The crafts of the hand

“The hand, when it works, beautifies.”

The heart is not a catalogue of five crafts. It opens on a single workshop: saddlery, iron and wood — several gestures on one and the same piece, and on the house.

THE FIRST WORKSHOP

The saddle and the house

One workshop, three materials. Not five crafts set in a row, not a shop: leather, iron and wood worked together, to the measure of a single ʿudda — and of the Riad.

Saddlery — leather and hides: the saddle, the straps, the reins, whatever touches the horse.

Iron — the bit, the spurs, the stirrups, and everything the horse requires.

Wood — the saddle-tree, and the Riad itself.

The saddle-cloth, woven and then embroidered in gold thread, may be made by the guilds of Fez to the measure of the house. The gesture remains the same.

THE WORKSHOPS

Leather

السرّاج · FEZ RED

Saddlery first, then harness and fine leatherwork. It is the workshop that opened the house and around which the other two have been ordered: wood gives the tree, metal the fittings, leather all the rest.

→ Al-ʿudda — the harness

Metal

الصفّار · VERDIGRIS

Coppersmithing and the forge: copper and brass beaten by hand, iron worked in the fire. The bits, the stirrups, the buckles and the ironwork of the house come out of here.

Fez gave this craft its name: Seffarine Square still carries that of the coppersmiths who have worked there for centuries.

The book

المجلّد · TERRACOTTA

Binding, restoring, writing. The workshop sews and covers the book, repairs the volumes of the khizāna, gilds and tools the leather of the boards — the same hide and the same irons as the saddlery, its neighbour in work. Calligraphy has its place here: the qalam, the page, the breath, writing as an inward discipline.

The Maghreb developed a script of its own, the khatt maghrebi — distinct from the eastern naskh or thuluth. Born in al-Andalus, it settled in Fez after the Reconquista. The basmala remains the first exercise of every apprentice calligrapher.

الخطُّ هندسةٌ روحانيةٌ ظهرتْ بآلةٍ جسمانيةٍ

“Calligraphy is a geometry of the spirit brought forth by an instrument of the body.” — Ibn Muqla

The basmala — bismillah al-rahman al-rahim — opens the Qur’an and paces daily life. It is also the first exercise of every apprentice calligrapher: a founding gesture before it is a decorative motif, it has always adorned the frontispieces of manuscripts, the doors of madrasas and the façades of mosques.

WORKSHOP TO OPEN

Ceramics

الفخّار · FEZ BLUE

Geometry, cutting, laying. The workshop will open when the house has the men for it.

The word zillij comes from an Arabic root meaning the small polished stone. The art was born in Fez under the Marinids, in the 13th and 14th centuries — the Bou Inania and al-ʿAttarin madrasas remain its most accomplished witnesses.

Each piece is cut separately with a hammer (minqash), from monochrome glazed tiles fired one by one. The assembly is done face down: the maalem composes the pattern on the hidden side, and turns it over only when it is finished — the geometric grids are memorised and passed on by word of mouth, like a musical repertoire.

This geometry is never merely decorative: the interlace that repeats without visible beginning or end is read, in Islamic thought, as an image of tawhid — the unity behind the multiplicity of forms.

WORKSHOP TO OPEN

Plaster

الجبّاص · PALE SAND

Carved stucco, relief, light. The workshop will open when the house has the men for it.

The gesture was born at Samarra, the ninth-century Abbasid capital, where the first wholly abstract style of ornament in Islamic art took shape. It reached full maturity later in al-Andalus and then in the Marinid Maghreb, with the muqarnas — the honeycomb cells that cover domes and portals.

The muqarnas — cells of carved plaster hung like stalactites — probably began in Persia and Mesopotamia in the 10th and 11th centuries, but reached its full geometric maturity in al-Andalus and the Maghreb: the dome of the Hall of the Two Sisters, at the Alhambra, remains its summit.

Unlike zellige, the muqarnas produced a genuine technical literature: in the 15th century the Persian mathematician Qadi Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Kashi wrote a treatise explaining how to break a dome down geometrically into standard modules.

