Patrick Weiler

"Prayer Rugs" are an interesting category of oriental rugs. It has been suggested that the majority were never made for prayer. I suppose it is probably likely, due to the fact that the majority were made for sale and use in Western homes as floor rugs. Some entered the West as decorations for Christian churches, such as those in Transylvania.
It has also been suggested that the "prayer" design is a view through a window. Others think it is an architectural representation of the front or interior of a building.
In the book Belouch Prayer Rugs, it is noted:
"Unfortunately most citizens of Persia are of the Shia sect of Islam and do not weave prayer rugs. Since Belouchis do weave prayer rugs and dearly love them, we have conjectured that they circumvented this prohibition in the form of "latent" prayer rugs."
This is interesting because "Belouch" and "Prayer Rug" are almost synonymous.
There are many formal Persian "prayer-format" rugs, such as Kahan, etc, that exhibit a floral or garden scene. This could constitute a secular, non-prayer version of a rug with a niche design.
Armenian-woven (Christian) prayer rugs complicate the issue. If one considers prayer rugs to have been made for Islamic prayer use, why would Christian weavers make them? Perhaps the same market-oriented view is held by factories in China that make crucifixes. They are a marketable commodity.

Many prayer rugs are strikingly beautiful; with graceful, calming designs. Others are bold, geometric and colorful.
Some, however, are unquestionably lacking in pulchritude.
Here is a stellar example:

It is from Camardi in the Nigde region of south-central Turkey.
You will notice that the photo quality is rather bad. I decided that, due to the focus of this Salon, it probably does not really matter if the rug looks good anyway!

Here is a close-up showing the colors more true-to-life. Or, as rug collectors might say, true-to-synthetic-life:

The yellow and pink are the only colors that are not washed out or faded. And they will probably remain that way in whatever trash heap this pitiful piece spends the next century in.
Both ends are missing knots, the selvage is damaged in many places, there is extreme wear in some areas and the design is a miserable echo of the glorious origins of its type. I suspect it was a commercially-made rug of around a hundred years ago. When I bought it a fifth of a century ago it was the welcome mat just inside the door of a store selling antiques.
I probably walked over it a dozen times before I realized that it was obviously an extremely valuable, exceptionally old, rare and beautiful best-of-type piece which the cognoscenti had failed to notice.
Boy, was I ever wrong.

Patrick Weiler

Brian Lynn

Hi
I keep getting the feeling when we say ugly in this discussion we are making value judgments as much as we are making esthetic judgments. If Hali wanted this Nigde rug for the cover and you could sell it at auction for 6 figures would you start to notice some redeeming features?

I am not sure anyone cares but the speculation on the religion of the Baluch or Belouch is Shi’a may not be accurate. When we refer to the rug weaving Baluch of Iran and Afghanistan we are speaking of what scholars call the Western Baluch (Baloch). In Afghanistan they are Sunni and in Iran they are majority Sunni with a lesser part Shi’a.

As for Armenian prayer rugs and Persian prayer rugs in general I wonder how much of the responsibility of identifying Mihrab or arch rugs with prayer has to do with the writing of early scholars such as the Germans who wrote over 100 years ago about 15th and 16th classic prayer rugs such as those in the Topkapi. I suspect that if the people selling the rugs to the west knew that westerners called them prayer rugs and would pay a premium for them then who were they to disagree. Possibly arguing against that is when speaking with people in Iran they call the mihrab style rugs “Prayer Rugs”.
Brian

Steve Price

Hi

This seems relevant to me, might be of interest to others.

Steve Price

Patrick Weiler

Hello Brian,

"when we say ugly in this discussion we are making value judgments as much as we are making esthetic judgments"

You are absolutely correct. This Salon is an opportunity to educate novice and experienced collectors regarding characteristics of weavings which are considered negative to both monetary value and esthetic appreciation.
Way too often rug books, web sites and rug clubs accentuate only the finest of pieces without differentiating the details which would allow one to make a determination of relative quality and value. It is as though consumers were only presented with Ferrari's, Lamborghini's, Rolls Royce's and the like, and then they were asked to decide which Yugo or Volga they would prefer to buy.
Some web sites denigrate the lack of sophistication within the collector community, but unless the opportunity is presented to show what not to buy, how will collectors ever know?

