While on periodic travel to Afghanistan over the past two years I had the rare opportunity to travel ‘outside the wire’. Beyond the Hesco walls and concrete barriers of military installations guarded by heavily armed men is the real Afghanistan that the country’s thirty-some million inhabitants call home. In great contrast to the dusty camps that are all most civilian contractors and military service members get to see of the country, Afghanistan is a land of vast beauty with a richer cultural heritage than many visitors ever fathom, let alone have the opportunity to explore.
Regardless of troop surges, Taliban offensives and defeats, and high-level international negotiations about their futures, many Afghans’ lives have remained largely unchanged for the past decade, and some for longer than that. Many areas of the country are so remote that they were barely impacted by Taliban control, and have similarly remained little affected by developments since their fall.
One of the visible, valuable, and exportable constants of these rural areas is the hand-knotted and hand-woven textiles that their people have produced for hundreds of years. Specifically, the sale of painstakingly crafted rugs has been a mainstay of the Afghan economy for centuries. Though accurate numbers are hard to come by, it is estimated that the rug industry is Afghanistan’s second largest employer after agriculture. While opium production has long been the country’s most lucrative economic activity, these rugs vie with dried fruits for the distinction of being the country’s most important legal export.
One sunny but crisp afternoon last fall, the lives of the artisans in the far-off mountains and valleys of Afghanistan crossed with mine. After having lunch on Chicken Street, the central drag of the bazaar in the Shar-E-Naw (“new town”) neighborhood, I looked up as I adjusted my scarf after walking out of a café and saw a beautiful rug hanging over the banister of a second floor balcony. I had not had the opportunity to buy any rugs on previous trips and knew that I had some holiday shopping to do, so my companion and I entered the shop’s ground level.
As we walked inside the store, piled to the ceiling with hundreds of folded rugs, we interrupted three men sitting on the floor having their lunch. After greeting them my Dari was exhausted, and my companion—a fascinating woman born in Kabul, raised abroad after the Soviet invasion, and now working for the coalition—took over the conversation in fluent Dari. They hurriedly finished their meals and we were led upstairs to a larger room with even more folded rugs stacked to the ceiling.
Over the course of hours of conversation, repeat visits to bargain for the best rates, and a dozen cups of tea, we unfurled hundreds of rugs before selecting the ones that would eventually travel to the other side of the world with me. During those times I learned much about the traditions of Afghan rug making and dealing, and I came to understand how something that lies on the floor has the potential to help so many Afghan people stand on their own feet.
How a Rug is Made
The production of a rug begins far from the cities where they often end up for sale, and starts in the mountains and valleys where shepherds have tended their flocks for generations. The guardians of the sheep understand that wool is a sustainable resource and that their animals must be sheared every year, and there is community buy-in to the idea that it is in everyone’s interest to raise the sheep well, since their nutrition and overall health directly affects the quality of the wool.
After the shearing is complete, the shepherds bring their wool down from the highlands piled high on the backs of donkeys to sell in the villages. Once sold in the bazaar, the raw wool is washed, spun into skeins for knotting, and dyed. Sometimes these steps are performed by the weavers themselves within their family compounds, or it may be outsourced to professional artisans in the bazaar who process then sell the finished wool. The wool is hand-dyed with natural materials also found across the Afghan countryside, including madder root for red, walnut husks for brown, and pomegranate for yellow. Because of the rudimentary resources, the matter from dyes and other foreign material in the sheep’s wool often remain in the yarn after repeated washings. Even after the rug is cut from the loom and washed, finishers may still have to go through the weave with tweezers to remove larger pieces of foreign matter that remain from the piece’s rustic beginnings.
Once the raw wool has been processed and is ready for use, the weaving of the rug itself is done by women who learn the centuries-old tradition from their mothers and grandmothers. Experts from the Textile Museum in Washington, DC have estimated that it takes about two months to teach a girl to weave, depending on the weave style, design intricacy, and concentration of knots per square inch. As their skills advance, the women work on traditional looms in their homes throughout the year Larger rugs, however, may be primarily produced during the summer months because they are usually woven on larger frames in the open air.
While most women face significant barriers to employment and are often not allowed to participate in other economic activities throughout Afghanistan, rug weaving has long been a traditional income-generating activity for women across the country. During the decade and a half of Taliban rule, when women were forbidden from working, rug making remained a viable opportunity because it was contained within family compounds. Even now that work outside the home is permitted for females, rug making within the home remains popular since it enables mothers to care for their children while simultaneously earning wages, albeit mere cents per hour of painstaking knotting. A 3 foot by 5 foot rug with 200 knots per square inch will take a team of weavers three to four months to complete. These craftswomen, who have few luxuries available to them besides time, have learned how to transform it into a resource.
