How a Prayer Mat Holds a Community Together

An object can be catalogued, classified, placed behind glass, and admired from a distance. A belonging, however, carries a quality that cannot be so easily contained. It carries the memory of a life, the intimacy of a ritual, the presence of a person, and the inheritance of a community. 

It is not simply an object that exists in the world, but a medium through which we come to understand who we are.

To an unfamiliar eye, a prayer mat might appear to be a piece of woven fabric, distinguished by its colours, patterns, materials, or place of origin. In a museum, it might be displayed as an example of religious craftsmanship, its description reduced to a date, a geographical location, and a few lines of historical context. 

Yet, for the person who kneels upon it, the mat is altogether different. It may hold the memory of a parent’s prayers, the reassurance of a familiar ritual, or the comfort of turning towards God in an unfamiliar place. It may also have travelled across borders, accompanied a family through displacement, or remained in a home long after the hands that first unrolled it were gone.

Museums, for all their capacity to preserve, have often struggled to preserve this distinction. 

When belongings enter museum collections, they can become detached from the people and communities that gave them meaning. The language of acquisition and ownership can create the impression that an institution has inherited not only the physical item, but also the authority to determine its story. 

“Museums have a really great knack for making belongings feel disconnected from the communities and people they come from,” Zeina Dowidar, cofounder of Hekayyatna, explains. Hekayyatna is a London-based production house focused on participatory cultural programming and storytelling. 

“When belongings enter museum collections, they are often presented as being under the ownership of a museum, divorced and sanitised from their history, placed behind glass to be marvelled at.”

This is the question at the heart of a project taking shape at the Horniman Museum in South East London, an institution whose collections include a substantial body of belongings from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA). Gathered over hundreds of years, these belongings hold traces of the region’s diverse histories, cultures, and everyday lives. 

Developed by Hekayyatna, Horniman curator Heba Abd El Gawad, and University College London (UCL), this work seeks to reconnect the Horniman’s belongings with the communities whose histories and experiences can help bring them to life.

Opening at the Horniman Museum on 3 December 2026, the exhibition will bring the museum’s belongings into conversation with responses from the SWANA community.

The exhibition seeks to ask what happens when the people who recognise a belonging are invited to participate in telling its story. What might a prayer mat reveal to someone who has grown up seeing one unrolled at home? 

What might a set of prayer beads bring to mind for someone who remembers a grandparent moving them quietly through their fingers? What histories become visible when we stop treating these items as isolated examples of material culture and begin to understand them as part of a living world?

“The idea of calling items belongings is to remind us that they belonged to someone before the museum, and that they belonged to a person, a place, or a community,” she adds. 

Dowidar points to an example from  Horniman’s collection, which was an Arabic book that had been catalogued as Farsi. The error might appear small on a museum record, but it illustrates a larger problem. When the people responsible for describing a belonging lack the relevant linguistic or cultural knowledge, an inaccurate label can obscure the very context needed to understand it.

“All our belongings tell a story about us,” she says. “The generations that come after us will look at them and wonder where we got them, when, and why, in an attempt to learn more about who we are.” 

Without this context, an object remains just that: an object. Its transformation into a belonging comes through the stories, relationships, and experiences that give it meaning.

The same is true of a misbaha (prayer beads), whose beads might recall a grandparent’s hands, the rhythm of remembrance, or the comfort of a practice repeated over many years. A belonging can carry a story even when its precise history is unknown, because it also belongs to a wider world of shared experience. 

This distinction has informed Hekayyatna’s work with the Horniman’s SWANA collection. Through community workshops and an online open call, the project invites people to explore the museum’s belongings and respond to them through their own knowledge, memories, and experiences. 

“The open call has brought us a wide range of responses to all kinds of belongings in the Horniman’s collections,” she says. “We’re excited about the possibility of replicating this work with other museum collections in the future.”

A museum may keep the prayer mat safe. But, its story does not belong to the glass case. It belongs, still, to the people whose lives have been woven into it.