The Meticulous Beauty of Islamic Patterns and How to Create Them: Check the Tutorials

Islamic architecture patterns are the geometric designs, floral arabesques and calligraphy that cover the walls, domes, screens and ceilings of buildings across the Islamic world. The geometric patterns are built from a few simple shapes, drawn with only a compass and a straightedge on a grid of circles, then repeated and interlaced into stars and polygons. This guide, for architecture students and designers, explains where these patterns come from, how they are constructed, what they mean, and points to free tutorials so you can draw them yourself.

Islamic architecture continues to inspire contemporary architecture, and much of its appeal lies in pattern. In religious buildings, Islamic architecture generally avoided images of people and animals, so craftsmen developed three main decorative languages instead: calligraphy, vegetal or arabesque patterns, and geometric patterns.

What is Islamic art?

“Islamic art” is a broad term for the visual arts produced in lands where Islam was the dominant religion or culture, from the 7th century to today, made by Muslim and non-Muslim artists alike. It covers architecture, calligraphy, ceramics, metalwork, textiles, manuscripts and woodwork, and both religious and secular works. In its early centuries it drew on Roman, Byzantine and Sasanian (Persian) art, and later absorbed Chinese influences in painting, pottery and textiles.

Origins and context of Islamic architecture patterns

Geometric ornament appears in Islamic buildings from the early centuries; by the 8th century craftsmen were adapting geometric motifs inherited from Roman and Persian art, as Eric Broug explains in his TED-Ed lesson on Smarthistory. Over the following centuries the patterns grew more complex, especially from the 10th and 11th centuries, and regional styles developed, from the tile mosaics of Iran and Central Asia to the carved stucco and zellij tilework of Morocco and al-Andalus.

The Alhambra in Granada, built mainly in the 13th and 14th centuries by the Nasrid dynasty, is one of the richest surviving collections of geometric tilework, carved stucco and muqarnas.

Later craftsmen developed “girih” tiles, a small set of shapes decorated with lines that join up into continuous star-and-polygon patterns. In 2007 the physicists Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt showed in the journal Science that the girih pattern on the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan, dated 1453, comes close to a quasicrystalline tiling of a type Western mathematicians described only in the 1970s, as Nature reported. Whether the craftsmen understood the mathematics is debated; what is clear is that they had a powerful method for building such patterns.

The intricate charm of Islamic patterns and how they are made

Islamic craftsmen created extraordinarily detailed patterns with a compass and a straightedge, building on the geometry of the ancient Greeks and developing it far further. However complex a pattern looks, it rests on a grid, usually of circles divided into equal parts, and on a small number of lines and shapes that are repeated. The number of divisions gives the “family” of the pattern: fourfold, fivefold or sixfold, with eightfold, tenfold and twelvefold stars among the most common.

The patterns changed over time and from region to region. They were applied to pottery, tiles, carpets, wooden partitions and screens, walls, domes and ceilings.

Islamic architecture patterns are still widely used today, in furniture, rugs, screens and prints, and in the facades of mosques, cultural centres and other buildings, sometimes generated by software, as in Synthesis Design + Architecture’s data-based pattern wall for IBM Watson.

The tiled muqarnas niche above shows the Jameh Mosque of Yazd in Iran, where geometric tilework, calligraphy and three-dimensional vaulting work together.

How to create Islamic patterns: tutorials

Many artists who specialise in Islamic geometric design share their methods online for free. It is remarkable how a composition grows from a few construction lines into a complex pattern. For built examples in South Asia, see Islamic architecture in India.

The Lebanese artist and calligrapher Joumana Medlej published a series of step-by-step geometric design tutorials on Envato Tuts+, including these three.

Geometric Design: Two Variations on an Islamic Tiling Pattern

Geometric Design: Create a Pattern from the Cordoba Synagogue

Geometric Design: Tenfold Star in a Rectangle

The images below are simple tutorials shared by artists on Instagram and Pinterest.

Pattern in Islamic Art: an online archive

The website Pattern in Islamic Art holds a large online archive of Islamic patterns and other design features, including drawings, diagrams, scans and photographs organised by region, as well as historically important books and articles. It is one of the best free starting points for pattern research.

Islamic patterns video tutorials

1. The complex geometry of Islamic design, by Eric Broug

In this short TED-Ed lesson, Eric Broug, a Dutch-born designer and educator who founded the School of Islamic Geometric Design and has written books on the subject, explains the logic behind the patterns and how they can be drawn with a compass and a ruler.

The following tutorial videos and playlists go further, step by step.

2. How to draw an extended 12-fold rosette

More geometry tutorials are available on Lex Wilson’s playlist.

3. How to draw an Islamic geometric pattern

More tutorials are available on Nora Youssef’s YouTube channel.

4. How to draw Islamic geometry

Samira Mian’s playlist, “Islamic Geometry: How to Draw Islamic Geometric Patterns”, continues with many more patterns.

What is the purpose of Islamic patterns?

Islamic patterns express abstract order rather than depicting the visible world. In mosques and other religious settings, figurative images were avoided, largely to prevent anything that might be mistaken for an object of worship; secular Islamic art, such as Persian miniature painting, does include people and animals. As a result, the decoration of religious architecture concentrates on calligraphy, vegetal ornament and geometry, often combined in one surface, as in the worship houses people still build today.

Many writers interpret the patterns as an image of the infinite and of unity: a pattern can be extended endlessly in every direction, and every element grows from the same centre and the same rules. These readings are interpretations rather than rules written down by the craftsmen, but they help explain why the same geometry appears on a small box, a tiled wall and a vast dome. For a designer, the lesson is practical: a few clear rules, applied consistently, can produce endless variety.

Sources and further reading

• Smarthistory, The complex geometry of Islamic design (Eric Broug, TED-Ed).
• Nature News, Medieval Islamic architecture and quasicrystals (2007).
• Pattern in Islamic Art, online archive.

This article is part of our guide to architectural styles.