The Stafford Khayamia
Stafford
2025

Shahed Saleem, in collaboration with artist Mohammed Younus, led a community creative workshop to co-design a new mihrab wall for the future Stafford Mosque. The project invited participants to explore Islamic art, geometry, and craftsmanship through a series of immersive, hands-on creative encounters.

Participants began by engaging with the Islamic art and artefacts collection brought by Dr Richard McClary from the University of York. Through close observation and drawing, they studied historic patterns, motifs, and ornamentation — translating centuries of artistic heritage into contemporary sketches. These studies were then transformed into cut-outs of coloured paper, creating a shared library of objects and motifs.

Working collaboratively, the group experimented with arranging these fragments into new tile compositions, layering individual interpretations into collective designs. Each resulting pattern represented a dialogue between tradition and innovation — between the historical objects that inspired them and the community that reimagined them.

The new tile compositions were subsequently sent to Cairo, where master khayamiya (tentmakers) recreated the designs in fabric, each one becoming a unique handcrafted bag. The final mihrab wall design will also be produced by the Cairo tentmakers as a full-scale textile installation — a richly detailed khayamia that will be exhibited in various venues to raise funds for the construction of the permanent mihrab wall.

Through this process, the project weaves together local and global acts of making, connecting Islamic history, Stafford, and Cairo in a shared creative exchange.

The project was funded by the Barakat Trust and assisted by the Arab British Centre.

Photos by Ethan Johnson