The eight-point star
Two squares, one turned on the other: how the khatam is drawn, where it marks the Quran, and where it appears in tile and stone.
Of all the shapes in Islamic geometric art, the eight-point star made from two squares is perhaps the easiest to recognise and the easiest to draw. It appears on manuscript pages and tile floors, carved in wood and cut in plaster, and it sits at the centre of countless larger patterns.
In Persian it is often called the khatam. In Arabic, when it is used as a mark in the Quran, it is called the Rub el Hizb. Our Khatam collection treats it as a subject in its own right, with twenty posters drawn in exact geometry and flat colour.
How it is drawn
You need only a compass and a straight edge. Draw a circle. Draw a square whose four corners touch the circle. Then draw a second square of the same size, turned by forty-five degrees, so that its corners fall exactly halfway between the corners of the first. Where the two squares overlap you get a regular octagon at the centre, and where they do not, you get eight equal points.
- Draw a circle and mark its centre.
- Draw two lines through the centre at right angles, and two more on the diagonals.
- Join the ends of the first pair of lines to make one square.
- Join the ends of the diagonals to make the second square.
That is the whole construction. Its simplicity is part of why it travelled so widely. Anyone with basic tools can draw it accurately, and the result fits neatly into a square grid, so it tiles well.
The Rub el Hizb
For recitation, the Quran is divided into thirty parts, each called a juz. Each juz is divided into two sections called a hizb, giving sixty in all, and each hizb is divided into quarters. The two-square star is printed in the margin of many copies of the Quran to mark the start of each quarter. Rub el Hizb means, roughly, quarter of a hizb.
Because of this, the shape is familiar to many Muslims from their own copies of the Quran long before they notice it in a building. Our print Rub el Hizb draws it in its plainest form: two overlapping squares and a small circle, in off-white line on deep teal.
In tile and stone
The eight-point star is a building block of larger patterns. One of the most common is the star-and-cross: eight-point stars set in a grid, with the spaces between them forming cross shapes. In thirteenth-century Iran, potters in Kashan made tiles in exactly these two shapes, lustre-painted stars and crosses that fitted together into whole wall surfaces. Examples survive in museum collections today.
In North Africa and al-Andalus, the craft of zellige assembled patterns from small pieces of glazed tile, each one cut by hand and set into plaster. The technique became widespread in the fourteenth century and can still be seen in the Alhambra in Granada and the madrasas of Fez. Star patterns are central to zellige, and eight-point stars appear constantly, often fitted between larger stars of twelve or sixteen points. The craft is still practised in Morocco.
The star also turns up far from historic sites. The floor plan of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur is based on it.
A compass, a straight edge and two squares: the whole construction fits on the back of an envelope.
Prints built on the star
Across the Khatam and two Zellige collections, the same shape is pushed in different directions. Star and Cross in Khatam shows the classic all-over pattern in off-white and teal. Star and Cross in Zellige · Colour Field makes it from large blush and rose clay stars. Khatam, Close crops in so tightly that only a handful of tiles remain.
Others play with the construction itself. Overprint lays two translucent squares over one another so the centre deepens. Knot weaves the two squares over and under each other. Sixteen offsets two stars to make a sixteen-point figure, which is how many of the larger rosettes in tilework begin.
Hanging geometric prints
Geometric prints reward a little care when hanging. Because the shapes are so regular, a frame that is even slightly crooked is easy to see, so use a spirit level and two hooks rather than one. They also look well in pairs or grids, where the repeated shape becomes a pattern across the wall: four small Khatam prints in a two-by-two grid can have as much presence as a single large one.