Ka’ba Tile

At the centre of this tile, a small dark cube stands inside a ring, and every arcade, minaret and label on it is arranged around that point.

The cube is the Ka’ba, the shrine in Mecca toward which Muslims everywhere turn in prayer, draped here in black with a band near the top. The ring around it marks the paved ground where pilgrims walk their circuits of the Ka’ba during the Hajj, the pilgrimage that every Muslim who is able is asked to make once in a lifetime. Around the ring, the painter has set the sanctuary of the Masjid al-Haram as seen from above and at a slant: long colonnades capped with rows of blue domes, slender minarets with red-tipped spires, and inside the courtyard small pavilions, each labelled in Arabic script with its name. Several are stations for the imams of the different schools of law. A gate at the bottom is marked Bab al-Salam, the Gate of Peace.

Beyond the walls the painter kept going, out into the city. Little domed buildings stand at the edges, labelled as birthplaces: of the Prophet, and of Abu Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthman and ʿAli. Up in the corner, hills rise in stacked turquoise curves, each named: Jabal al-Nur, Jabal Thawr, Jabal Abu Qubays, Jabal al-Rahma. The tile is a guide to a real place, ordered so that someone who had never stood there could find their way around it, and someone who had could find again where they had been.

It was made around 1720 to 1730 at Tekfur Sarayı in Istanbul, a smaller and less famous workshop than Iznik, and the maker signed it in a small red-framed box at the lower left: Osman ibn Mehmed. Its palette follows the older Iznik tradition. The tilted bird’s-eye view, the museum notes, owes something to European pictures, and is typical of these later Istanbul pieces.

Their exact purpose is uncertain. Some may have decorated houses, perhaps marking a household where someone had made the pilgrimage. Others are still found in mosques, usually set into the qibla wall, the wall that faces Mecca, where a worshipper’s eyes rest during prayer. In either place, the tile shows a destination its viewers already knew: a real city, real buildings, and the cube at the centre that millions of people face each day, wherever they happen to be.