Tiraz (the caliphate's written mark on cloth and papyrus)

Tiraz is a band of writing woven or embroidered into fine garments, carrying the name of the ruler and words of good omen, made in workshops of the state called houses of tiraz. Ibn Khaldun counts it among the grandest marks of kingship and says that the Persian kings before Islam put the images and figures of kings in their tiraz, and that the kings of Islam put written names and words of good omen in their place ¹. Al-Baladhuri reports that Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan was among the first to introduce writing at the head of papyrus rolls, from Surat al-Ikhlas and other remembrance of God ², and the TDV encyclopedia says that he ordered the Greek tiraz on the cloth of Egypt replaced with the declaration of God's oneness ³. That change made the tiraz the written mark of the caliphate.

The word tiraz came into Arabic from Persian with the sense of adornment, and it was used for the band of writing on a garment, for cloth bearing such a band and for the workshop where it was woven ³. Ibn Khaldun describes the craft: the names of rulers, or signs particular to them, were drawn into the weave of their silk and brocade garments, the letters made of the weft and warp in gold thread or in coloured threads that differed from the cloth, as the craftsmen judged; the royal garments were then marked with that tiraz to honour the sultan who wore them, or the man whom the sultan honoured with a garment of his or appointed to an office of the state ¹.

The band usually ran around the collar, the sleeves, the front or the back of the garment, mostly in Kufic script. Its text was commonly the basmala, the declaration of God's oneness, the ruler's name and members of his family, and prayers for his long life and reign; it often named the place of manufacture and the minister or official responsible for the workshop, and rarely the weaver ³.

Egypt made papyrus and sent it to the lands of the Byzantines, and the Arabs traded with dinars that came to them from the Byzantines ⁴. On the authority of Awana ibn al-Hakam, al-Baladhuri says that the Copts wrote at the head of the rolls a mention of Christ ascribing divinity to him, and put the cross in the place of the basmala ⁵.

Cloth told the same story. In ancient Iran and Byzantium, rulers had their names, images or special signs woven into the cloth of their garments, in gold thread or in silk of a colour that stood out from the cloth, and after the conquest of Egypt the Christian weavers there went on weaving Greek tiraz on their cloth ³. Ibn Khaldun adds that the kings of the Persians made their tiraz with the images and figures of kings ¹.

Under the heading "The affair of the papyrus", al-Baladhuri reports that Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan was among the first to introduce the writing placed at the head of papyrus rolls: he had Surat al-Ikhlas written there, with other remembrance of God ². The Byzantine emperor wrote to him that the Muslims had introduced in their papyrus a writing he disliked, and that if they did not drop it he would put on the dinars words about their Prophet that they would dislike. Abd al-Malik was troubled, being unwilling to give up a good practice he had begun, and he sent for Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Mu'awiya, who told him to forbid their dinars, so that no one would deal in them, to strike coinage for the people, and not to spare the Byzantines what they disliked in the rolls. Abd al-Malik struck the dinars ⁵. In another account, through al-Mada'ini, Khalid also advised him to stop any papyrus from going to the lands of the Byzantines, and for a while none was carried to them ⁵.

Al-Suyuti gives the same report, from the book of firsts of Abu Hilal al-Askari: Abd al-Malik was the first to write at the head of the rolls Surat al-Ikhlas and the mention of the Prophet ﷺ with the date; the emperor threatened him, Khalid advised him, and the dinars were struck in the year 75 AH ⁶. Al-Suyuti also quotes Malik: the first to strike dinars and write the Qur'an on them was Abd al-Malik ⁷.

The TDV encyclopedia places the same turn on cloth. It says that Abd al-Malik wrote to his brother Abd al-Aziz ibn Marwan, governor of Egypt, ordering that the Greek tiraz on the cloth be abandoned, that the declaration of God's oneness be worked in place of the Trinity, and that those who kept the old custom be punished; the emperor's threat then led the state to strike its own coinage and to put tiraz on the garments of the caliph, the officials of the state and the soldiers as a mark of the caliphate ³.

Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan was the Umayyad caliph who ordered the change; the record names him as the one who commissioned it, not as a weaver. Before the caliphate, according to Ibn Sa'd, he was a devout worshipper in Medina, and Abu al-Zinad counted him among the jurists of Medina ⁸. His advisor in the affair was Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Mu'awiya, and Egypt, where the papyrus and the cloth were made, was governed by his brother Abd al-Aziz ^{5 3}. The weavers themselves are not named in the sources.

The tiraz was produced in workshops attached to the rulers' palaces, called houses of tiraz. The man in charge of them, the sahib al-tiraz, oversaw the dyers, the tools and the weavers, saw to their pay and their equipment and supervised their work, and the post was given to the leading men of the state and its trusted clients ¹. The pieces made for rulers were prepared with great care, sealed, and presented to the caliph by the head of the tiraz ³.

