A pictorial rug theme drawn from the classic Persian love story of two young people whose families forbid them to marry. The man, known as Majnun (“madman”), loses his reason from longing and roams the desert composing poems and songs; the woman, Layla, is married off to a wealthy nobleman to safeguard her family's honor and dies of grief, and he weeps himself to death on her grave. The best-known Persian telling is the verse romance of Nizami (1188), and the story appears on pictorial rugs, for example from Tabriz.
A senior weaver who oversees the other weavers of a workshop and keeps its standards of design and weaving high. Master weavers often found a workshop and lend it their name, as with Alabaf and Habibian, and in elite city workshops their names are frequently woven into the rugs as signatures. The most demanding pieces, such as pictorial rugs, are entrusted to them, and the Afghan master Khal Mohammadi, also an expert dyer, gave his name to a rug type. Rugs woven under such supervision are generally of higher quality than non-workshop rugs, though not in every case. The title is also used more loosely for any highly skilled weaver.
A rug woven as a picture, with landscape scenery, scenes from history or mythology, biblical or other stories, and human figures in place of a repeating ornament, comparable in composition to traditional art. Master weavers in city workshops make them, chiefly in Tabriz, which is known for a wide variety of pictorial designs, and also in Kashan, Isfahan, and Sarouk. Faces and floral areas are often woven at a higher knot density than the rest of the rug, so the knot count is best averaged over two or three areas.