Al-Mithaq
The scientific review
The two houses publish their data, including the measurements that contradict these pages. A single Scientific Committee, for Fez and for Ragusa, reviews them before publication. It is composed by competence, not by prestige: each seat answers to one thing that must be measured or read in the two houses, and whoever brings neither a measurement nor a reading does not sit. It will have no more than nine seats; at least one will be Moroccan and at least one Sicilian. The names will appear on this page once the first three have accepted in writing, and not before.
The house
- Climate of the spaces
- The patio at four in the afternoon and the bedrooms at night, in July, under today’s climate and that of 2050: someone who can measure the comfort of a house without compressors.
- Hammam
- Steam, mass, furnace: someone who has measured a living hammam, not a model.
- Water and subsoil
- Cisterns, wells, channels, the limestone beneath the house: someone who reads the subsoil before it is touched, and can say whether the old water bears the new use.
- Structure
- Stone vaults on seismic ground, under a protection order that admits no concrete: someone who can say whether the house stands, and with what it can be consolidated without betraying it.
- Conservation
- A medina and a listed masseria are two readings, not one: a seat for each.
- Building site
- Someone who has built with traditional techniques, in Morocco, and knows what they really cost.
- The land
- Twenty-three hectares without irrigation: someone who knows what grows there, and how water is held between cisterns and garden.
Craft and common life
- Transmission
- How a gesture passes from a master’s hand to an apprentice’s, and what is lost when it is written down: someone who has observed it in the field, in Morocco.
- The guild
- What survives of the craft guilds as an institution, how one entered, how one left, who held the grade: someone who knows because they lived it, not only because they studied it.
- The rule
- How a community of craft holds together grade, table and given word, and where a written rule rings false to those who must live it.
What the Committee does not do
It does not admit, does not judge practice, does not raise funds, does not sit in the majlis and has no say over the niẓām. No funder appoints anyone to it. Its name goes on the reports and on the method, never on the companions: no photographs of common life. Every opinion states what is measured, where, with which instrument and who reads; the data are published as they are. No fee, travel reimbursed; a three-year mandate, renewable; written opinions; one meeting a year, in one of the two houses or at a distance. The chair is chosen by the members, once there are at least three.
Correspondents
Alongside the seats, the Committee draws on correspondents for an opinion or a measurement, on written request: the history of water in al-Andalus, passive cooling, leather and tanning, the legal form of an intermediate body. They do not appear on the frontispiece and do not count among the nine.
The air and water pages of the two sites — the Riad, the Funduq — say what is measured and what is not promised. Anyone who recognises themselves in one of these competences, or wishes to report an error, can write to us.