By the way, my rare, exclusive, valuable Camardi is available for a significant sum, although a non-refundable deposit of several hundred thousand Euro's is required as a prerequisite to be allowed to submit an offer.

Patrick (I put the Trick in PaTrick) Weiler

Patrick Weiler

Here is a Baluch prayer rug which is not in the Absolutely Necessary To Have category. Notice the irregular shape, monotonous regularity of design, limited color range, overly busy-ness and condition issues:



In this picture you can see that the spandrels are uneven. The left side is narrower, with a thicker trunk of the tree of life than the right side.



Here you can see the selvedge melts away, the flatweave end is disappearing and the heavy wear is obvious.



It is an example of a later Baluch-type prayer rug of which thousands were made. As much as we may like to think of the weavers as hard-suffering, nomadic wanderers, this piece was probably woven commercially.
It is obviously earlier than the multitude of mid-century copies, but not of the quality of pre-commercial masterpieces.
The Tree-of-Life design, with little remaining of the realistic rendition of the best and earliest pieces, is common to Baluch prayer rugs.
It is marginally Ugly. The dyes appear to be natural, but it is known that Baluch weavers used natural dyes much later than most commercial weavers did. The colors include white, black, maroon, camel, red, deep aubergine and blue. The construction is asymmetric, open left, with 9x9 knots per square inch. It would have to be considered a Quasi-Collectible.

Patrick Weiler

Patrick Weiler

Steve,

In the Salon on Prayer Rugs you linked to, you showed a
"Caucasian bagface, or one of the smallest prayer rugs in the world. 19th century."
It is 20"x17" in size.
You mentioned that you had a first-hand report that it was not a prayer rug, but had been removed from the rest of the bag.
Here is a piece I have had for several years. It is awkwardly sized to be a bagface, and at 22" long and 12 to 13-1/2" wide it is close in size to the piece you showed. There are no remnants of closures or of wear if it had been folded in half, and no obvious signs it was ever anything else than a very small flatweave. The sumak diamond near the top of the field makes it look like a prayer rug, but it is certainly too small for a typical prayer rug.


A recent Muslim visitor from Syria remarked that it was a shepherd's prayer rug.
Shepherds wear shoes when in the field praying, he said, and they needed a prayer rug small enough that it would not take up much room. It would be just the size for bowing and touching the forehead to.
Consensus is that it could be from NW Iran, perhaps from the Varamin area.
The field color may be camel wool, and the dark brown strip along the inner field and the outer selvedge wrapping are animal hair, probably goat or horse.
I have not read or heard of small pieces like this described this way, but it seems to make sense.
It is not an Ugly piece, but is tangentially related to the piece you showed and to Prayer Rugs.

Patrick Weiler

Steve Price

Hi Pat

The bagface to which I referred has a clear arch form, and I included it in that essay just to illustrate the absurdity of the belief (still held by some, as far as I know) that every rug with an arch was woven for Muslim prayer.

Regards

Steve Price

Joel Greifinger

Patrick,

Here's a contemporary Afghan mixed-technique prayer rug that I owned a while back, when I first got interested in rugs. While not particularly notable, it's got some pleasing enough features. It is not an obvious object of disdain.

Somehow I missed what was immediately obvious to my adult daughter, an artist recently steeped in university art history courses. When she saw it, she started to laugh. Referring to the bottom of the rug, she assumed that I had made a deliberate choice to display this flagrantly phallic design and that this representation had some relation to the intended symbolism of the prayer rug. I spent some time denying that I took her reference, but have never been able to see it in quite the same light since.



It has since left the house on good terms, being released it to its current happy owner through the wonders of eBay.

Joel Greifinger

Steve Price

Hi Joel

Here's the complete anatomical schematic, from Douglass and Peters The Lost Language (1990).



Regards

Steve Price

PS - My favorite element here is the sperm cells. They're microscopic, of course, and the fact that they're part of archetypical prayer rug design is compelling evidence that the microscope wasn't invented by Leeuwenhoek in 17th century Europe, but much earlier, in western Asia.

Patrick Weiler

Joel,

Not only is that rug a sign for a sex store, but it also shows a display of sex toys along the top of the field.
What kind of University did your kid go to, anyway?
This may be a rug for a separate topic, but hopefully not in THIS Salon. Ugly is bad enough. Tasteless is off topic!

Patrick Weiler