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February 23, 2006
Prayer Rugs
When I met my parents last Saturday they gave me a belated Christmas gift: a large aerial photo (11 by 17 maybe) of a street scene in Cairo, probably taken from an upstairs balcony. The street itself occupies just over a third of the photograph and is bracketed by dense concrete buildings on both sides. Half of the street is covered with vendor stalls and baskets of fruit. The other half of the street is covered in prayer rugs. While a few people are strolling along the sidewalk on the right hand side of the street, there are over a hundred people on the left hand side, each kneeling on a prayer rug, bent forward, head pressed to the surface. The photograph is called Midday Prayers, Cairo 2000.
Where the buildings lining the street are a uniform gray-beige, the street itself is a riot of color. On the one hand, there is the produce. The tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce (Romaine), squash, apples and carrots are saturated and form their own tile mosaic that compliments the blue, white, red and yellow shirts worn by the kneeling men.
Below the men, I notice the prayer mats. Most of them are bright green and large enough for five or six people. Some of the mats are even larger. Twenty-three men kneel on an olive tarp in the foreground of the photo. The scene is distinctly un-American, not because the mats are shared, but because the men often kneel across two mats (knees on one, arms on the next with a thin gap between) where Americans might feel more comfortable on one mat. I also note only four mats that have patterns. Four prayer rugs. One of these sits on a green mat.
I imagine that these mats are different from those used indoors. From the photos I’ve seen, the prayer mats used in mosques are more elaborate and feature designs that would be familiar to students of Persian rugs. At the same time, I imagine that Egyptian vendors don’t have enough money for individual rugs, particularly if those rugs are to be used in the street. Basic prayer rugs seem to run from $10 to $20 online and so I suspect that they would cost $2 to $5 on the street, roughly 11 to 28 Egyptian pounds or 7% to 20% of the average monthly take home pay for an Egyptian street vendor. At those prices, I imagine that the vendors have a nicer rug at home, but could not afford to run through rugs by carrying them around during the day and using them for the crowded afternoon prayers.
When did people begin using prayer mats? The earliest known carpet (the Pazyryk Carpet) is dated to 500 BC. A mat is something different, though, and I can imagine that selected animal skins were used for ceremonial purposes before humans learned warp and weft and the knots needed to weave rugs. It’s interesting because the prayer mat, while probably younger than the design drawn in the ground or the pile of rocks, may be one of the oldest devices used to demarcate a space for prayer and, as a space, it is individual where the design or the cairn is a public edifice.
Today, this demarcation between the public and the private is much more tenuous, at least in the Catholic Church and the Synagogue. If I attended regularly I might, over the years, get “my seat," but irregular attendees make do with the seats that are available: there is nothing special or magical about the first pew and nothing special about the last. The personal connection that may be encouraged by bringing one’s own “prayer space” from the private domain into the public, is lost.
Something to think about maybe, the next time I scurry across indoor carpeting, trying to build up a static charge before greeting my sister at the door.
Jibber Jabberin | By jb | 06:42 AM