JEDDAH — Handmade carpets are bought and collected all over the world. Museums proudly display them, collectors battle against each other in stressful and potentially expensive bidding wars, and many people simply take great delight in placing their chosen carpet in their home. But while there is no doubt that handmade carpets bring immense pleasure and pride to their owner, carpet weaving does have its detractors, who often claim that all carpets are the product of forced child labor.
The truth of the matter, however, is that the great majority of handmade carpets in the shops today, both in Saudi Arabia and worldwide, are produced by willing and accomplished weavers. The weavers usually range from teenagers to adults. To become an accomplished weaver in the first place, both the teens and adults would have undergone lessons to weave carpets at an early age. The prolific weaving tribes of Turkmenistan, Iran, Russia, and Afghanistan for example, following centuries of tradition, encourage their children from about the age of five upward to practice weaving on small child size looms. However, the child is never put under any pressure to produce anything in particular and only goes through the motions of tying knots and becoming familiar with handling the tools of the trade. These little trainee weavers, while diligently learning weaving techniques from their mothers, are at the same time under the protective umbrella of a safe and loving family environment.
However, many people from the Western world often misinterpret this involvement of children as being a form of child slave labor, which could not be further from the truth. These children are after all only following a weaving tradition that their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers followed when they were at the same age. There is in effect no difference between a child from the developed world that diligently and with great effort and commitment learns the finer points of ballet or playing a musical instrument, and a child weaver who is thoroughly taught the finer points of the ancient art of weaving. All these examples do have a common goal, which is to acquire a skill. If we take the analogy a stage further, we will see that the child weaver will after many years of practice become a competent carpet producer and will be able to sell his/her weavings to generate much-needed income for the family. The same could be said for a child from the developed world who may after many years of dedicated effort become competent to dance or play a musical instrument as a professional.
In Afghanistan, for instance, a very interesting tradition exists today teaching youngsters to weave carpets at an early age. Young girls and boys of 10 years of age and above can become very competent weavers and create small wool piled carpets and kelims that on average measure 1.5m x 1.5m. Once they have completed these little weavings, they give them to their parents as gifts. The main purpose for giving such a wonderful gift is to display to their parents their ability to weave. The pride and self-esteem that is gained by the young weavers from producing these little carpets are immeasurable. The carpets are referred to as "respect carpets" and can be found in certain specialized carpets shops.
A similar example in the developed world would be where craft apprentices are required to produce an item that was related to what they had been studying over the past few years as an exhibition of their competence.
However, there are unfortunately some examples of press-ganged child labor in weaving workshops in certain countries on the Subcontinent. The unscrupulous owners of these weaving sweatshops do not have a traditional weaving background and the slight interest they may have in carpets is purely profit-related. They pay their weavers a minimum wage to work long arduous hours in squalid conditions. The lion’s share of the proceeds from the carpets ends up in the workshop owner’s pocket. Their callous, exploitative attitude toward a proud, ancient, and artistic profession seriously undermines and tarnishes the integrity of the many professionally-run weaving workshops located in all the major weaving cities of the world that supply the majority of the world’s demand for woven carpets. Many children employed in these weaving sweatshops do not have a weaving background and are often taken off the streets to be taught only the very rudiments of carpet weaving in the shortest possible time to enable them to produce carpets en masse. Despite the toil involved in producing these low-end carpets, the children derive no pleasure from their work, as the conditions that the young weavers have to endure are not conducive to creating an atmosphere of well-being. The rugs that they produce are generally of low quality in terms of materials used, involving as they do coarse and poorly dyed wool. Furthermore, very often, the jufti knot (one knot tied over four warp threads instead of the usual two warp threads) is used along with only one weft thread (the majority of woven carpets have two weft threads) in order to speed up production, resulting in the carpet having an extremely loose ‘handle’, i.e. a characteristically floppy feel. Moreover, speedily woven carpets such as these often display a rather basic, ill-defined design.
Thankfully, with the intervention of UNICEF, the offending countries’ governments have closed down many of the weaving sweatshops that use child labor.
Sadly, it is impossible to completely wipe out this practice.
This specific area of carpet weaving was quite rightly exposed, and it is important to realize that it accounts for only a very small percentage of the world’s entire carpet production. Yet this is also the area of carpet weaving that understandably misleads people into stereotypes and generalizations. Isolated instances of bad practice thus tend to drag down a whole industry, which in the vast majority of cases operates with great responsibility.
***
(Send comments to [email protected], or visit www.warpsandwefts.com.)
— Arab News Features 30 January 2003