Beni Ourain: what it is, and what it isn't

A Beni Ourain is a hand-knotted pile rug of undyed sheep's wool, cream or ivory, crossed by thin dark lines that usually form lozenges. It is woven by women of the Beni Ourain, a group of Amazigh tribes in the north-eastern Middle Atlas of Morocco. Dealers usually count seventeen tribes in the group.

That is the whole definition. A rug that is not hand-knotted, not wool, or not made in that tradition is something else, whatever the label says. The name has become a style, and the style is sold everywhere.

In Tamazight the people are the Ait Warayn. Their speech belongs to the dialects of the eastern Middle Atlas, which linguists place between the languages of the Rif and those of the Atlas. Maps disagree on the edges. Some writers put the weavers in the Rif near Taza, others firmly in the Middle Atlas south of it. The mountains do not care much for the line.

The winters there are long and cold, and the rugs were made for them. Families slept on them and wrapped themselves in them. Dealers like to add that a household turned the rug pile-down in summer. It is a good story; the written record is thinner than the retelling.

The making is simple to describe and slow to do. Warp threads are stretched on a loom inside the house. A woman ties a short length of wool around two neighbouring warps, cuts it, and moves to the next pair. Then a row of weft is passed across and beaten down, and the next row of knots begins. The tufts stand up and become the pile. A deep Beni Ourain can carry a pile of three centimetres; a rug of about three metres by two can weigh fifteen kilos.

The pattern is drawn from memory, not from a chart. The lines are often brown or black wool, and they wander. A lozenge narrows, a row stops short, a border appears on one side and not the other. Collectors look for exactly that drift, because it is what a hand does over months. Symbols in these rugs are a grammar, not a dictionary: the same lozenge is read differently from house to house, and nobody outside the house should claim a single meaning for it.

European designers took these rugs up in the 1920s. Le Corbusier put Moroccan pile rugs in the Villa La Roche in Paris, built between 1923 and 1925. Alvar Aalto laid them in the Villa Mairea in Finland, and a 1938 photograph of Fallingwater shows a similar rug on Frank Lloyd Wright's floor. A white wool rug from the mountains sat very comfortably beside steel and glass.

Then the name travelled further than the rugs. Today "Beni Ourain" is printed on machine-made shag, on tufted rugs with a glued backing, and on cream rugs from looms nowhere near the Middle Atlas. Large shops sell pieces "in the style of" the tradition, which is at least honest. The word "Berber" went the same way years ago: in a carpet showroom it now means a loop-pile floor covering, often olefin, that imitates the look of a hand-tied knot.

A few plain checks sort most of it. Turn the rug over. On a hand-knotted rug you can see the rows of knots on the back, slightly irregular, and the pattern shows through. A tufted rug has a fabric or latex backing instead. Wool feels slightly greasy and smells faintly of sheep when it is damp; acrylic does neither. The fringe should be the ends of the warp threads, not a strip sewn on afterwards.

Age is a separate question. Many Beni Ourain rugs on the market were woven recently, by the same kind of hands, in the same way, and that is not a fault. Vintage pieces, from the middle and later twentieth century, have softer pile, older wool and the marks of use. Either way, the date should be given as a circa and a decade, because nobody wrote it down at the loom.

The cream is the colour of the sheep. Everything else is a woman's hand, a winter, and a lot of wool.