The Keyhole and the Wall

" The Prophet took me by the hand and led me into the Hateem...Perform salah here if you wish to enter the Ka’bah"

Apse in a 'Bellini' carpet, Anatolia 16th/17th, The Metropolitan Museum

El Hateem wall, Ka'bah

"When I (Aisha) expressed the wish to perform salah within the Ka’bah, the Prophet took me by the hand and led me into the Hijr (Hateem) where he said, ‘Perform salah here if you wish to enter the Ka’bah because this is part of the Baytullah."

The Hateem is a low semi-circular wall part of the Ka'bah. The Ka'bah complex seen from above has this design.

2-Ka'bah and Hateem plan

It is hard not to parallel it to a rare carpet design woven in the Caucasian area. It is suggestive of the squared building of the Ka'bah connected to the Hateem.

3-Caucasian carpet

Memory goes back more so to an illustrious rug motif, the so called 'Bellini' or keyhole/re-entrant, where a similar design (usually octagonal) appears indented in the bottom line of a niche drawing.

4-'Bellini' prayer rug, Anatolia, circa 1500, Museum of Islamic Art Berlin

The niche is usually thought to depict a mihrab, the carved space in the qibla wall oriented to the Great Mosque of Mecca.
The origin of the niche/mihrab in Muslim religious architecture has been thoroughly researched revealing a multifarious nature (J. Spurr: the arch-mihrab-gate form acted as a multivalent master symbol in Islamic culture that could be represented with a variable specific iconography and could be inflected in particular ways depending upon immediate context).
All considered, the connection with the Ka'bah is very likely one prominent feature to the point that  the mihrab has been also taken as a vertical representation of the holy building itself (J. Natan 2013).

Primarily, the niche carved in the wall is the space reserved for prayers and sermons repeating the prophet's acts in Medina and then Mecca. The mihrab was probably created (from the ubiquitous niche) to innovate a real Muslim liturgy based on the prophet's guidance (E. Whelan).


In architecture it was soon typified by a volume carved in the wall taking the name of mihrab mujawwaf different from a flat mihrab.

5-Khan Tulun madrassa (built 1224), mihrab, Aleppo, V&A photo credits

This volume was signified also in neighbour cultures representations.

6-Biblia Hebraica, folio from the Leningrad Codex, 1008, The National Library of Russia

Islamic art soon devised a unique spatial notion diverging from the scientific achievements Muslim science had reached on optics and vision to the point that scientists used to complain the poor precision of artists.
Quite remote from a realistic vision, spatial rendition refuses perspective. Perspective, in fact, offers the  priority range of human eye not giving justice to the more complex content Muslim ideology adds to the image.

Islamic painting adopts "overlapping and diagonally projecting parallel lines" to signify the space between foreground and background (and not converging lines to a vanishing point like in European Renaissance art). Parallel lines introduce a flattened and layered spatial vision.

The seduction of Putiphar, Behzad 1488

Architecture in turn avoids a realistic perspective by means of disproportionate elements, absence of converging lines and multiplied parallel layers moving backwards. The eye is not invited to experience the interior space which is conveniently flattened .
Depht is implied not explicitly rendered.
On the contrary, European visual art works with proportionate elements in a moving grid converging to a point  creating a volumetric experience (Latif and Haider).

                                                  7-Miri Arab madrassa, Bukhara 16th

The use of an allover decoration helps diminishing the volumetric experience.

8-Wooden mihrab, Damsaköy Taşkınpaşa mosque Ankara Museum

9-Tile mihrab, Ulu mosque, Birgi, Izmirn region, 1313-1314

Obviously, moving from architecture to a two-dimensional image as that of textiles, space rendition can  become extreme: flat and unrealistic/abstract.
In carpets, specifically, the axis does not move backwards, everything happens in the foreground axis. The real shape of the floor within the niche, without changing axis and converging lines, should then appear as if vertically drawn on the same level as the niche design.
No smooth transition and no perception of front and back wall. On the other hand, disproportionate scale applied to the flat woolen surface becomes unrealistic. The floor inside the niche appears small, very small; vertical and not horizontal. Arguably, as congenial to the Islamic sensibility as not to the western.

10-'Bellini' prayer rug, last quarter of the 15th, Anatolia, Topkapi Saray

Some exemplars propose only the entrance to the niche.

11-Multiple niche carpet, fragment, Anatolia, 14th, TIEM

12-Niche carpet, Anatolia, 19th ?, Alexander collection

Keyhole or re-entrant design characterises a group of Anatolian niche rugs dated from the late 15th to the 16th, and a small number of 'Damaschino' or 'Para-Mamluke' rugs. This type appears in Italian painting between 1470 and 1562.
One single existent Mamluke is a stunning masterwork.

Mamluk carpet, circa 1500, Museum for Islamic Art Berlin

Ahmed I, Sultan and supreme Caliph of the Islamic world, 1610, issued an edict forbidding from depicting mihrab or Ka'bahin carpets traded to infidels. Was he referring to the niche with the indented space? Indeed the numerous carpets destined to the European market in the 17th century, mainly the so-called Transylvanian, lack of this unique detail (Ionescu 2006).

In turn, very rare are surviving carpets with a realistic depiction of the holy building in Mecca. 

