Organisation of the spaces

SLEEPING

The rooms on the gallery

One does not sleep in a corridor of equal rooms. The rooms open onto the gallery that runs around the courtyard on the upper floor, in the arrangement Fez has always given to houses where men work and lodge at once: that of the fondouk. Each room takes the measure the bay leaves it, so that none is identical to its neighbour.

The inequality of the rooms is not a fault of the building, but what forbids putting a price on them. They are not distributed according to what one pays, but according to what the house judges — the work, the seniority, the charge exercised. The ṣāniʿ, the nāʾib and the maʿallem sleep under the same gallery.

Each room has six beds. Most men lodge with the ṣāniʿ of their own workshop, so that the unit of life ordinarily coincides with the unit of work, but nothing obliges them to: each changes bed and room when he wishes. The nāʾib sleeps among his companions. The maʿallem occupies a room of his own, adjoining that of his ṣāniʿ, so that he can be called during the night without sharing their room. It opens on both sides, onto the dormitory gallery and onto the common spaces, so that he comes and goes without crossing the shared room. The faqīh occupies a room of the same kind and for the same working reason, since he rises before everyone for the call to fajr. The house opens with four or five such rooms — twenty-five to thirty-five places — and may go, at full regime, to eight or ten. The single and double rooms meant for guests are at the Munya, not here. The upkeep of the room falls to the men who occupy it.

Young men of more modest means are received in the same rooms. Integration is part of the formation.

KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge

The room of the books and the small reading salon adjoining it. The khizāna — the cabinet of the volumes — remains under lock on the Riad's side. One asks for a book; the book is brought.

It is also the passage between the Munya, the apartment of honour and the Riad: the only room the three can reach when the door is opened from the inside.

THRESHOLD

Government and threshold

The rooms of the Ash-Shaykh and of the Muqaddam are distinct — by function, not by comfort. The Ash-Shaykh has a room with a small sitting room adjoining it, onto which the two rooms of the Muqaddam open directly, so that the government of the house occupies a single quarter and is always to be found in one place. That quarter communicates with the dormitory zone, but it also has its own access from the common spaces: one may come to it without passing through the rooms, and leave it without crossing them. A single door in the common wall with the Munya, openable only from the Riad's side. The key is held by the Bawwāb.

An inner Munya — an apartment opening onto the courtyard and the garden — is set aside for the direction or for an aged master. It is not a matter of comfort, but so that a man who answers for the house may withdraw from it without leaving it.

Near the porter's quarters, opening onto the vestibule, a small bare room serves to confine, for a fixed time, a man who has gravely broken the rules of common life without the fault calling for dismissal; the measure belongs to taʿzīr and is pronounced before the arbitration of the house.