“Set the Gaze on Fire”: Gold-Cloth Furnishing and Sacred Propaganda in the Courts of Early Mediaeval Islam

Abstract

Three documents from Fatimid Egypt, ʿAbbasid Mesopotamia, and Taifa Toledo – dated between the fourth–sixth/tenth–twelfth centuries – describe the practice of decorating audience halls with gold-threaded furnishing textiles. By identifying fragments believed to be described in these texts, it is proposed that these vibrant interiors were an aesthetic and ceremonial phenomenon of the period. The colour potential of such fabrics, often emphasised in poetry, appears to have encouraged their use, given the symbolic significance associated with the palace and the caliph-imam as vessels and emitters of divine light.