By employing these designs, the Safavids may have been deliberately defying the Ottomans, since the Turks generally avoided figural imagery in the decorative arts. The closest they came to it was their use of abstract patterns based on animal pelts, such as that found on a kaftan made for a child of the Ottoman imperial family: the paired wavy lines derive from the stripes on tiger hides worn by ancient heroes.

In avoiding the public display of human and animal figures, the Ottomans sought to present themselves as the leading advocates of Islamic orthodoxy, a status they could claim as the guardians of the most sacred Muslim sites in Mecca and Medina. The holy precinct in Mecca, which includes the cubelike stone building known as the Ka'bah, is schematically represented on a seventeenth-century Turkish tile.