The khitbah and the life of the affections

Residence asks for celibacy for the time of formation, but whoever resides there may prepare himself to build, together with the workshop, a house and a family as well. In the urban tradition of the medina, the apprenticeship of the young man — be he ṣāniʿ on the way to mastery or ṭālib over his books — neither breaks the bond with the family nor suspends the domestic future. It is indeed customary for the young man to be already formally promised (makhtūb): the marriage promise (al-khitbah) binds the two families while he is still learning the craft, setting a sure goal for his ardour. Marriage will come when the pupil has become maʿallem, when he can sustain a workshop and keep a house.

To this bond the house opens its parlour, and goes no further. The young woman comes accompanied by her mother or her kin, according to the custom and the decency of the ʿurf; the young man presents himself in the presence of his own. There is no violation of the inner inviolability (ḥurm) of the common house, nor furtive seclusion: the meeting is kept by the presence of the relatives, in the decorum of a room conceived to receive with gravity and tenderness.

These periodic meetings carry a pedagogical weight no less than the workshop or prayer. They remind the resident why he files the iron, why he planes the cedar, why he submits to the discipline of the body and of rising at dawn: he does not train to withdraw from the world, but to make himself capable of keeping, one day not far off, a family and a house of his own in the medina.