NAVINA HAIDAR: This is a lamp for lighting a mosque. It would be hung from a ceiling, along with other similar glass lamps. Each one would have a small, low flame inside floating in a little saucer which kept the oil. The overall effect in the mosque would be soft, flickering, colorful lights. This mosque lamp is more than six hundred years old. It’s made from delicate, thin glass, so it’s amazing that it’s survived this long. To make a mosque lamp, the overall shape is blown from liquid, molten glass. After it cools and turns solid, the colors are painted on. But it’s much trickier than it sounds, because each color paint has to be heated to a different temperature to make it stick to the glass! For example, the red might be painted on first. Then the whole lamp is put into an oven at a very specific temperature to make the red paint crystals stick to the glass. If the oven is even just a tiny bit too hot, the glass shape itself will melt! Then the whole process has to be repeated with the next color, and the next, and so on. Look up… Hanging from the ceiling are modern mosque lamps. You can see that the tradition of these kinds of mosques lamps continues today. The artist who created these mosque lamps included tiny bubbles in the glass, just like they did in the old days. These bubbles catch the light and make the lamps sparkle.