section 1: Introduction

section 2: African or Oriental?

section 3: Our personal view

section 4: Anomalies in kilims

section 5: Islamic notions of good and evil

section 6: The American market

section 7: "Kilim, the complete   guide", extracts

section 8: Berber tribes | conclusion

The Qur’an

 sura 88

(ayats 8 -16)

The Overwhelming Event

bismillahir rahmanir rahim

Other faces that Day

Will be joyful,

Pleased with their Striving,

In a Garden on high,

Where they shall hear

No word of vanity:

Therein will be a bubbling spring:

Therein will be couches

Of dignity, raised on high,

Goblets placed (ready),

And Cushions set in rows,

And rich carpets

All spread out.

---

Marrakech

section 3

A personal view

We travelled to Morocco after visiting the Alhambra Palace in Granada. The imagery of those courtyards, the endless decoration of its high walls, the way the buildings hover between the sky above and the pools of water at your feet, how gardens have been calmly laid out and tended inside the building whilst beyond their walls the ragged slopes are of wildest nature, the jewel-like construction of ceilings, domes and walls and then from a window your eye is drawn toward the Sierra Nevada mountains laced with snow and sun...... it is a Qur’anic recitation in stone, with the same images of paradise being evoked to allow meditation upon the next life.

As muslims we were naturally interested in the people who had built the Alhambra - where they had come from, where they went - and we travelled into Morocco wanting to know more.

When we started buying Moroccan hanbels, a dealer in Saharan Amzrou asked us what it was we were looking for in a kilim. He had not been to the Alhambra but we tried to describe the impression it had made on us and how we looked for some of these qualities in the kilims: restrained use of colour, energetic design embellished with fine decoration.

We travelled northwards along the Draa Valley and crossed the High Atlas to Marrakech just as two months earlier we had driven up to Granada nestling in the plains of the high, snow-capped Sierra Nevada. The forebears of those who had once ruled Spain, made Marrakech their capital and built there in the style of al Andalus using Andalucian craftsmen.

If our education in kilims began in Saharan Amzrou, (where the quality of the kilims are judged in part by the tightness of the weave so as to exclude sand passing through), it was rounded off in Meknes and nearby Azrou when we started to see Zaiane and Beni M'Gild hanbels.

There is a freedom of expression and a boldness of design in some of them which is emphasised by the many irregularities found in the working patterns. Reduced to its most fundamental, you might say all Moroccan kilims are a variation on the diamond motif, and these Zaiane pieces testify to this. Yet they are not boring, rigid, repetitions on one theme. The motifs do break out of the rugs two dimensions and offer a new perspective for the eye; a glimpse of a space outside this world.

In this, these carpets approach the true purpose of islamic art: like the Alhambra, they offer the beholder a way of contemplating the greatness of Allah. Islamic art needs to be non-figurative and it is most often employed in decoration, playing with geometric figures capable of endless extension to suggest realities beyond the earthly.