What Is Zellige? The Geometry Behind Islamic Tilework

Zellige is the geometric mosaic tilework that covers the walls, fountains and floors of Morocco's great buildings. Up close it is thousands of hand-cut pieces of glazed terracotta. From a distance it is a single, seamless pattern that appears to have no beginning and no end. Both readings are correct, and the second is the point.

What it is

The word zellige refers to small, individually cut tiles set into geometric compositions. The craft took its mature form in Fez under the Marinid dynasty, and the method has barely changed since. A master, the maalem, cuts each piece by hand from a glazed tile and sets it face down into a pattern assembled in reverse. It is slow, exacting work, and it does not forgive error.

The mathematics of infinity

Islamic geometric pattern, of which zellige is one expression, is built from the repetition of simple units into complex symmetry. Underneath many designs sits a hidden framework of construction lines, sometimes called girih, from which stars, rosettes and interlacing bands are generated. Done well, the pattern tessellates without seam, implying an order that continues past the edge of the wall. For a tradition that turned away from figurative religious imagery, this was never decoration for its own sake. It was a way of pointing at the infinite without presuming to depict it.

Where to see it

The Alhambra in Granada, the madrasas of Fez, and countless courtyards and fountains across the Maghreb and Al-Andalus carry it. Centuries before European mathematicians formally described certain of these symmetries, the craftsmen of these workshops were building them by hand and by eye.

Riwayah's atmospheric pieces, including Andalusian Bloom and the prints in the Sacred Spaces collection, draw on this visual tradition.