Each cell is carved into plaster that is still fresh, in the very short time before the material hardens — which is why this workshop, alone among those of the Riad, does not form passing guests.

الجصُّ لا يُتقَنُ إلا بيدٍ تعرفُ متى تتوقفُ

“Plaster is brought to perfection only by a hand that knows when to stop.”

WORKSHOP TO OPEN

Cloth

النسّاج · INDIGO

Silk, gold thread, the drawloom.

The workshop takes up the gesture of the tiraz (طراز) — the woven or embroidered inscription that the state workshops, the dar al-tiraz (دار الطراز), produced across the medieval Arab world, from Fatimid Egypt to Umayyad Andalusia. Reserved at first for the sovereign (tiraz khassa), then extended to dignitaries (tiraz ʿamma), the inscribed cloth sealed the khilʿa (خلعة) — the gift of a robe of honour, a political gesture as much as a textile one.

That tradition crossed the Mediterranean as far as Palermo, where Arab craftsmen wove in 1133–34, for Roger II of Sicily, the Norman king, the coronation mantle now kept at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna: red silk embroidered with gold, pearls and enamel, edged with a Kufic inscription giving the place and date of its making, two lions facing camels on either side of a stylised palm.

ممّا عُمِلَ بالخزانةِ الملكيةِ المعمورةِ […] بمدينةِ صِقِلِّيَةَ سنةَ ثمانٍ وعشرين وخمسمائة

“Of what was made in the flourishing royal treasury […] in the city of Sicily, the year five hundred and twenty-eight.” — inscription embroidered on the hem of Roger II’s mantle, royal workshop of Palermo, 528 H / 1133–34

(Transcription and translation after I. Dolezalek, Arabic Script on Christian Kings, De Gruyter, 2017 — the full inscription, in rhymed prose, lists the virtues and benefits of the royal treasury; only the opening and the closing formula, with place and date, are reproduced here.)

In Fez the gold and silver thread has a name of its own: sqalli. A whole guild, the maʿallemin sqalli, is given over to making it — gold beaters, rollers, wire drawers, spinners — before the thread reaches the drawloom, the mrema bejebbad, where the roles divide: the zouaq draws the pattern, the nyar sets up the loom, the medewar prepares the bobbins, the jebbad weaves, under the maalem’s authority. A widespread hypothesis, without firm academic confirmation, links the name sqalli to Sicily (Siqilliyya) — a possible echo of that same Mediterranean circuit of gold thread.

This brocade, woven of silk and sqalli thread, has clothed great occasions for centuries. At Dar al-Hiraf the gold thread stays reserved for ceremonial pieces; everyday cloth makes do with silk alone.

نسجوا من الذهبِ الورودَ على الحريرِ

“They wove roses of gold upon the silk.”

Wood

النجّار · OLIVE GREEN

Carving, joining, the patience of cedar.

Middle Atlas cedar, with plaster and zellige, forms the triad of Moroccan decorative materials. Coffered ceilings and mashrabiyas bear witness to an art of geometric assembly without nail or glue.

والخشبُ يلينُ تحتَ يدٍ صابرةٍ

“Wood softens under a patient hand.”

THE LABORATORIES

Two works of the house and the garden. They form a guild in their own right without counting among the crafts of the hand: one colour, one sign — the alembic — and one banner.

Essences

العطّار · PALE BLUE

Herbalism, distillation, soaps. The garden provides the rose, the orange tree and the aromatics; the alembic does the rest.

→ The perfume workshop

Preserves

PALE BLUE

Jams, honey and the garden’s aromatics, for the table of the house and for what leaves it. The kitchen garden arrives whole and departs in jars.

→ The garden and the kitchen garden

FEZ

Capital of arts and crafts

A refuge city for Andalusian craftsmen after 1492, home to the Qarawiyyin. Under the Marinids, the guilds structured urban life around gesture, honour and transmission.

Dar al-Hiraf is rooted in this lineage: a formation that unites gesture, honour and common life.

These gestures of the hand find their counterpart on the side of the body, the word and sound in Music and chant and Furusiyya, and their own dress in Al-Kiswa.