Al-Warsha

In Moroccan Arabic, warsha means two things at once: the workshop and the building site. The language already says what had to be relearned elsewhere — that for a craftsman they are the same place.

Dar al-Hiraf is not a school that gives lessons and sets exercises. It is a house that has, at all times, a real piece of work in its hands, and learns its trade upon it.

Why not exercises

A technique can be learned on a practice piece. A trade cannot. The trade begins where the work has a client, a deadline, a measure to be met, and a fault that someone makes you redo at your own cost.

That is the whole difference between a school and a bottega, and it is why this one works on real buildings, to be lived in by real people.

The house first, and by true masters

The fondouk that houses the school is restored by established masters, under professional supervision, before the school opens. the ṣāniʿ do not touch it.

Two reasons, and the second is the simpler: it is a listed building, and one does not practise scales on a monument. But above all, the ṣāniʿ are the residents — while it remains a building site there is nowhere to lodge them.

During the works the first cohort does not wait, but forms in the masters' own workshops, in the medina, sleeping at home, as apprenticeship has always been done here. It enters the house once the house is finished, and it enters already half formed.

The object of the works

Once the house is open, the school's own building site opens in turn and never closes again. It advances in the order in which the ṣāniʿ become able to measure themselves against it, and it bears upon three sets of works that need not be carried on at the same time.

First come the outbuildings of the house, the stores, terraces, service rooms and linen room, and then the garden with its channels, basins, trellises and enclosing wall: works modest enough for a mistake to be repaired, and real enough for it to matter.

Next come certain parts of Al-Munya, the adjoining house, whose successive campaigns may be funded by those who prefer to support an identifiable piece of work rather than a general budget; each campaign is nonetheless carried out by the workshops of the school under a master's direction, and is signed like all the rest.

Last of all, and for many years, comes the body of houses in the derb which the house raises one by one in order to settle craftsmen in them: those it has formed, and those who, formed elsewhere, ask to affiliate themselves to it and agree to observe its rule. This is the slowest part of the programme and the largest, since its purpose is less to restore walls than to bring back into the quarter the families of the trades that left it for the new town.

The circle closes upon this last point, for those raised houses are precisely the ones in which the men who leave here with a trade will settle, as set out on the page After the residency.

The name stays in the wall

In the Maghreb, work is signed. On a zellige panel, a cedar ceiling, a plaster tympanum, one finds the formula ʿamal (عمل) — "work of" — followed by a name and a date. It is not a lost custom, but how we know, seven centuries later, which hand cut what in the madrasas of this city.

The house takes it up again, without exception. Every finished piece carries, discreetly and outside the field of the composition, the name of the man whose hands made it, and the year. Where a piece was executed by A ṢĀNIʿ under a master, both names appear: the one who showed and the one who did.

It is not a signature for glory. It is a warranty: the man who signs answers for his work — in thirty years, when a joint gives way, it will be known whose door to knock on. It is itqān made verifiable, and it is why a craftsman has always agreed to sign.

Over the years the walls of the house become a register of hands: first the six masters who raised it, then their students, then the students of their students. A genealogy that is not kept in a book — it is read on the spot, by looking up.

The trade account

Real work has a value. As soon as A ṢĀNIʿ's work has one — from the second leather of the ḥizām al-itqān onward — that work is paid, at the rate of the trade and not as compensation.

Each man therefore holds a trade account with the house. Into it go the wages of his hours on site, and a share, fixed in advance, of the value produced when a restored house is transferred or let, apportioned to hours worked and to grade.

It is not a share in a company and it gives no voice in the government of the house, but what one has earned, and nothing else.

What one takes away

On leaving, each man chooses. The balance may be taken in money — or converted, at its value, into the first share of the house-workshop he will buy from the house, without interest, year by year.

Which is to say: the man who spent those years raising the houses of the quarter already owns a share of the one he will live in, and has paid for it with his own work. Nothing evaporated; it all settled into walls.

To the man who completes the whole path and establishes himself in the medina, the house doubles the balance.

The account is not the only support he has when setting up: the tools of the first workshop are advanced to him without interest by As-Sanduq, the chest of the futuwwa, to which he remains affiliated after his departure in all that touches illness, marriage and burial.

Three rules, and they do not move

• — The account gives no vote. No right of government, no assembly, no share. This house is not a company.
• — The account is never touched for a fault. A man who is sent away leaves with his balance: what has been earned is earned. An account that can be confiscated is a chain, and a chained man stops telling the truth.
• — At death it goes to the heirs, unconditionally.

Against this, the house gives for years the roof, the table, the clothing, the tools and the teaching, and charges for none of it. That is not counted; it is stated.