Manuscripts

Maghrebi script rounds where the eastern hands angle, and it is the letterform Morocco has written in for a thousand years — still, today, by hand. The illumination around it, interlace and gold and lapis, comes out of the Almohad and Marinid workshops, and the Qarawiyyin library at Fez has been lending the books out since 859.

This comes from a craft people still practise. It is nobody's private property and it is not nobody's work either: it was made, over centuries, mostly by women whose names were never written down. We say so rather than call it anonymous.