blog post, I stressed the superior importance of the scribal artwork over the floral designs in the interior of the tiles. However, it is clear to me now that I underestimated the complexity of this relationship; a further examination of the tiles as well as a consideration of their audience and of certain background literature yields conflicting conclusions as to whether or not the text on the object was fully appreciated by the viewer.

Certain evidence reinforces my prior conclusion. For example, the two tiles, which were elements of the same wall in an Iranian shrine, are of the same brown-white color scheme. Unless the objects that the Harvard Art Museums acquired were coincidentally matching tiles in a multicolored wall, which seems unlikely, the entire wall (or a significant portion of it) must have been similarly colored. Noting that the brown covers much more area than the white, the wall must have appeared fairly uniform in color. Given that the text is placed on a contrasting white background, the portion of the tile containing text must have truly jumped out at the viewer amidst the sea of brown. If one’s eyes would indeed have been drawn to the text, then what would one have noticed next? Certainly, such calligraphic artwork would have been intimately familiar for all Islamic viewers, and even more so for literate viewers who would have recognized the text as verses from the Quran. As Beatrice Gruendler noted in “Book Culture before Print,” parchment versions of the Quran in the Islamic world “became the earliest object[s] of scribal art.” Thus, these tiles follow in a grand artistic and textual tradition, which would have been well established by the time they were created in the thirteenth century. Intriguingly, even without seeing any portion of the tiles other than the text, one could guess that they date from later than the ninth century. This is due to the presence of diacritics marking the vowels in the tiles, which Gruendler says were not regularly used until the beginning of the tenth century. Moreover, the diacritics make the text much easier to read, again suggesting that the text in the tiles was of significant importance.

Yet, I have neglected thus far to truly contemplate the location of the tiles and their audience. These considerations lead to strikingly different conclusions. First, I assumed in my earlier blog post that viewers in the Middle Ages would have been looking at the tiles from the same distance that I was in the gallery. However, it is abundantly clear from lecture and section discussions that this was not necessarily the case; the tiles could have been quite far away from their observers. If this is true, it puts one of my previous points in question. In my other blog post on the Islamic tiles, I thought that the “rushed” appearance of the floral patterns in comparison to the neatly ordered text indicated a greater importance attached to the latter. I can take this one step further and posit that this appearance may be due to these tiles being “mass produced,” in which a large number of scribes and artists (if one can make such a distinction) were crafting a large number of tiles of this type. For the viewer far from the tiled wall, nevertheless, this reduced quality would not have made an observable difference, as it is only from up close that once can discern the imprecise lines in the tiles. Furthermore, the diminished care accorded to each individual tile suggests that perhaps there were a large number of tiles to be made for the shrine’s wall or that the shrine was less grand than I initially imagined and its creator could not afford higher quality tiles. Any of the above hypotheses would mean that people would likely have not been paying close attention to the verses on the individual tiles but rather looking at the wall as a whole. In fact, such an “overall” observance of religious wall decoration in the medieval Islamic world is supported by the text of Naser-e Khosraw’s Book of Travels. For example, when Khosraw visited the Dome of the Rock, surely abundant calligraphic decoration was present in the interior of the edifice. Yet, this is not what Khosraw notes down in his description of the Dome. He notes, rather, the architecture, the shapes and colors of the interior, and the “geometric designs.” It would thus appear that, as today, the average individual visiting a religious site would have viewed the interior decoration as a whole rather than closely analyzing the constituent text and images.

I do not believe that the conclusions of my first blog post on the tiles are entirely invalid due to the points raised in this one. There is still distinctly more effort taken on the part of the tiles’ creators to write and align the text on the perimeter as opposed to precisely drawing the patterns within. Additionally, a religious figure or devout individual who spent a great deal of time in the shrine may very well have paid close attention to the Quranic verses on the tiles. It seems, nonetheless, that for the casual viewer the tiled wall would have been observed as a whole, with the text and floral design melding into each other to form an iridescent and beautiful place of worship.