Moroccan Black Soap: Beldi, the Hammam and Everyday Washing
What Moroccan beldi soap is made of, the hammam order of steam, kessa and ghassoul, how to use it at home, and what to wash with every day.
In Fez you find a hammam with your nose before your eyes. The door is kept deliberately plain, and the entrance turns a corner at once, so nobody in the street can see in. What gives it away is the smell of steam and soap drifting out through that door.
It usually stands next to a mosque, and one of its walls leans against the public bakery, so that no heat goes to waste.
The soap people wash with inside is called sabun beldi, though Moroccans usually just call it el-beldi. The French call it savon noir. In English it is Moroccan black soap.
What beldi soap is
It is made from olive oil and potassium hydroxide, known as potash. Crushed olives go in with the oil, and they give it a gel-like body and a colour somewhere between dark green and black.
Potash is the reason beldi comes as a soft paste in a jar. Soap made with soda, sodium hydroxide, sets hard into a bar. Soap made with potash stays soft and comes out of the jar on your fingertips. Potash was once made from the ash of burnt plants.
In Moroccan Arabic, beldi means local: made here, by hand, the traditional way. Its partner is roumi, which means from far away, from the West, from a factory.
The word soap travelled a long way too. The Arabic sabun came from the Latin sapo by way of Aramaic. The Bosnian sapun came from the same Latin word, probably through Medieval Greek. When a Moroccan says sabun and a Bosnian says sapun, both of them are speaking Latin, each with a local accent.
Soap on the backs of mules
In the 1520s Hasan al-Wazzan, the man Europe knows as Leo Africanus, described the markets and shops of Fez. Among them were shops selling liquid soap. Soap was also made in the mountains around the city, he wrote, and it came into Fez on the backs of mules.
Of one mountain north of Fez he wrote that it was rich in oil, honey and vines, and that its people were mainly occupied in making soap.
The olive does two jobs in this story. The oil goes into the soap and the stones go into the fire: the furnaces of the Fez hammams burn olive stones and wood shavings. In Leo's day they burned something less fragrant, dried animal dung, which boys went round collecting.
Leo counted more than a hundred bathhouses in Fez, all built to one pattern. Most of them belonged to mosques and colleges and paid them a yearly rent. Once a year the bath-keepers marched out beyond the city walls with trumpets and pipes to fetch a wild onion, which they put in a brass pot, covered with a linen cloth soaked in lye and hung at the door of the bath for luck.
The hammam, room by room
The hammam grew out of the Roman and Byzantine bathhouse and was adapted to the washing that Islam requires. At Volubilis the Romans built their baths, and at the end of the 8th century the Idrisids built a hammam a short walk away. Some twenty years ago about five thousand traditional hammams were working in Morocco, more than 120 of them in Fez.
A Moroccan hammam runs in a straight line: a cold room, a warm room, then a hot room, one after another. In Fez they are called el-barrani, el-wasti and ed-dakhli, and the middle one is usually the largest. Before them comes the guelssa, where you undress.
Morocco inherited that straight line from the Romans and kept it, most likely because it stayed outside Ottoman influence. Hammams further east, including the ones the Ottomans brought to Bosnia, are built around a central space. The oldest in Sarajevo, Isa-beg's, was first recorded in 1462, almost seven centuries after the one at Volubilis, and it reached Sarajevo by an entirely separate road.
In the hot room there is the barma, a basin set into the wall. Hot water runs into it straight from the furnace and fills the room with steam. Along the walls are small niches, the mtahra, for anyone who wants more privacy.
Behind the building, with its own entrance, is the furnace, which Fez calls the farnachi. The water heats in large brass cauldrons, once made of copper. The smoke runs under the floor of the hot room and leaves through four chimneys set into its four corners. That is Roman underfloor heating, and in Moroccan hammams it is still lit.
In Fez, men and women use the same building at different hours. The only double hammam in the city, with separate halves, is the Saffarin, named after the metalworkers of the square beside it.
