Religious objects (15) - Terracotta - 1940-1950 - Prayer Stones

Here is a collection of fifteen ritual prayer stones, small clay-earth bricks of various shapes and imprints. Their name derives from the classical Arabic word turbah and the Persian mohr, both meaning earth. They are used by Shiite Muslims in the performance of the five ritual prayers to symbolize the natural earth on which they place their foreheads, as their religion prescribes. They also carry a deeper spiritual significance since they are shaped from the earth of Karbala, the place where Hussein, their revered saint and grandson of the Prophet, died. Thus, lacking the opportunity to make the pilgrimage to Hussein’s tomb in Karbala, they place their foreheads on a bit of earth from that site.

The word turbah also designates the material used by God to create the world, life and humanity.

These small objects all bear inscriptions and symbols connected with religious beliefs and spirituality: the name of Allah, prayers, protective hands and words, evocations of mosques. These intentionally aesthetic-free illustrations confer a great spiritual charge to these simple fragments of earth because they have been used with fervor and reverent contemplation.

They were brought from Central Asia by a Swiss ethnologist and researcher, and are therefore rigorously authentic. They were then passed by succession to his descendants who sold them at auctions toward the end of the 1960s.