Behind the Loom

Above Azrou, in the cedar-forested hills of the Middle Atlas, the sound of the loom is the sound of the village. We spent three days with the Ait Benhaddou family and came back changed.

Fatima, the eldest daughter, learned to weave at seven. Not from a book, but from watching. "My mother's hands were the lesson," she says. The patterns she produces today — intricate diamond tessellations in red and black — are variations on patterns her grandmother made, which were variations on patterns stretching back before recorded history.

What strikes an outsider immediately is the precision required. A standard rug might contain four hundred individual knots per square centimetre. Each knot is a decision: colour, tension, direction. There is no erasing. The work demands presence.

We left with a deeper understanding of why these textiles command the respect they do — not as decor, but as documents. They are, in the truest sense, written records of a culture.