Steam, soap, kessa, ghassoul
In the hammam you first sit in the heat.
Then comes the beldi. It is rubbed into damp skin, left for a few minutes and rinsed off. The soap softens and cleans. The glove does the rest.
That glove is the kessa. It is rough, it goes over the hand, and it takes off the softened skin. Very often somebody else does this for you: the tayyaba, the woman who washes and massages in the hammam.
The hammams of Sarajevo had a kesa of their own. The tellak wore it on his hand, and the word reached Bosnian through Turkish from Persian, where it means a bag.
After the kessa comes more water, and then ghassoul, on the hair and the body. It is a clay rich in magnesium, and its name says what it is for. It comes from the Arabic verb to wash: ghassoul is, quite literally, the thing that washes.
It is mined from underground galleries in the middle Moulouya valley, near Missour, on the edge of the Middle Atlas. It is the one deposit anyone mines. Once it is out of the ground it is sorted by hand, washed and dried in the sun. At the end of the 18th century a sultan's decree handed the quarries to the sharifs of Ksabi, on condition that half of the fees they collected went to the treasury.
The ghassoul is rinsed off in its turn.
A whole afternoon
You go to the hammam for the afternoon, and after bathing you sit in the guelssa and talk. Leo wrote that people feasted after their bath, with music and singing. In his time, while the women were bathing, a rope was hung across the entrance as a sign to men that they could go no further.
The hammam marks the stages of a woman's life. She goes before her wedding, forty days after giving birth, and before the great religious festivals.
In Fez more than a hundred years ago, the bride went to the bath in the afternoon five days before the wedding, with women of her family, one of whom carried a candlestick with a wax candle that was lit as they came in. For the red that brides in parts of Morocco wore on their cheeks, read what aker fassi is.
People who have never been know the hammam from their grandparents' stories. Across the border, in Constantine in Algeria, one woman summed it up for the researchers who came to ask: “At the hammam, even if I do not know you, I can tell you everything.”
What to wash with every day
In 2003 I was five. My mother washed me with beldi and scrubbed me down with a kessa. After a long day of playing in the park, the dead skin and grime came off under the glove as “black noodles”.
When I told my friends at school about it, they looked at me strangely. Black noodles?
The easiest thing to carry home from the hammam is its order. For everyday washing, one more thing helps: knowing your skin's own number.
The surface of the skin is mildly acidic, at about pH 4.7 on average. In measurements, skin below pH 5 is in better condition: it holds its moisture better and flakes less.
Soap is alkaline by nature. When bar soaps from the shelf were tested, most of them came in between pH 9 and 10. Even plain tap water, which in Europe is usually around pH 8, raises the skin's pH and keeps it raised for up to six hours.
A wash that takes too much from the skin leaves a familiar feeling: tightness the moment you finish, and dryness later. That is why tightness after washing is a signal worth noticing.
The hammam gives soap a place with a clear before and after: steam before, and water and the glove after. A weekday morning shower has neither the steam nor the tayyaba, so what you wash with matters.
This is where glycerin earns its keep: it holds water in the outer layer of the skin. It was discovered, fittingly, in a soap pot: it was isolated from olive oil that was being turned into soap, and named the sweet principle of fat.
ALJIG is our body wash with glycerin and argan oil, scented with orange blossom. After the shower, the skin stays soft.
How to use black soap at home
If you have a jar of beldi, the same order works at home, with a hot shower in place of the steam room.
- Stand under a hot shower for a few minutes, so the skin is damp.
- Rub a pinch of beldi into the damp skin of your body.
- Leave it for five to ten minutes.
- Rinse, then go over the skin with a kessa.
- Rinse again.
- If you have ghassoul, mix it with warm water into a paste, spread it on your hair and body, leave it for a few minutes and rinse.
- Finish by massaging a little argan oil into the skin.
And if you ever need a hammam in Fez, follow the smell of soap.