War Rugs are Afghani textiles which include woven representations of weapons, political figures, maps, and military vehicles- visual motifs from decades of armed conflicts in Central Asia. Rug weaving is an ancient art form in Afghanistan, with artisans using vegetable-dyed wool to render complex typically geometric tapestries. Afghan weavings have been long sought-after to both the East and the West, from the age of the Silk Road which delivered textiles between Europe and Han Dynasty China, to the modern age. Such a modern resurgence occurred as Westerners traversed the hippie trail from Western Europe to India, stopping in Kabul before crossing the Himalayas. There they would buy wares and souvenirs including fine rugs from vendors on Chicken Street, a commercial road two blocks from the Presidential Palace. Afghanistan’s reputation for intricate textiles and lapis lazuli grew via this rutted overland route, until a series of violent disruptions in the 1970s including the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a military coup in Pakistan, and rising tensions between Pakistan and India in Kashmir.
The market for rugs specifically depicting war blossomed after the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and may have peaked during the 20 year occupation. The earliest war rugs pre-date the 1979 Soviet invasion, depicting leaders such as the Ghazi Amanullah Khan. During the USSR occupation military equipment is more often seen, largely tanks, though mostly in more abstracted graphics and borders. Following the Soviet withdrawal, political commentary often takes the form of President Mohammad Najibullah as a puppet on the hand of the USSR, or retreating tanks with raised turrets. A post-9/11 shift in imagery includes the twin World Trade Center towers, fighter jets, and US-Afghan flags joined by a dove with olive branch, all imagery traceable to propaganda leaflets. Some Afghani vendors obtained permits to sell their war rugs on US military bases. Drone imagery appeared in the 2010s, though its origin has been the subject of controversy.
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, are designed to be hard to see. While their auditory presence, another type of drone, can be heard as an ominous foreboding circling well before missile strikes, it seems unlikely that the imagery of a drone, much less specifically a UAV identifiable as the MQ-9 Reaper, would enter a weaver’s workshop. I have similarly been unable to find examples of propaganda leaflets or insurgent plane-spotting literature with the bird’s eye view depiction found on war rugs. Nigel Lendon, formerly an Australian professor of Art History, raised this concern on his blog Rugs of War asking "The questions Kevin needs to answer".
Kevin Sudeith, proprietor of warrug.com, is the largest dealer of war rugs, and his website is the source for many images included in this project. He has also had an enormous impact on the creative direction of contemporary war rugs through his close relationship with Afghani weavers in Pakistan. Speaking with Quartz, in Afghan carpet weavers are putting drones on their rugs, Sudeith said “If I write a blog post about a particular rug, eighteen months later contemporary, handmade versions of it will appear.” He calls them the product of a “collaborative process” with a family in Pakistan, “based on designs that have previously emerged in the market.” Sudeith now lists his drone rug stock as “Only available on Warrug. Original and unique drone war rugs.”
As part of a commercial circuit, weavers produce rugs to sell on the market, and are motivated to replicate the better selling designs. As art, rugs are no different from other mediums in that they’ve inspired forgers over the decades. A textbook example of art forgery is that of Teodor Tuduc, a Romanian rug restorer who began weaving new rugs based on old designs with such fidelity that many experts were fooled, and the historical record itself was warped and woven. Tuduc even went so far as to publish a book, Antike Orienttepiche aus Siebenburgen, written under the false name of Professor Dr. Otto Ernst and fictitiously published by the Black Church Parish. Tuduc’s book, in English Antique Oriental Carpets from Transylvania, was based directly on Emil Schmutzler’s 1933 book Altorientalische Teppiche in Siebenbürgen, or Ancient Oriental Carpets of Transylvania. Stefano Ionescu, in his lecture Tuduc: The World's Most Famous Rug Forger relates how powerful the creations of Tuduc’s studio were, saying “In one case a prominent German scholar wrote a peer-reviewed journal article in which he exposed some of Tuduc’s fakes, and in another article in the same issue, he praised an Ottoman rug that was in fact another unrecognized fake by Tuduc.”
Can there be such a thing as an “authentic” Afghan war rug? Most are woven in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Their figurative imagery is already atypical for an Islamic textile, which are more often geometric or abstract. Their fibers and dyes can be wool and plant derived, or a mix including contemporary synthetics. Materiality aside, and without getting bogged down in postmodernist debates around the concept of authenticity, perhaps the most authentic Afghan war rugs are those which struggle against oppression and invasion by digesting the images and tools of wars waged for incomprehensible reasons.
- Sudeith, Kevin. WarRug.com.
- Lendon, Nigel. Rugs of War.
- Mascelloni, Enrico, and Annemarie Sawkins, Ph.D. "Afghan War Rugs: The Modern Art of Central Asia" [PDF]. Memorial Art Gallery.
This project is based on the Historic Tale Construction Kit.