14-Ka'bah carpet, Anatolia 16th? Istanbul

On the other hand, Near Eastern niche rugs likely contain typical elements of the Holy Place - stylised minbars - as if allusion to it. Logic would interpret the medallions as metaphor for the sacred presence both of god and the prophet (who first prayed at the Ka'bah)

15-The Ballard Bellini carpet, Anatolia 16th/17th, The Metropolitan Museum. Paired mimbars below the floating medallion

In the 17th century production of tile panels representing the Masjid al Haram bloomed feasibly balancing the lesser output of  Mihrab/Ka'bah carpets according to the Sultan's edict.

16-Masjid al Haram tile, Iznik 17th Aga Khan Museum

The Ahmed I edict seems curiously to refer to the mihrab and Ka'bah image. It is a point of fact that in 17th century European painting keyhole prayer rugs do not appear anymore.
Is the keyhole design that qualifies the niche as a mihrab mujawwaf (niche carved in the qibla)?
Is the keyhole similarity to the Hateem that identifies the niche pattern as the Ka'bah?
It seems indeed an attractive inference.

An apse protruding from or indented in a precinct was likely a different pattern. Its arrangement in a double mirroring design is still mysterious. Love for symmetry? A group of early Anatolian carpets found in the Divrigi mosque represents the former type. Balpinar-Hirsch 1988 suppose it was the depiction of a basin.
A fertile progeny, misnamed' shield' carpets, populated the Caucasus in the 18th and 19th century.

17-Anatolian carpet 16th/17th, the Vakiflar Museum

In the same way, the latter type with double inward apses appears in the Anatolian repertoire of mirrored motifs. The minbar motifs encircling the central medallion hint at an architectural and religious discourse, again, and, at the 'Bellini' type.

18-The Parsons Todd double Re-entrant carpet, Anatolia, 17th/18th ?, The Macculloch Hall Museum photocredits azerbaijanrugs.com

Scholarly interpretations of the re-entry vary from the primeval mound and an ablutional fountain to the entrance of the niche.

The primeval mound is an image of creational myths in most ancient religions from China, India and Egypt to the Pelasgians. Often compared with the cosmic egg, it arises from the original sea as place of divine creation.

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In Chinese/Buddhist tradition the mound on top of the primeval sea took also the shape of a stupa (temple) in memory of those built by disciples to honour Buddha's ashes.

19-RKO type rug, Gansu late 18th,  Eskenazi, photo credits Hali 2000

The ablution basin in Anatolian religious architecture was soon moved out of the interior space where it was usually placed under the dome's oculus to signify the world axis in pre-Islamic traditions. Few buildings in Anatolia preserve it inside. Usually, it is placed in the fronting porched courtyard.

20- Divrigi hospital

Otherwise, miniature works show similar water pools gracing palaces' gardens, a different discourse from ritual prayer. At other times, a ritual water jug (ibrik) is associated to the mihrab pattern signifying ablution, but not in early times.

21-Garden pool and fountain, Tabriz folio 1530-40, Chinese and Greek painting competition, the Bruschettini collection detail

Purification rites from pre-Islamic time survive in Iran.
Probably derived from the Mithraic use of a basin filled with water, then adapted to host the Zoroastrian fire, it appears as a reserve carved in the floor facing or inside the mihrab. But nothing similar exists in Anatolia.

22-Olijetu Ilkhanid room, Isfahan early 14th

23-Jameh mosque, Yazd 14th

The multifarious nature of the Muslim world is a fact, more so in early times. Hard to disentangle and attribute diverse elements composing the prisma. The weavers' necessity for diverse patterns conforming to traditions yet flexible to innovate did not make things easier to understand. But let recall the keyhole design to be most relevant in the Anatolian Ottoman culture likely for the adherence to Sunni prescriptions, besides the indisputable karstic heterodox presences.
Formalism and puritanicalism imbued also the arts, more so those connected to ritual observance. Architecture and linear geometry provided the advocated abstract/unrealistic representation-flat and frontal- best represented in textiles.

24-Anatolian prayer rug, 16th, The Metropolitan Museum

25-Anatolian carpet, 16th, Vakiflar Museum

A small rural mosque, dated to the 7th to 8th centuries C.E. in the area north of Be'er Sheva, Israel.

The image shows the original indentation of the mihrab wherein the preacher was intended to pray.

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Appendix

In Turkmen weavings a uniquely shaped rug exists that seems to properly fit the indented floor to pray on inside the mihrab.
It has been interpreted as funeral rug to be put over the coffin, a prayer rug for a child, a cradle and a horse trapping (see W. Swan http://turkotek.com/salon_00002/messages/89.html).
E. Tsareva,  leading authority on Turkmen weavings, understands the unusual shape of the upper border to fit a funerary context and  calls it ayatlyk (Carpets of Central Asian Nomads, 1993)

A group of turkmen shaped rugs called salanchak

Obviously, if the rug was a private object to bring along in the mosque it should not be strictly shaped and scaled; if a mosque property, it should. The niche shape can vary from a curved to a polygonal and a stepped, and rugs follow.

The Medina mihrab, The Israel Museum Jerusalem 

Rustem Pasha mosque, Istanbul

Poikalyan Mosque, Bukhara and a 'salanchak' shaped felt

Stepped mihrab mujawwaf, Shir Kebir mosque, Dekhistan 10th-11th

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