Berber and Beni Ourain

The Middle Atlas, and nowhere else

The Beni Ourain, or Ait Ouarain, are a confederation of tribes in the north-east of the Moroccan Middle Atlas, between Fez and Taza. Their rugs were woven at home, by the women, for domestic use: they are slept on and used as covers, in a mountain climate where the winter is cold. That use explains the depth of the pile. A Beni Ourain is as much a blanket as a floor rug.

The word Berber, used on its own, designates nothing precise. It covers very different productions: Azilal from the High Atlas and Boujad from the Tadla plains, colourful and graphic; Beni M'Guild, darker, often brown and purplish; Zanafi and hanbels, flat-woven, with no pile; Taznakht in the south; and boucherouite, rag rugs made from cut-up clothing, which appeared in the second half of the twentieth century. When people speak of a Berber rug in Belgium, in the great majority of cases it is a Beni Ourain or a piece of that kind.

On age, one has to be clear. What circulates on the European market is overwhelmingly twentieth century. Genuinely old pieces exist but are rare, and a large part of what is sold as vintage dates from the 1960s to the 1990s. The current commercial wave goes back to the 2000s, with a production woven expressly for export: hand-knotted, but new.

Knotted, but very loosely

Contrary to a widespread idea, a Beni Ourain is indeed a knotted rug. It uses the symmetric knot, closed over two woollen warps. What sets it apart is the manner: the rows of knots are spaced out by several weft passes, sometimes four to eight, and the knot itself is closed without being pulled tight. Hence a deep, mobile pile that lies down and stands up again, and a very low density, in the order of ten to forty thousand knots per square metre. A Persian workshop rug has ten to twenty times more.

The wool is local, undyed for the ground, greasy and a little rustic. The pile measures two to six centimetres, sometimes more. The rug is thick, heavy, and it holds a considerable quantity of water. The foundation is entirely wool, which has direct consequences in the wash.

The formats are irregular: the edges are not straight, the corners are not square, the piece is not exactly rectangular. This is not a manufacturing fault. There is no cartoon, no fixed frame and no dimensional control.

The design: an ivory ground and brown diamonds

The classic scheme is of a simplicity that explains its success in interiors: an ivory or cream field of undyed wool, crossed by a loose network of diamonds drawn in dark brown or black, the lines slightly shaky, never ruled. Most often there is no border at all: the design stops at the edge, or it carries on and is cut off. That absence of a border is the best criterion for telling the rug apart from an oriental rug, which almost always has several.

On the back you read widely spaced rows of knots and a great deal of visible weft. An industrial piece imitating the type, tufted and coated with latex on the back, has nothing in common with that: its back is a glued cloth, with no legible row of knots.

The question of value, put plainly

A Beni Ourain is a decorative object. It has no collector's value in the sense that a Kashan, an 1880 Caucasian rug or an old Turkmen rug has one. There is no quality scale founded on knot density, no analysis of dyes that would raise a piece, no established price record that would let an owner be told what the rug will be worth in ten years.

We would rather say it directly: our rug buying covers hand-knotted oriental rugs, and we do not promise a trade-in value on a deep-piled Berber rug. What we can say, on the other hand, is precise: what a wash will and will not do, what threatens the piece, and how to keep it in good condition for a long time. That is the only ground on which we have anything useful to bring to this type of rug.

In the workshop: water, felting, moths

The first problem is mechanical. Long wool soaked with water weighs several times its dry weight. A large wet Beni Ourain is moved by supporting its whole surface, never pulled by a corner or lifted by an edge: with knotting as loose as this, the knots give way and whole tufts come out.

The second is felting, and it is the main risk. Long, loose, greasy wool, plus heat, plus alkalinity, plus agitation: that is the very definition of felting. A machine, a rotary bonnet, a hot injection-extraction, and the pile turns into a stiff mat of felt that will not open again. There is no treatment for disentangling felted scales. Hence washing below 30 °C, with neutral soap, by hand and in the direction of the pile, opening the pile up during drying.

Drying takes markedly longer than on a short-piled rug, and it is done flat, with air moving, the pile lifted and separated. A Berber rug dried folded or hung keeps the shape it dried in.

The third point is the dark lines bleeding onto the ivory. On old pieces the brown comes from naturally dark wool, which does not bleed. On much recent production the black is dyed wool, and black running onto an ivory ground is permanent. It is the first thing we test, before any contact with water.

That leaves the moth. Thick, undyed wool in a deep pile that vacuums badly because the vacuum catches in it: there is no more favourable environment for the carpet moth. The larvae eat the keratin at the base of the tuft; the pile looks intact until you pull it, and then it comes away by the handful. A moth treatment is discussed from the first cocoon found, not later.

What we do not do to a Berber rug

A few useful refusals. We do not bleach a yellowed ivory ground: the products that whiten wool oxidise it and weaken it, and yellowing caused by an alkaline product cannot be undone in any case. We do not shear a pile to even it out. We do not apply a latex backing to stop the rug slipping: it cracks, it yellows, and it makes any later washing impossible.

And it is worth knowing what a repair gives: with knotting this loose, a hole is filled by reknotting deep wool, but the match almost always shows, because the original ivory has turned towards cream with age while the new wool is white. The shade can be brought closer, it cannot be made to coincide. We say so before the quote, not on handing the rug back. For routine washing, everything is set out on the Berber rug cleaning page.