The architects of ancient Near East used the advances in ceramics in the decoration of buildings. Over the centuries, the need of the new era for this type of architectural elements completely disappeared, and with them the knowledge of ceramic technology, allowing to use glaze technology in architecture. The idea of tiling completely missing in the period of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the period of Sassanid Iran, only reappeared in the Abbasid Caliphate.

From the technological point of view, it was apparently an achievement of the Iranian ceramic industry in the IX–XI centuries. The Baghdad metropolitan area and its surrounding cities were also the center of ceramic production. There was a historically established dominance of Iranian discourse in the art of Abbasids’ capital. Apart from that, the proximity of Byzantine played a role due to the architectural technologies and ideas available there.

Meanwhile, the materials, techniques, and the artists themselves were selected from the best ones throughout the Caliphate for Bagdad. It was exactly the place where researchers believe the lustre technique emerged.

Appearing in the center of the Caliphate, the lustre technology is supposed to have spread rapidly westward, towards the Mediterranean. The earliest example were the city of Kairouan in Tunisia and Qal’at of the Beni Hamad in Algeria. Thus, the question arises whether the local craftsmen in the major Islamic urban centers of the Mediterranean region possessed this technology or whether it was an imported production from Baghdad.

The regularities of style development in the Abbasid Caliphate as well as the analysis of written sources, allow to assume that the lustre tiles were sent from the capital Baghdad, rather than were made directly on site.

The absence of expensive lustre technology in other centers of the state suggests that it was nothing but a political tool to influence and assert Baghdad's power in an unstable region of Ifriqiya where centrifugal tendencies were strong. The Grand Mosque in Kairouan is an example of the manifestation of Abbasid political motives.