Beni M'Guild and the Purple

At Timahdite, on a plateau of the Middle Atlas about 1,900 metres up, snow falls on between fifteen and forty days a year. It closes the tracks. It covers the pasture. The sheep market still opens on Thursday, and the breed sold there carries the town's name.

This is Beni M'Guild country. The confederation holds the land around Timahdite and Azrou, in Ifrane province, with Khenifra and the Zayan to the south-west. Two agronomists who studied the tribe's herding, Pablo Vidal-González and Mohamed Mahdi, record that the Beni M'Guild settled these mountains between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, that the ksars of Azrou, Aïn Leuh and Agurai were built in the seventeenth century to contain their raids into the valleys, and that for a long time they took a fee from caravans on the road to the Tafilalet. They lived in large tents, khaimas. Buildings only replaced the tents from the 1940s on.

The rugs come out of that tent. Beni M'Guild women knot a pile that is long and dense, often among the deepest of any Moroccan weaving, on a wool foundation. Nobody at the loom wrote down why. The plain reading is the weather. A family that spends winter on a plateau where the average night drops below freezing, under cloth, needs bedding more than it needs decoration, and a knotted rug with a thick pile is a mattress, a blanket and a floor at once. The herding was built around the same winter: the tribe's old pattern was a double move, up to the jbel in summer and down ninety kilometres to the Saïs plain near Meknes for the cold months, until the French protectorate barred them from the plain and pushed them toward settled life.

Then the colour. Beni M'Guild rugs are the dark ones of the Middle Atlas. Where a Beni Ourain stays the cream of the fleece, a Beni M'Guild is dyed through: deep red, brown, indigo blue, and the shade dealers now talk about most, a purple that runs from plum to violet to a lilac that looks faded even when it is not.

Purple is the colour to ask questions about. In the natural dye kitchen of Morocco, as recorded by Khalid Loukid, a curator at the national museum of weaving and carpets in Marrakech, the reds come from madder root, the blues from indigo prepared with figs, dates and wood-ash lye, the yellows from pomegranate bark, weld and saffron, the browns from henna, sumac and oak bark, and the blacks from the same plants with iron added. There is no plant in that list that gives purple on its own. A natural purple is a two-step colour, red over blue or blue over red, slow and expensive, and it is rare in rugs woven for a family's own use.

Most of the purple on the market is younger than that. Loukid's record has synthetic dyes arriving in Morocco from the late 1880s. Weavers around Ouarzazate had switched almost entirely to imported mineral colours bought in Marrakech by the early twentieth century; the French protectorate was worried enough about the trade to introduce a state seal in 1919 that let only natural-wool or traditionally dyed carpets be exported; and by 1920 the madder fields of the Ait Zineb had been given up because aniline was cheaper. By the time most of the Beni M'Guild rugs in circulation were woven, the 1960s to the 1980s, the dye came in a packet from the souk, and the packet had purple in it.

That is not a confession. It is a date. A violet or plum Beni M'Guild from around 1980 is a synthetic colour on handspun mountain wool, knotted by hand on a loom in a house that had been a tent a generation earlier. The dye is the modern part. Everything else is old.

The colour has also moved. Early synthetic dyes were not all fast. Loukid cites the complaint that aniline partly discoloured and degraded carpet designs. On a purple rug this shows as drift: a field that is plum at one end and dusty rose at the other, bands of lighter and darker violet where one pot of dye ran out and the next began, a back that is louder than the front because the face has lived forty years in daylight. Dealers call that abrash and price it up. It is also simply what happened.

Under the purple is the drawing. Beni M'Guild rugs carry the Middle Atlas vocabulary: lozenges, lattices of diamonds, zigzags and chevrons, often laid out in a loose grid across the whole field rather than inside a frame. On the darker grounds the drawing is done in a second colour close to the first, red on purple, orange on red, so that the pattern comes and goes as the light moves across the pile. From across a room one of these rugs reads as a single colour. On the floor, in the morning, it is full of shapes.

The wool is the quiet reason to want one. Middle Atlas sheep grow a long, oily fleece for the cold, and Beni M'Guild weavers used it generously. A rug of three metres by two can be heavy to lift and takes a long time to dry. It wears for decades. It also holds dye deeply, which is why the purples have stayed as strong as they have.

Fifteen to forty days of snow a year, a tent, a Thursday market and a packet of dye. That is most of what there is to know, and the rest is in the pile.