Rug dealers may either commission pieces ahead of time with the understanding that they will purchase them upon completion, or families may choose to produce rugs of their own volition with the hope that they will be able to sell them eventually. When purchasing from rural villages the dealers assume the risk of future sale as well as the costs of transporting the rugs across Afghanistan’s mountainous and landlocked territory, which results in substantial markups once the rugs make it to cities. These prices are further inflated when rugs are shipped outside of the country for sale.It is usually not the labor and materials themselves that make the rug costly, but instead the transportation and dealer fees that are tacked on as the piece travels further from its point of origin.
Formalizing the Sector
As machine-made rugs and large scale city workshops threaten to undercut the cottage industry, it is important that homemade continues to live as an important part of village life. Organizations ranging from NGOs to commercial dealers to the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Task Force for Business Stability Operations (TFBSO) have realized the utility of empowering the networks and individuals that produce these cultural keepsakes. Investments in preserving these indigenous crafts and taking them to international markets have had a variety of positive outcomes.
For example, ARZU, a NGO who’s name means “hope” in Dari, applies an innovative model of social entrepreneurship to the rug production industry. By sourcing and selling the rugs they weave, ARZU helps Afghan women weavers and their families break the cycle of poverty by providing them steady income and access to education and healthcare. As an organization representative explained, “Participation in ARZU’s program has a profound effect on the position of women in the villages where we work. As wage earners, women are viewed as contributors and assets, rather than burdens. Additionally, through participation in ARZU literacy classes and health services, women are able to function as informed and healthy citizens, increasing civil engagement and development at the local level." Allowing women to participate in the economy and contribute their time and skills to income-generating activities builds their resilience as individuals, and this resilience is then passed on to their children and families.
The craftsmanship and artistry that go into these pieces is a point of pride for the tribes, workshops, and families that produce them. Fine textiles have served as a form of currency and social indicator as far back as through Silk Road trading times, when Afghanistan was a major regional hub for trade and commerce. Like a metallurgist taking raw materials and forging separate elements into a product that is the strongest possible sum of its parts, these artisans transform clumps of freshly shorn raw wool into beautiful works of art.
Upon my return to the States the rugs found new homes in buildings and cultures remarkably different from the places they were created in. Every time I look at them, I wonder about the backstory of the women who wove them; what their names are, what they daydreamed as they knotted, and what conversations took place during the hours of meticulous work. I will never get answers to those questions—the paths that could have ever connected me back to the artisans have been severed by time, middlemen, and distance—but I do know that understanding the vast amount of work that went into these rugs has increased my appreciation for them and the beautiful culture they came from even more.
Whitney Grespin has worked in contingency contracting and international development on four continents. She currently specializes in security sector reform and capacity building.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's May/June 2013 print edition.
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From Herds to Homes
May 30, 2013
While on periodic travel to Afghanistan over the past two years I had the rare opportunity to travel ‘outside the wire’. Beyond the Hesco walls and concrete barriers of military installations guarded by heavily armed men is the real Afghanistan that the country’s thirty-some million inhabitants call home. In great contrast to the dusty camps that are all most civilian contractors and military service members get to see of the country, Afghanistan is a land of vast beauty with a richer cultural heritage than many visitors ever fathom, let alone have the opportunity to explore.
Regardless of troop surges, Taliban offensives and defeats, and high-level international negotiations about their futures, many Afghans’ lives have remained largely unchanged for the past decade, and some for longer than that. Many areas of the country are so remote that they were barely impacted by Taliban control, and have similarly remained little affected by developments since their fall.
One of the visible, valuable, and exportable constants of these rural areas is the hand-knotted and hand-woven textiles that their people have produced for hundreds of years. Specifically, the sale of painstakingly crafted rugs has been a mainstay of the Afghan economy for centuries. Though accurate numbers are hard to come by, it is estimated that the rug industry is Afghanistan’s second largest employer after agriculture. While opium production has long been the country’s most lucrative economic activity, these rugs vie with dried fruits for the distinction of being the country’s most important legal export.
One sunny but crisp afternoon last fall, the lives of the artisans in the far-off mountains and valleys of Afghanistan crossed with mine. After having lunch on Chicken Street, the central drag of the bazaar in the Shar-E-Naw (“new town”) neighborhood, I looked up as I adjusted my scarf after walking out of a café and saw a beautiful rug hanging over the banister of a second floor balcony. I had not had the opportunity to buy any rugs on previous trips and knew that I had some holiday shopping to do, so my companion and I entered the shop’s ground level.
As we walked inside the store, piled to the ceiling with hundreds of folded rugs, we interrupted three men sitting on the floor having their lunch. After greeting them my Dari was exhausted, and my companion—a fascinating woman born in Kabul, raised abroad after the Soviet invasion, and now working for the coalition—took over the conversation in fluent Dari. They hurriedly finished their meals and we were led upstairs to a larger room with even more folded rugs stacked to the ceiling.
Over the course of hours of conversation, repeat visits to bargain for the best rates, and a dozen cups of tea, we unfurled hundreds of rugs before selecting the ones that would eventually travel to the other side of the world with me. During those times I learned much about the traditions of Afghan rug making and dealing, and I came to understand how something that lies on the floor has the potential to help so many Afghan people stand on their own feet.
