It's All in the Weave

by Susan Douglass

T-shirts with logos, fabrics interwoven with designer names, animated cartoon characters, funny sayings, political messages""-we all wear them. Why are these items so common today, when everyone wants to express his or her unique identity?

Clothes With a Message

Messages on clothing are not new. More than 1,000 years ago, important people visiting the courts of rulers received robes of honor as gifts for service. These robes were made from the finest fabrics produced in courtly workshops, and no fabric sent a message of luxury and honor more than silk brocades. First invented in China, patterned silk weaving in beautiful colors was so attractive to traders that the Silk Road, the trade routes linking East and West, is named after it. When silk technology moved west, brocade weaving moved with it. Only royalty and high-ranking religious leaders, however, could afford expensive brocades.

In the courtly workshops of the Middle East, artisans wove patterns that included fantastic animals, plants, geometric designs, and inscriptions. The images represented traits associated with the ruler-courage, generosity, and good taste.

Inscriptions called tiraz were also woven into court fabrics. Adorning the hem or sleeves, tiraz bands included the ruler's name, words of praise, or blessing. As the tiraz represented a stamp of approval for the wearer, it is not surprising that demand for such fabrics was high. As a result, brocade production moved beyond the royal workshops.

Complex weaving required highly skilled workers and looms. A single brocade weaver could pick out the design by hand, but it would take years. Pressure to produce more fabric soon led to innovations. The draw-loom could raise and lower threads in a complex, repeating pattern sequence. The drawloom may have been invented in Southwest Asia during the 6th and 7th centuries, or even earlier in China. By the 13th and 14th centuries, however, brocade manufacturing centers were found in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Sicily, and Cordoba. Brocades were exported to Europe for use in church decoration and robes for royalty.

Enter the Computer

As demand grew, Europeans began to imitate "Islamic" brocade designs. Gradually, European brocades changed from imitations to original motifs, and the inscriptions changed from Arabic, to Arabic-look-a-like, to Latin letters. With an increasing demand for brocades, efforts to make them more quickly and cheaply led to more innovation and-would you believe-to computers.

Weaving a pattern into fabric is very similar to making graphic design on a computer. If you enlarge a digital image, you will see that it is made up of hundreds of tiny, colored squares, called pixels. Weaving produces a pattern of such squares by crossing threads. In brocades, different colors show on the surface if they lie on top, instead of under the lengthwise threads.

Weaving, then, is really digitized design, and the "draw-boy" was a digital artist. It was innovation in weaving that led a Frenchman named Joseph Marie Jacquard, in 1804, to create a roll of punched paper that instructed a "mechanical draw-boy" to raise or lower certain threads on the loom.

So, the next time you wear a logo, think about the connection between it, computerized designs, and royal tiraz bands.

Wordhelp:Brocades are fabrics with an elaborate design woven into them.

Names That Tell Tales

by Kim Zarins

Compared to the short names of Western culture, Arabic names sound  

like the beautiful stuff of fairy tales that go on and on. For example, the

name of the philosopher whom Westerners call Avicenna or Ibn Sina is  

really Abu "Ali al-Husayn Ibn Sina" Abdallah. These long names are not  

just songlike, they are also informative. Each section tells us something  

about the person. Check out the translation table below to help you decode

Avicenna's Arabic name: 

NAME  MEANING

abu  father of

abd  servant or slave of (followed by a name 

   for Allah, the Muslim name for 

   "God")

al  introduces either a descriptive word 

   (e.g., al-Rashid means "the 

   righteous") or indicates a family 

   ("of the family ____")

Husayn  good or handsome

ibn  son

bint  daughter

Thus, Avicenna's name means, "Father of Ali, the good, son of Sina,  

servant of God." Notice that the first part of Avicenna's name is

 "Father of Ali." In our society, we take on our parents' last name  

(usually our father's name or sometimes both parents' names.) 

Wouldn't it be interesting if our parents took on our names?

As in Western culture, Arabic names often have a connection to  

people mentioned in the Bible. They are, however, spelled differently,  

as can be seen from these examples: 

ARABIC  ENGLISH

Dawud   David

Haroun   Aaron

Ibrahim  Abraham

Musa   Moses

Saara   Sarah

Suleiman  Solomon

Yaqub   Jacob

Yusef   Joseph

What's in a Name?

Now, try decoding these Arabic names:

1. Abbasid  Caliph  Haroun al-Rashid (from A Thousand and One Nights.)

2. Ja'far ibn Mua ¸Yammad Abu Ma'shar al-Balkha 

3. Abu' l-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Rushd

4. Salah al-Din Yusuf Ibn Ayyub 

5. Abu Ishaq Ibraham ibn Yahya al-Naqqash al-Zarqali 

6. Fatimah bint Tariq ibn Khalid Al-Fulani 

Answers to "What's In a Name?":

1.  Abbasid Caliph (Caliph of Abbasid dynasty) Aaron the Righteous

2.  Jafar son of Mohammed father of Mashar of the family al-Balkhi  

(known as Albumazarin in the West)

3.  Father of Walid Mohammed son of Ahmad son of Mohammad son  

of Rushd (known as Averroes in the West)

4.  Salah al-Din Joseph son of Ayyub (known as Saladinin in the West)

5.  Father of Isaac, Abraham son of John the Naqqash of the Zarquali family  

(known as Arzachel in the West) 

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Updated: 3/21/10 02:37 pm
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