Henna and the Loom
Henna dyes hands at weddings, and in a few Amazigh valleys it dyes wool too. Where it really turns up in weaving, and where the story runs thin.
Below the Jebel Siroua, in the country around Taznakht, wool goes into a pot of henna with slices of lemon and is left to steep. When it comes out it is brown. That is the plainest record there is of henna on the loom: a dye for yarn, in one part of the Anti-Atlas, written down by the curator of Morocco's national museum of weaving and carpets in Marrakech.
The recipe is short. The leaves are dried and pounded to a powder, then mixed with water and lemon juice. The colour is fixed with a liquid made from ash, the burnt central stem of the palm frond, which is alkaline. Most dyes on wool need a mordant such as alum to hold; for henna, the record names the ash.
The chemistry explains why. The dye in henna is lawsone, a small red-orange molecule in the leaves of Lawsonia inermis. It reacts with keratin, the protein of skin and hair, and binds to it, which is why henna on a palm lasts until the skin wears away. Sheep's wool is hair. It is keratin too.
Henna was never only a colour. In 2024 UNESCO inscribed henna, its rituals and social practices, on its list of intangible heritage, on a joint file from sixteen Arab states, Morocco among them. The file describes the henna tree as a blessed tree, tied to purity, fertility, health and joy, and lists the moments it belongs to: births, weddings, feast days, pilgrimages, visits to shrines.
That sense of blessing follows it onto cloth. Among the Amazigh of the Anti-Atlas, the curator writes, the blessing carried by henna is what raises it above an ordinary dye. It is used to dye and to paint textiles, above all wedding coverlets and women's things, with geometric figures standing out on a henna ground. On the veils of the Ait Abdellah, women hold a ceremony to protect the bride. On veils from the Beni Ouarain country, henna is laid on again and again over the same places, until it covers the black outlines beneath.
So henna in weaving is real. It is also narrower than the souk would have it.
In the carpet shops of any medina, a warm brown or a soft apricot in an old rug will often be called henna. Sometimes it may be. But the same museum record names madder, sumac and oak bark for reds and browns, pomegranate for orange and black, saffron in the High Atlas. A brown can come from any of these, from undyed dark fleece, or from a packet. Colour seen by eye is not proof of what made it. The documented uses of henna are specific: wool in the Taznakht country, painted and dyed pieces for weddings in the Anti-Atlas, veils worked by hand. It is not a general recipe behind every rug.
The packets came early. By the record, synthetic dyes spread fast from the late 1880s, cheap and bright. Weavers around Ouarzazate, not far from Taznakht, turned almost entirely to imported colours bought in Marrakech, and the old madder fields of some valleys were given up. Henna had a price as well. In the old market figures the curator cites, its leaves cost about three times as much as madder root: six to eight francs a kilo against two or so. A dye that dear was not wasted on just anything.
What lasts is the knowledge. Dye recipes pass from mother to daughter, and in the douars of the Siroua older women have shared theirs. Before a bath, some fumigate the wool, put it out of sight, and wash as if for prayer. The henna is the same henna that goes on a bride's hands at her wedding. Only the hair it lands on is different.