A field guide to Islamic pattern
Girih, zellige, tashbik, muqarnas: the names behind the patterns, and what to look for when you meet them on a wall.
Islamic art has a visual vocabulary as precise as any architectural style, and most of its words are easy to learn. Once you know a handful of names, a tiled wall in Fez, a wooden screen in Cairo or a ceiling in Isfahan stops being a blur of ornament and becomes something you can read. The Pattern Atlas collection sets out a hundred of those words as plates, each built by construction rather than by eye.
Patterns made from geometry
Girih, the Persian word for knot, is a family of patterns built from five tile shapes with equal edges: a decagon, a pentagon, an elongated hexagon, a bowtie and a rhombus. Lines laid across the tiles at fixed angles join up into ten-fold stars and long interlacing bands. Tashbik, the Arabic word for interlace, is the strapwork itself: bands that pass over and under one another as they run through a star pattern, the way they do on carved wood and inlaid doors.
Most of these patterns grow from a star. Craftspeople grouped stars by the number of their points, and the six, eight, ten and twelve-pointed families each carry their own character. The eight-point star, called khatam in Persian and often drawn from a circle and two overlapping squares, is the one you will meet most often.
Patterns made by hand
Zellige is the North African craft of cutting glazed tiles into small pieces and setting them in mortar to build star patterns. Each piece is chipped by hand from a fired tile, which is why a zellige wall shimmers: no two pieces sit at quite the same angle. Mashrabiya and jali are screens. A mashrabiya is a lattice of turned wooden spindles that lets air and light into a room while keeping it private; a jali is the same idea cut through stone, common in South Asian buildings.
Patterns in three dimensions
Muqarnas are tiers of small niches, stepped and corbelled, that carry a dome or vault down to the walls beneath it. From below they read like a honeycomb or a cascade of tiny arches. Ablaq is simpler and just as striking: masonry laid in alternating courses of dark and light stone, a signature of Mamluk Cairo and Damascus.
Once you know a handful of names, ornament becomes something you can read.
Hanging the plates
The plates are designed to work as a series. Four or six in a grid, with equal gaps, make a calm study wall; a single plate sits well above a desk or on a bookshelf. Alternate the light and dark grounds, or keep to one, and frame them all in the same thin moulding so the drawings do the talking.
- Grid of four: Girih, Zellige, Tashbik, Khatam
- Grid of six: add Muqarnas and Mashrabiya
- A single plate: Star Families or Arch Forms above a desk