The project
Riad Al-Uns is a house of formation and common life, and not a hotel: craft, prayer, the rhythm of the day, measured hospitality.
What is instituted in Fez
What is instituted in Fez can, without being altered, be recognised on the other shore as well. It is not a matter of offering Europe an image of the Maghreb, nor of preparing a programme. It is a house of craft and common life, in the medina, whose high form remains visible — in Sicily as in Fez — without either shore being mistress of the other.
→ The vision
Neither madrasa nor college — a third way
Riad Al-Uns exists between two models from both of which it stands apart, each for a precise reason.
A madrasa forms through instruction (taʿlīm) — memorisation of the text, study of fiqh and tafsīr, transmission of religious knowledge while seated, immobile, mostly in a position of listening. It is an essential place in the Muslim world, but a place of the text, not of the gesture: the body remains largely silent there.
A Western college, by contrast, forms through the accumulation of secular knowledge and preparation for a diploma — without ever questioning what the philosopher Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas called the loss of adab: the joint discipline of body, soul and spirit. Al-Attas preferred, to the word taʿlīm (instruction) and the word tarbiya (rearing or mere biological tending — a term which, al-Attas notes, applies equally to animals), the term taʾdīb: an education that inculcates adab, not merely knowledge.
It is this third way that the Riad takes. Neither memorisation alone, nor the accumulation of diplomas, but the formation of a malaka — a word that Ibn Khaldūn, in his Muqaddima (14th century), applies equally to crafts and to language, to faith and to art: a stable quality, acquired through the repetition of a gesture until its form takes root in the soul. Ibn Khaldūn does not distinguish the craft of the artisan from the virtue of the believer: both are acquired in the same way — through repeated practice, until it becomes second nature.
In Arabic this unity never needed to be cast as a proverb. Where Latin must bring two terms together — mens sana in corpore sano, a prayer of Juvenal turned slogan —, Arabic has a single verb: rāḍa (راض), said of the horse one trains without breaking it, of the garden one tends, of the body one exercises and of the soul one corrects. From this root come riyāḍa, exercise, and rawḍa, the garden, whose plural riyāḍ gives this house its name. To form a man, here, is riyāḍat al-badan wa riyāḍat al-nafs — the training of the body and that of the soul: one and the same gesture applied to two materials. Al-Ghazālī gave that title to the twenty-second book of his Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn — “On the training of the soul, the refining of character and the treatment of the diseases of the heart” — without having to justify treating a character as one treats a body: the language had said it before him.
This is why Dar al-Hiraf teaches a craft with the hand, not only with the memory; why the five prayers structure the day instead of remaining a slot in a timetable; why the patio, the hammam, the shared table count as much as the study room. What the Riad forms goes beyond an informed mind: a man whose character carries, in his very body, the mark of what he has learned.
The order of the house
Dar al-Hiraf
House of crafts and residence for adult unmarried men. The first workshop — saddlery, iron, wood — and, with the craft, the discipline of character and of faith, which also prepares a man, one day, to keep a hearth and a family.
Beauty
Architecture, materials, garden, silence. Beauty is not a decorative luxury, since it educates the gaze and the body, as the craft educates the hand.
Rhythm
The five prayers structure the day. Between them: the workshop, the table, the body, silence. A form of life, not a programme.
Measured hospitality
To welcome without denaturing. Few guests, a measured time, the same principles as the house.
The documents of the project
The first house
What this house must establish, and what could be taken up elsewhere.
The vision
What the project proposes to do, and what the house will not become.
Family and community
From the house to the hearth.
Measured hospitality
To welcome without denaturing.
Charity and service
What the house owes its quarter.
Openness and collaborations
The schools, the workshops and the institutions.
The words of this page are in the common glossary; the works cited in the sources; the sister house is Al-Funduq aṣ-Ṣiqillī.