Hammam

What is done and what is not

The fūṭa is worn at all times, from entrance to exit: the ʿawra remains covered throughout, from navel to knee, without exception and without dispensation. No one looks at, and no one touches, what the fūṭa covers.

The hammam is never mixed. The hours for men and those for women are strictly separate, as Maghrebi usage requires. No photograph is taken there, by residents or by guests.

These rules are not a modern precaution. They take up, without softening them, those that prophetic tradition and the Muslim jurists laid down for the bath from the earliest centuries:

A Mediterranean history

The hammam was not born in the Islamic world: it inherits from it. Its roots lie in the Roman and Byzantine baths, which the emerging Muslim world adopted and transformed from the 8th century onward. In al-Andalus, from the end of that same century, the bath appears in residences and palaces before spreading through towns and countryside — carried by geographers who describe it, jurists who regulate its use, and physicians who praise its virtues.

A place the law regulates

The public bath does not enter Muslim life unexamined: it enters regulated. Jurists set its conditions very early — covering of the ʿawra, strict separation of the sexes, prohibition of the gaze — and al-Ghazālī devotes to the ādāb al-ḥammām, the proprieties of the bath, a passage of his Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. In al-Andalus, the ḥisba treatise of Ibn ʿAbdūn, written in Seville in the 12th century, goes so far as to govern who may work in the baths, and under what conditions of decency.

The hammam is thus one of the few places in the city whose use was, from the outset, set down in writing. It is that tradition, and not some present-day house policy, that the house applies.

The rooms: a path, not a single space

The traditional hammam is not a single room but a path through several rooms of rising, then falling, temperature — a principle found, sometimes under different names, from Andalusia to the Maghreb.

This organisation into rooms of rising temperature is not an Islamic invention: it directly continues that of the Roman baths. The correspondence, as can be seen, does not bear on one or two rooms but on the entire building — from the changing room where one undresses to the furnace chamber the bather never sees. The name changes language; the logic remains intact.

The kinship is all the clearer in that the heating method is inherited too: the heat of the praefurnium circulates beneath the floor and within the thickness of the walls, following the Roman principle of the hypocaustum, which the baths of al-Andalus and then of the Maghreb preserved unaltered.

In the hot room, the steam is most often scented with eucalyptus essential oil — sometimes combined with mint — diffused to clear the airways; argan oil and olive oil, by contrast, remain reserved for skin care, not for the steam.

The path is not linear: at the end, one returns to rest in the cold room. The hammam was never a quick errand, but an occasion that could last for hours.

In Fez itself, the Hammam al-Mokhfiya — dated to the mid-14th century, under the reign of the Marinid sultan Abū ʿInān, adorned with carved stucco and zellige, and attached to the habous endowment of the Qarawiyyin mosque — bears witness to this same spatial organisation, just steps from what would one day become the Riad.

The göbek tasi — the heated stone

At the centre of the hot room, some hammams feature a wide marble platform heated from below — the göbek tasi (“navel stone”), on which one stretches out to sweat before the scrub. The element belongs first to the Ottoman hammam tradition, distinct from the Maghrebi and Andalusian tradition in which the Riad stands — but it is found today, through a blending of customs, in many contemporary Moroccan hammams, notably in Marrakech and Fez.

At the Riad, the choice remains faithful to the original Maghrebi logic: several rooms of rising temperature rather than a single central stone. The göbek tasi, where it exists, answers moreover to the same principle as the whole hammam — heat that prepares the body before any other gesture.

The tayeb — a craft of the hammam

In the traditional Maghrebi hammam, the man who performs the kneading is called the tayeb; his female counterpart, the tayyaba, works in the women's hammams. The two worlds remain strictly separate, through distinct rooms or hours.

This is not a spa profession trained in a school: it is a knowledge transmitted inside the hammam itself, through repetition — the same logic of transmission as that of the Dar al-Hiraf workshops, applied to the body rather than to raw material. The gesture, firm and brief, releases the tensions of manual work: a kneading of the muscles of the back and shoulders, within the limits the law sets for the bath.

This heritage is not unique to the Islamic world: the Roman and Byzantine baths already practised tractatio, the kneading with oil after bathing — a gesture that the hammam inherited and has passed on, in its own way, down to today.