The houses of tiraz spread with the Abbasids: the testament of Harun al-Rashid mentions a tiraz workshop, and the existence of a diwan of tiraz shows how much the state valued it from an early date ³. Ibn Khaldun names the Umayyads of al-Andalus, the party kings after them and the Ubaydids in Egypt as keepers of the office, and says that it lapsed in most states as they shrank ¹. In al-Andalus the first tiraz garment was worn in the time of Abd al-Rahman II, and Almeria, Murcia, Seville, Granada and Malaga became leading centres; workshops also existed in Fars, the Jazira, Iraq and Yemen ³.

It was built on the royal tiraz of the Persian kings, which carried the images of kings ¹; on the Greek tiraz that Christian weavers wove on the cloth of Egypt; and on the scribal custom of writing a mention of Christ and the cross at the head of the papyrus rolls ^{5 3}. Abd al-Malik kept the band and the workshop and changed what was written in it.

The dinars that Abd al-Malik struck in 75 AH came directly out of the same quarrel ⁶. Under the Abbasids the houses of tiraz and the diwan of tiraz became an institution of the state, and the Umayyads of al-Andalus and the Fatimids gave their workshops great importance: in Fatimid times the garments sewn in a single year were worth up to 600,000 dinars ³. The Norman kings of Sicily went on wearing tiraz in Arabic Kufic script, with its content unchanged, for a long time after Muslim rule there ended ³. In Ibn Khaldun's own day the Turkish rulers of Egypt and Syria had their tiraz of pure gold and silk, called zarkash, made by craftsmen outside the palace with the name of the sultan or the emir on it ¹.

The tiraz turned a garment into a document. Ibn Khaldun says that it honoured the man who wore it, whether the sultan himself or someone the sultan clothed in his garment or appointed to office ¹. Weaving became work for many hands: at Tinnis in Egypt some 5,000 looms were working, among them a workshop belonging to the caliph, and a governor under al-Muqtadir had eighty tiraz workshops of his own ³.

Because the ruler's name was woven into the cloth of the state, it became a sign of allegiance. A governor who rebelled showed that he no longer recognised the caliph by removing his name from the Friday sermon and from the tiraz; when al-Ma'mun rose against his brother al-Amin, he took al-Amin's name and title off the tiraz ³. The same quarrel that began over the head of a papyrus roll led to the caliphate's own coinage ⁵.

The band of writing on royal cloth was not new: it was older than Islam among the Persians and the Byzantines, and the TDV encyclopedia traces it back to the pharaohs of Egypt ^{3 1}. What the sources ascribe to Abd al-Malik is a change in what the tiraz carried: Arabic remembrance of God instead of the cross and the mention of Christ on papyrus ², and the declaration of God's oneness instead of Greek writing on cloth ³. Al-Baladhuri's words are cautious: Abd al-Malik was "among the first" to do it. The record therefore treats the Islamic tiraz as an improvement on an older institution, and names Abd al-Malik as the one who commissioned it.

The houses of tiraz are gone, but many tiraz pieces survive in the world's museums, some from the first half of the eighth century, in bands from one to fifty-five centimetres wide ³.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York keeps a tiraz fragment of silk warp and cotton weft with an embroidered band of red Kufic script, from eastern Iran or Khurasan, about 892–902 (accession 31.19.2) ⁹. The museum holds other pieces as well, such as a tiraz textile fragment, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds a tenth-century tiraz fragment and the tiraz of al-Zahir.

Arabic writing on ceremonial cloth outlived the houses of tiraz. The coverings of the Ka'ba were woven in Baghdad under the Abbasids and later in Egypt, mostly at Tinnis, with a tiraz carrying the basmala, the caliph's name, a prayer for his reign and the names of the man who had it made and of the place it was woven ³.

About thirteen hundred years ago, the clothes of kings were decorated with a band showing pictures of kings. The caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan ordered Arabic words remembering God to be written instead. So weavers began making a band of beautiful letters called tiraz, with the caliph's name and a prayer for him, and pieces of it are still kept in museums ^{1 3}.

• Ahmad ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri, Futuh al-Buldan, Mu'assasat al-Ma'arif, pp. 335–336, section "The affair of the papyrus". ²
• Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddima, p. 256, section "al-Tiraz". ¹
• Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti, Tarikh al-Khulafa, Dar al-Minhaj, pp. 356, 358–359. ¹⁰
• Nebi Bozkurt, "TIRÂZ", TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 41 (2012), pp. 112–114, online edition. ³
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Open Access, "Tiraz Fragment", accession 31.19.2. ⁹