Prayer Rugs at Bowers: A Glimpse of Paradise

Some are finely woven with intricately detailed depictions of animals and birds. Others, from regions where such creatures are considered too sacrilegious for devotional use, forgo animals entirely and are dominated by a tree of life or wildly active floral patterns. Still others can be identified, ironically, by a purely decorative cross design.

But all of the Islamic prayer rugs included in the exhibition, “Gardens of Paradise,” currently on display at Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, purport to be a gateway to heaven.

“The garden is the (Islamic) concept of heaven,” explained Charles Butler, director of the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia and curator of the exhibit. “The true devout (Muslim) believes he will enjoy an afterlife in a garden filled with flowers. Paradise is a garden always in bloom.

“Prayer rugs serve to separate Muslims from daily earthly concerns and impart the tranquillity of that paradise,” continued Butler, who will be featured in a lecture Thursday at Bowers Museum. “But they also have a life as works of art that goes far beyond the devotional aspect. Everyone has entree to these objects.”

Although the entire so-called “rug belt” extends from Spain to China, the Bowers exhibit features 52 antique rugs from Turkey, the Caucasus region, Iran and the area between Iran and Afghanistan that rug aficionados refer to as Turkoman.

Prayer rugs of all regions have certain elements in common, most notably a directional arch, the top of which should always be facing Mecca, the holy center of the Islamic faith. Mohammed directed his followers to pray to Allah five times each day, and the arch represents the mihrab , or prayer niche, in a mosque.

Interestingly enough, an educational video that accompanies the exhibit uses an example from the Ottoman Empire to show how Middle East prayer rugs enjoyed parallel use in Judaism.

While the rug shown in the video shares the arch design of an Islamic prayer rug, narrator Walter B. Denny, professor of Islamic art at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, reports that “it was in fact used in a synagogue as a cover for the Torah, the scrolls of the Hebrew Scriptures. . . . The Hebrew inscription (is) taken from the book of Psalms: ‘This is the gate of the Lord. Through it the righteous enter.’ ”

According to Denny, in a phone conversation from Amherst, how far the rugs go back has been a subject of great controversy. Some experts, he said, even argue that kilim carpets from Turkey were related to Neolithic cave paintings.

“Since it’s been shown that the Neolithic paintings probably never existed,” said Denny, fresh from a rug symposium in Kansas City, “that (theory) has been largely discredited. . . . But they only argue about that in strange places like San Francisco.

“What’s disturbing is that the market was so eager to endow (the rugs) with art-historical respectability--that beauty alone is never enough to get a work of art respect or a good price. You need the myth of a well-known name or an elaborate ancient lineage, to quote Gilbert & Sullivan, to ‘pre-Adamite things.’ ”

Logically, Islamic prayer rugs cannot originate earlier than the time of Mohammed, in the Sixth Century. The earliest rug on display at Bowers dates from the turn of the 18th Century, though one bears a misleading earlier date woven in by the artist while copying an even older rug, not an uncommon practice.

Often hilly or mountainous, the “rug belt” regions are typically unsuitable for growing crops, and have therefore been peopled through the centuries by nomadic goat- and sheep-herding tribes. The weaving of the sheep’s wool, or goat or camel hair, into rugs was considered part of the socialization process for the young women and children of the tribes, and the teaching of the craft by the older women an ongoing mentorship.

Many differences between the rugs on display and modern rugs--all of which often are generically referred to as “Oriental” rugs--derive from the use of natural plant dyes versus the animal dyes introduced in the 1870s. And whereas patterns for the rugs were formerly inspired by even older rugs, schematics similar to those used for needlepoint are now used.

Foremost among the differences, however, and paradoxical as it might sound, Butler lamented the modern rugs’ lack of imperfections.

“The village rugs woven on hand looms are not only more coarse but more personable,” Butler said. “There’s a charm to the irregularities that factory rugs have done away with.

“One allure of antique rugs is that many have evident repairs. But the repairs are also antique, so the repairs themselves are telling. Both design and the history of the individual piece make these very narrative objects. In the case of villages now assimilated into larger cultures, you can see things in the rugs that relate back to a culture that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Butler doesn’t altogether eschew modern rugs, especially those in which the conflict of old and new is evident.

“There were rugs made during the Afghan-Soviet conflict, for instance, where depictions of helicopters, fighter jets and Soviet soldiers were actually sewn into the rugs,” Butler said. “It’s a slice of time in the weavers’ art where modern iconography is entering a culture still caught between modern and older times, where the battle between progressive and traditional thought is very, very real.”

The village weaving tradition died out in the course of two world wars. Indeed, Denny once predicted that by the end of the 1970s the Oriental rug would be a dead art form.

But Denny has good news:

“There was a break in the tradition, but there is once again an awful lot of good weaving going on in the world,” he said. “Village weaving was deeply embedded socially, and the demand of the Western market seems to have been enough to revive it. Even the natural dyes have been rediscovered.

“The revival has also had a totally unanticipated result--the rugs have become a vehicle for the emancipation of the women in the Turkish villages. The women have always woven the rugs, and they’re still weaving the rugs. But now they’re keeping the money instead of giving it to their husbands.”

“Gardens of Paradise: Oriental Prayer Rugs,” continues through May 16 at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. $1.50 to $4.50. Exhibit curator Charles Butler, director of the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia, will speak Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at Bowers. $5 to $7.50, includes exhibit admission. (714) 567-3600.