How a Rug is Made
The production of a rug begins far from the cities where they often end up for sale, and starts in the mountains and valleys where shepherds have tended their flocks for generations. The guardians of the sheep understand that wool is a sustainable resource and that their animals must be sheared every year, and there is community buy-in to the idea that it is in everyone’s interest to raise the sheep well, since their nutrition and overall health directly affects the quality of the wool.
After the shearing is complete, the shepherds bring their wool down from the highlands piled high on the backs of donkeys to sell in the villages. Once sold in the bazaar, the raw wool is washed, spun into skeins for knotting, and dyed. Sometimes these steps are performed by the weavers themselves within their family compounds, or it may be outsourced to professional artisans in the bazaar who process then sell the finished wool. The wool is hand-dyed with natural materials also found across the Afghan countryside, including madder root for red, walnut husks for brown, and pomegranate for yellow. Because of the rudimentary resources, the matter from dyes and other foreign material in the sheep’s wool often remain in the yarn after repeated washings. Even after the rug is cut from the loom and washed, finishers may still have to go through the weave with tweezers to remove larger pieces of foreign matter that remain from the piece’s rustic beginnings.
Once the raw wool has been processed and is ready for use, the weaving of the rug itself is done by women who learn the centuries-old tradition from their mothers and grandmothers. Experts from the Textile Museum in Washington, DC have estimated that it takes about two months to teach a girl to weave, depending on the weave style, design intricacy, and concentration of knots per square inch. As their skills advance, the women work on traditional looms in their homes throughout the year Larger rugs, however, may be primarily produced during the summer months because they are usually woven on larger frames in the open air.
While most women face significant barriers to employment and are often not allowed to participate in other economic activities throughout Afghanistan, rug weaving has long been a traditional income-generating activity for women across the country. During the decade and a half of Taliban rule, when women were forbidden from working, rug making remained a viable opportunity because it was contained within family compounds. Even now that work outside the home is permitted for females, rug making within the home remains popular since it enables mothers to care for their children while simultaneously earning wages, albeit mere cents per hour of painstaking knotting. A 3 foot by 5 foot rug with 200 knots per square inch will take a team of weavers three to four months to complete. These craftswomen, who have few luxuries available to them besides time, have learned how to transform it into a resource.
Rug dealers may either commission pieces ahead of time with the understanding that they will purchase them upon completion, or families may choose to produce rugs of their own volition with the hope that they will be able to sell them eventually. When purchasing from rural villages the dealers assume the risk of future sale as well as the costs of transporting the rugs across Afghanistan’s mountainous and landlocked territory, which results in substantial markups once the rugs make it to cities. These prices are further inflated when rugs are shipped outside of the country for sale.It is usually not the labor and materials themselves that make the rug costly, but instead the transportation and dealer fees that are tacked on as the piece travels further from its point of origin.
Formalizing the Sector
As machine-made rugs and large scale city workshops threaten to undercut the cottage industry, it is important that homemade continues to live as an important part of village life. Organizations ranging from NGOs to commercial dealers to the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Task Force for Business Stability Operations (TFBSO) have realized the utility of empowering the networks and individuals that produce these cultural keepsakes. Investments in preserving these indigenous crafts and taking them to international markets have had a variety of positive outcomes.
For example, ARZU, a NGO who’s name means “hope” in Dari, applies an innovative model of social entrepreneurship to the rug production industry. By sourcing and selling the rugs they weave, ARZU helps Afghan women weavers and their families break the cycle of poverty by providing them steady income and access to education and healthcare. As an organization representative explained, “Participation in ARZU’s program has a profound effect on the position of women in the villages where we work. As wage earners, women are viewed as contributors and assets, rather than burdens. Additionally, through participation in ARZU literacy classes and health services, women are able to function as informed and healthy citizens, increasing civil engagement and development at the local level." Allowing women to participate in the economy and contribute their time and skills to income-generating activities builds their resilience as individuals, and this resilience is then passed on to their children and families.
The craftsmanship and artistry that go into these pieces is a point of pride for the tribes, workshops, and families that produce them. Fine textiles have served as a form of currency and social indicator as far back as through Silk Road trading times, when Afghanistan was a major regional hub for trade and commerce. Like a metallurgist taking raw materials and forging separate elements into a product that is the strongest possible sum of its parts, these artisans transform clumps of freshly shorn raw wool into beautiful works of art.
Upon my return to the States the rugs found new homes in buildings and cultures remarkably different from the places they were created in. Every time I look at them, I wonder about the backstory of the women who wove them; what their names are, what they daydreamed as they knotted, and what conversations took place during the hours of meticulous work. I will never get answers to those questions—the paths that could have ever connected me back to the artisans have been severed by time, middlemen, and distance—but I do know that understanding the vast amount of work that went into these rugs has increased my appreciation for them and the beautiful culture they came from even more.
Whitney Grespin has worked in contingency contracting and international development on four continents. She currently specializes in security sector reform and capacity building.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's May/June 2013 print edition.
