Kamar band, the master’s sash

The craft charters

Central Asian craft trades had charters known as risola. Writing in San’at, a magazine of the Academy of Arts of Uzbekistan, in 2009, Dilyara Atajanova says the rite of making a master, called kamar band, kamar baste or ona miyon band, was described, and so kept, in these charters. For the weavers she cites four manuscript copies of their charter, the Risola-i bofandagi, held by the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences. In Persian, kamar means ‘waist’ and band means ‘fasten’; the same word, kamarband, reached English as cummerbund.

To verify: How old the surviving risola manuscripts are; What Jeanine Elif Dagyeli’s 2011 book on the craft risola, Gott liebt das Handwerk, says about the rite: we have not yet been able to open it

Three turns of the sash

According to the weavers’ charter, Atajanova writes, one member of the craft house stood on the apprentice’s left, while another, on his right, wound a special sash three times round his waist, saying a prayer, the kalima. The young man then folded his hands on his chest and stood among the gathered members to answer questions written in the charter. The head of the house asked the teacher whether he regretted having fed and clothed the apprentice and given him money, and asked the apprentice whether he regretted his service; both answered no. At the end the new master gave a gown to his teacher and a shirt to the kalantar, the head of a craft house in Khiva. Atajanova also describes a Turkish form of the rite, in which the apprentices’ mentor, the jigit bashi, wound the sash three times and tied it in three knots.

To verify: Atajanova’s account of the questions and gifts draws on a 1971 study of crafts in southern Khorezm by I. M. Jabbarov, which we have not read

Still kept

Atajanova writes that craftsmen still hold the rite in a festive mood: the teacher tells his students they are ready to work on their own, and their parents dress him in a traditional gown and a sash to thank him. Among silk weavers, according to M. Juraev in field notes from Bukhara in 2007, it is the master who puts a gown on the apprentice, girds it with five or six metres of gauze, gives him cloth and tools, and sets up a loom in his workshop. We tell the sash as the moment a teacher said, in front of the whole workshop, that the work was good enough. We make no promise about anyone’s career, and any sash we show will credit the weavers who made it.