Embroidery

In Islam

Embroidery, which was widely developed in Islamic lands, is an application by means of a needle on a woven fabric that is stretched over a hoop or a tilted frame. Embroidery thread can be made of cotton, wool, silk or gold and silver. Pearls and precious stones were also used. The stitches that compose the decorative motif fall into four categories: running stitches, used for making simple lines; cross stitches such as the herringbone stitch; satin stitches for filling colour. The flat fishbone stitch falls into this category and is frequently used for filling in an area; it can be seen in much of the embroidery from the Maghreb. What is referred to as “feather stitch” is often employed for decorating quilts and for creating effects of relief. This is the technique that has been employed, using metallic threads, for most 19th-century velvets. And lastly, loop or pile stitches such as chain stitch, used for creating motifs, a technique very frequent in Turkish and Algerian crafts. An art that requires little material but a great deal of patience, embroidery has customarily been women’s work and executed inside the home. On the other hand, embroidery that employed metallic thread tended to be done by men, in the workshops. 

The Orient and Anterior Asia are now viewed as the cradles of embroidery, a hypothesis that new archaeological finds in Syria and Mesopotamia have confirmed. During the sacking of Ctesiphon in 637, an immense carpet decorated with needlework came to haunt the imaginations of the Arabs: Known as the Springtime of Chosroes or Bahar-i-Khusraw, it reproduced, using precious stones, all the marvels of an interior Persian courtyard. And again, there was a legendry carpet decorated with tales from Persia and embroidered portraits of the caliph al-Mantasir, son of al-Mutawakkil, who was able to read into it his approaching downfall. During the Middle Ages, the work of embroidery, while known to Byzantines, would be considered in the West as a specialty of the Muslim world. The word “raqqâm”, which in Arabic designates to embroider, passed into the Medieval Latin with the word recamare: “embroider”, from the Italian ricamare and the Spanish recamar. Some of the earliest examples of embroidered inscriptions produced in the tirâz can be attributed to Iraq. They carry the name of the Abbasid caliph al-Muktafi (902-908) and are characterised by embroidery on white cotton; others, stitched on linen, are considered to be Egyptian. This is proof that the procedure was already firmly in place in the State workshops and exclusively the handiwork of men. Another factor that has contributed to tying embroidery with the Muslim world is a notable increase in the use of gold and silver thread in productions during the Fatimid epoch and the Umayyad dynasty in Córdoba. In Cairo, during the 11th century, during the canal festival, the traveller Nasir-Khusraw noted that all the costumes and accessories were embroidered with gold thread. And ibn Zuluq also noted that during the time of pilgrimage, a textile with all-over embroidery in gold thread and precious stones, the “Shemsa” or “Sun”, was either sent to Mecca or displayed from the heights of the palace walls, making the ruling Fatimid caliph the focus point of the community of the Faithful.

But Egypt was not alone in this. The tirâz workshops under the orders of the Córdoba caliphate were producing similar embroideries. The “Shroud of Autun” in Spain that supposedly wrapped the relics of Saint Lazarus is an extraordinary blue cloth covered in medallions and embroidered with princely emblems. It is thought to have been manufactured in Andalusia around 1007 as a repayment to ‘Abd al-Malik, son of al-Mansûr and has been coupled with another embroidered silk and gold piece in conservation in Spain in the Oña Church. A later piece is the chasuble which purportedly belonged to Thomas Becket in deposit at the cathedral of Fermo (Italy) which was made in Almeria in 1116. It is comparable to the two other pieces both in terms of its technique and its astrological iconography. All three bear witness to the capacity of embroidery to develop decorative motifs that imported spiritual meaning and hence raised the status of the finished textile to that of a sacred object. When analysing the silk productions of Norman Sicily, we should bear in mind that the Christian world was very sensitive to this. A prime example is the silk coronation robe made for the Norman king Roger II of Sicily, a robe manufactured in Palermo in 1133 (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum). The robe is encircled by a propitious Kufic inscription and decorated on both sides with a lion defeating a camel. The embroidery in gold and silver has a total of five thousand pearls. Judging from its technique and iconography, then, it makes a convincing claim for belonging to the Muslim art. Its semi-circular shape, its pure luxury and the technique employed present all the qualities of the “pluvial”, that liturgical cape that would be frequently produced in Christian Spain; yet, all the way up to the sixteenth century, the cape kept its Oriental aspect, most notably apparent in the vestments of southern Germany, Spain and Italy.

The advance of the Turkish people intensified in the Eastern Mediterranean—Seldjukids, Mamluks, and then Ottomans—an historical fact that is not unrelated to the rise of embroidery and its steady replacement of woven textiles. This trend could be seen in Egypt as early as the Ayyubid epoch (1171-1250). The canvases of linen once used for tapestry weave gave way to embroidered registers or assemblages of pieces of silk used in applique and enriched with embroidery. In Lebanon, under the Mamluks, the tunics with embroidered plastrons discovered in the Quadisha caves show a clear Turcoman influence in their geometric ornamentation. The handiwork of women, these embroidered silks on cotton, which date from around 1300, are comparable to robes we see today in certain villages in Syria and Palestine.

In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean came to popularise embroidery through its intercultural exchanges. In Istanbul, all textile furnishings in the house—table cloths, wall hangings, bed covers, the cloth for covering bread (bohça) and hammam towels were embroidered. The fashion continued to spread, resulting in the embroidered scarves (tanchifa) and curtains sewn by Algerian women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  The designs in polychrome silk on muslin are composed of veined corollas, miniature flowers and intertwining stems. While the same predominantly blue and red palette and applique technique can be seen in crafts from Istanbul and in the Bukhara suzani, the ornamental vocabulary also borrowed from Renaissance Italian and Spanish velvets—themselves very similar to Ottoman productions. Among some of the oldest embroideries we know of from Algiers is a scarf used as a decorative cloth for a statue of the Virgin in the Chartres Cathedral. It was presumably offered as gift in 1650 by the Prince of Condé. This penchant for embroidered garments infused with Turkish or European motifs became the typical style of Moroccan embroideries from Fez and Tétouan but also of those in Tunis, where gold “passing” and sequins were very much in vogue.  This was primarily an urban art, transmitted from city to city, from seraglio to seraglio, a blend of “noble” themes, as that of the four flowers created for Soleiman the Magnificent, and traditional themes that originated in the Balkans, in Aegean cities and southern Italy or that were transmitted from the Arabs and Jews of Andalusia.   

R.G.