Residential path
A renewable year, up to three, under the rule of the house: one does not come for a course, one lives there. An independent path, reserved for adults.
THE CONDITION OF FORMATION
Living, not just learning
The residency is the condition of formation. The craft, prayer, the body, the table and the evening conversation make a single rhythm, held together day after day, and not juxtaposed activities.
The man who emerges from it must be able to stand on his own — a craft, a family, the word given.
Age and commitment
The residential path is reserved for adult men (eighteen years of age completed) who are unmarried. It provides for an initial trial period of one to three months and, thereafter, a renewable annual cycle, ordinarily up to three years.
The resident pays no fee: the house provides in full for board, lodging, tools of work and dress, so that attention may turn to the work and to formation. For each man there is constituted, outside the house and in his own name, a bound providence fund. See At-Tadbir.
The priority remains the continuity of the crafts and the formation of men capable of lasting, not of making up numbers.
A DISTINCT PATH
Craft immersion
Craft immersion lasts from two to six weeks and allows one to come to know a craft beside a master. It is independent of the residential path.
It too is reserved for adults. It may precede an application to the residential path, but it is not a required stage and does not guarantee admission.
WHAT HOLDS THE HOUSE TOGETHER
The regulations
The common life of a number of men living in the same house, sharing the workshops, meals and prayer, does not rest on goodwill alone: it needs a written framework, clear, given to each one.
Each resident receives, upon admission, the regulations of community life of the Riad — the principles that make a dignified and orderly shared life possible: daily rhythm, mutual respect and brotherhood, life in the dormitory, mentoring, guidance by the masters, dress, use of digital devices and screens, substances and health, visits and outings, and the procedure followed in case of a breach. The resident signs it before moving in.
This document remains above all a text for internal use, handed over and explained at the moment of admission, not a communication tool. What is said of it here is only a glimpse; the full text is provided to any serious candidate who requests it.
AL-ATHAR
At the end: the work received
The residency ends with a work and not with a departure. Each man leaves in the walls a piece of his own hand — a panel, a door, a basin, an inscription — chosen with his master, judged by him, and set in place before the community.
It is neither carried away nor sold. It is entered in the register of the house, with the master’s name and the year, and the man undertakes at the same time to pass on in his turn what he has learned.
THE THRESHOLDS
Do not confuse the doors
The residential path is neither a short stay nor a craft immersion. The guest of Al-Munya is received elsewhere: see How one enters.
How one enters·Staying·Craft immersion·Al-Munya
After the training period, some young masters choose to remain in the settled community of Ar-Riwaq.
The words of this page are in the common glossary; the works cited in the sources; the sister house is Al-Funduq aṣ-Ṣiqillī.