The interior spaces

A house is understood by its door. The riad does not open onto the street, but turns away from it. Blind façades, a single door, and behind that door a bent vestibule — the driba — which prevents the eye from reaching the courtyard. This is the first architectural decision, and not a precaution added afterwards, the one from which all the others follow.

What the bend protects is the possibility, for those who live there, of genuinely being at home — of crossing the courtyard at dawn, of working, praying, keeping silent, without being seen by whoever passes in the derb.

A door that asks permission

The threshold — the ʿataba — is not, in the Islamic tradition, a simple boundary of property. The Qur’an makes it the object of a precise rule, and that rule contains, almost literally, the name of this house:

THE ROOT OF THE NAME

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا لَا تَدْخُلُوا بُيُوتًا غَيْرَ بُيُوتِكُمْ حَتَّىٰ تَسْتَأْنِسُوا وَتُسَلِّمُوا عَلَىٰ أَهْلِهَا

“O you who believe, do not enter houses other than your own until you have made yourselves known and greeted those who dwell in them.”

— Qur’an, sūrat An-Nūr (XXIV), 27

The verb used, tastaʾnisū, comes from the root ʾ-n-s — the very root that gives al-uns, the cordial intimacy from which the house takes its name. To announce oneself before entering is therefore, in the language of the text, to seek to become familiar: to ask to be received rather than to slip inside. The exegetical tradition calls this gesture istiʾdhān, the asking of permission.

What is described below is nothing other than that verse translated into stone and plaster. A house that can be walked through without asking stops belonging to anyone, and hospitality has nothing to do with it.

The three parlours

Three small rooms of some ten square metres open onto the driba, before the bend: the parlours. There — and only there — does the house receive what comes from outside. The mothers and sisters of the residents, families come to see where their son lives, suppliers, visitors passing through: all are received in the parlours, none goes beyond them.

Three rooms rather than one large hall, for a simple reason: three conversations can be held at once without anyone overhearing his neighbour, and yet there is still only one threshold to keep. This is the arrangement of monasteries and madrasas, and it has proved itself.

Each parlour has its own water point and its own facilities. The detail seems minor; it decides everything. A visit lasting two hours will eventually need something, and if that something lies inside, the rule gives way on the very first day — with the best justification in the world. No window looks onto the patio, and sound has been considered as carefully as sight: a Moroccan courtyard carries voices everywhere.

These three rooms receive the best the house knows how to make — carved plaster, zellige, a low seat, well-judged light. Not for display: because they are the only part of the house a mother will ever see, and the judgement she forms of the whole will be formed there, in that room and nowhere else.

Two doors that never open together

Between the derb and the house, the passage runs through an intermediate space. The visitor enters by the street door, the resident reaches the parlour by the door on the riad side, and the two are never open at the same moment. The control stays on the side of the house. Without this, the parlour would be merely a room near the entrance — which is to say, nothing.

After ʿishāʾ, the door of the house is closed.

The bawwab

The threshold requires a man, and that man is a resident like the others — of the same age as those who live there, bound by the same rule. His charge is the door: it is through this service that he has his place in the house. It is a service in its own right.

The function also requires a body. The bawwāb is chosen among the residents most advanced in the disciplines of the body. The futuwwa lies precisely in that measure: to contain one’s own force rather than deploy it.

The door has its own room, adjoining the vestibule: the keys hang there, the lantern and the register of those who are out are kept there, and that is where he stays as long as the house is open. He does not sleep there. Once the door is closed after the ʿishāʾ he goes back to his shared room and sleeps among the others, because he belongs to the house before he belongs to its threshold, and because a man sleeping alone at the entrance would end by resembling what this house does not have: a watchman.

The room of correction

In the same place, opening onto the vestibule and not onto the residents’ quarter, there is a small bare room. A man who has gravely broken the rules of common life, without the fault amounting to expulsion, is confined there for a time fixed in advance. It contains a bed, a mat and nothing else, and meals are still carried to it and the calls to prayer still reach it.

The practice has a name in Islamic law. Taʿzīr is correction left to the judgement of the one who holds authority, as against the penalties fixed directly by the text — the ḥudūd — whose nature and measure are not open to discussion. The classical jurists count confinement among the forms taʿzīr may take, alongside reprimand, and leave it to the man who answers for the house to set its degree according to the man, the fault, and what will repair it.

The dormitory and the rooms

Fez offers the model a few streets away. For centuries the Marinid madrasas of the medina — as-Saffarin, al-Attarine, Bou Inania — housed the students of the Qarawiyyin in tiny cells set on the upper floor, opening onto a gallery and onto the patio. That smallness was not a poverty of means: it was a choice. A large room holds on to whoever occupies it and empties the common spaces. A narrow one returns him to the patio, the workshop, the table and the prayer.

Men lodge there in shared rooms of six beds, for the most part with the ṣāniʿ of their own workshop, so that the unit of life usually coincides with the unit of work. This is the norm, and it admits of exceptions: each changes bed and room when he wishes, because it is the young men who decide, in full freedom. The maʿallem occupies a room of his own, adjoining theirs, so that he can be called during the night without sharing their room. The upkeep of the shared room falls to those who live in it.

A house without keys

No door in the residents’ quarter locks. What divides the spaces are turned-wood screens and hangings, made in the house’s own wood workshop: the eye does not pass through, the air and the voice do. Withdrawal is possible everywhere, shutting oneself in nowhere.

The principle is a simple one: a man does not hide from his brothers, he withdraws from them — and those are not the same act. Locks do exist in the house, but they are on the stores: the library, the pantry, the room where leather and cloth are kept. What is locked is what one answers for before the others, not what belongs to oneself.

BEYOND THE THRESHOLD

What comes after

البيت مدرسة

The house is a school.