✦ Handwoven Heritage Pieces
Every Qadeem rug is woven by hand in small family workshops across Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey. We work directly with master weavers — paying fair wages, providing year-round work, and preserving designs that have been passed down for centuries.
For three generations my family has worked with rug weavers across South and Central Asia. What began as a single uncle sourcing pieces in Mazar-i-Sharif has grown into a small business that ships hand-knotted rugs to homes all over the world. We're not a marketplace. We don't list anything we haven't personally inspected. Every rug in our collection has been negotiated for, photographed, and shipped by the same five people. The weavers know us by name. We hope you'll come to know them too.
We travel to these regions twice a year to commission new pieces and check on the workshops we partner with.
Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan
Hand-knotted wool rugs on horizontal looms, often with octagonal 'elephant foot' motifs.
Known for: Afghan Aqcha, Khal MohammadiHerat, Afghanistan
Fine wool and silk pieces with intricate floral medallions, a craft preserved through generations.
Known for: Classic medallion designsLahore, Pakistan
Workshops specialising in reproductions of antique medallion designs using hand-spun wool.
Known for: Bokhara reproductionsPeshawar, Pakistan
Considered a hub of fine city weaving — silk-on-silk pieces with extraordinary knot density.
Known for: Fine silk, pictorial rugsKonya, Turkey
Anatolian flat-weave kilims with bold geometric patterns and natural plant dyes.
Known for: Kilim, Yörük tribal piecesSrinagar, Kashmir
The world's finest silk rugs — some workshops produce a single 6×9 piece per year.
Known for: Kashmiri silk on silkPhotos used with permission. We pay weavers per piece — never per hour — so they can work at the pace good craftsmanship requires.
Master Abdul Karim
Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan · 35+ yearsAbdul learnt weaving from his grandfather at age 9. Today he runs a small workshop with four loom stations and trains apprentices from the surrounding villages. His pieces often take 4–8 months to complete.
Fatima Begum
Lahore, Pakistan · 22+ yearsOne of the few women masters in her workshop, Fatima specialises in fine-knot Bokhara reproductions and has trained over a dozen other women in the trade.
Hassan Aziz
Herat, Afghanistan · 41+ yearsHassan's family has woven rugs in the same neighbourhood for over a century. He's known for his unusually fine wool-and-silk blend pieces with central medallion designs.
Rabia Khatoon
Srinagar, Kashmir · 28+ yearsRabia leads a small all-female workshop that produces silk-on-silk rugs with 600+ knots per square inch — some of the finest in the world.
Mehmet Yilmaz
Konya, Turkey · 30+ yearsA third-generation kilim weaver, Mehmet still uses natural plant dyes (madder root, indigo, walnut shell) on hand-spun wool from his own flock.
Zubair Hussain
Peshawar, Pakistan · 38+ yearsZubair's workshop produces some of our most intricate pictorial silk rugs. A single 4×6 piece can take 18 months and contain over a million knots.
Want a rug woven by one of our master weavers? Commission a custom piece →
