As-Sanduq

What is remembered of the futuwwa is its virtues and its signs: generosity, loyalty, the knotted belt, the degrees. What is forgotten is that it always had, besides, something very concrete — a chest.

The craft corporations, from the Maghreb to Anatolia and as far as the arti of Venice, all kept a common fund: for the sick man who could no longer work, for the widow, for the burial, for the young master setting up who had nothing to buy his tools with. It was not a charity attached to the trade, but the trade itself, seen from the side where it protects its own.

What it covers

Six things, in the order in which they arrive in a life:

• — The tools of the first workshop, for the man who leaves and sets up. An interest-free loan: a master who establishes himself needs tools before he needs advice.
• — Help towards marriage. The house claims to form men able to sustain a trade and a household; at twenty-eight the real obstacle is money.
• — Maintenance during illness, for as long as the hands cannot work.
• — Extinction of whatever remains owed on the house-workshop, in case of death or permanent incapacity. A family does not inherit a debt.
• — Funeral costs of the member and of his own. It is the oldest of the functions, and the least optional.
• — Exceptional relief, for what nobody had foreseen.

Members are the residents, the naib, and the masters who have left and set up on their own. Each pays the same contribution; the man with no income is exempted without losing any of his rights. The fund is not an insurance: no one is admitted to it in proportion to what he has paid in.

Who holds it, and who does not

Three elected members administer it, chosen among the masters who have left and the naib, for two years. The charge is unpaid.

Neither the Ash-Shaykh, nor the muqaddam, nor the faqih, nor anyone holding authority over the residents may sit on it. This is not distrust, but the one rule that prevents a common fund from becoming, within two generations, the instrument by which whoever governs secures the loyalty of whoever receives.

The house pays into the fund. Its contribution gives it no vote.

Neither merit nor conduct

The criteria are written, posted, and the same for everyone. No request is weighed by seniority, piety, diligence or sympathy. Every request receives a written and reasoned answer; a refusal goes before the assembly of members.

And one rule that surprises, until the reason for it appears: relief may never be refused — or granted — on account of a breach of the rule. The discipline of the house and the assistance of the fund are two separate orders. A fund that can punish is not a fund but a lever; and the day relief becomes conditional, the man who needs it stops telling the truth about his own conduct. Mutual aid and sincerity are lost at a single stroke.

Three locks

The corporations' chest had several locks and several keys, held by different men: no one could open it alone. The Riad's has three.

The accounts are closed once a year before the assembly, with the sums given set out by category and without names: what was given to whom is not said. Alms take their value from the discretion with which they are made, and relief between brothers is no different.