Pakistani Sultanabad by I.M. International, 8 feet 7 inches by 11 feet 8 inches.

As I was finishing the first edition of this book, a new Pakistani production was coming on line called I. M. International. We had seen the company’s first rugs and were so impressed that we suggested they were among the best in the world. I. M. International has lived up to its promise.

Today the company is a major force in the rug world, contributing scores of designs, all of them superior to ordinary Pakistani natural-dye carpets. Turkish-born Izi Mizrahi produced rugs in his native country for fifteen years before moving production to the Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan. There he has made them mostly in Persian and Caucasian designs with natural dyes and hand-spun wool. His color choices are consistently good; his carpets have good body; his quality control is among the best; his rugs have a nice, old look; the best of them are simply gorgeous.

A Pakistani Karadja rug by I.M. International. It’s hard to imagine that its 100-year-old prototype from north Persia was any more attractive than this.

This luscious rug was produced by an emerging company called Q Mark in Pakistan, woven by Afghan refugees.

Q Mark and Pamir have woven rugs for in Pakistan for several years and are just now emerging with good, new productions. Hazara looms have put production on hold due to a migration of weavers back to Afghanistan.

In its dynamism, the Oriental rug industry now is reminiscent of the dot-com world in the 1990s: every day the established titans are being challenged by new innovators. Two relative newbies have caught our attention lately. Both have woven rugs for several years and are just now emerging with good, new productions.

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One of my favorite productions from the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan is called Khal Mahmeti. I am puzzled about where their designs spring from. They are recognizably Turkmen in character, but unlike any Turkmen designs I have seen.

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Pakistani Farahan oriental rug by Art Resources. Art Resources treats its wool with respect, never allowing it to be injured.

Art Resources creates great, old-looking oriental rugs in Pakistan, without distressing them with chemicals. Look for them to become one of the major oriental rug productions of our era.

Art Resources is one of my favorite producers. It is a Los Angeles business run by Iranian-born Jack Simantob. Equipped with an MBA from an American college and a good background in antique rugs, Mr. Simantob first imported rugs from Pakistan and then began to make them.

Jack’s vision was different from other rugmakers in one important respect. He wanted to create great, old-looking rugs, but he wanted to do it without distressing them with chemicals or other methods which compromise the quality of the wool. He ages his rugs ‘naturally’, as he says, and over a period of months. That approach is well-nigh heroic when you consider how expensive it must be to tie up scores of large rugs for months while they age. Still, the price to the end user is a bit less than most other ‘antiqued’ rugs, and I have to say that the wool pile in the Art Resources rugs feels much better than wool in rugs that have been aged overnight. I did not at first ask Mr. Simantob what his ‘natural aging’ consists of, assuming the answer is a professional secret, but at the risk of being rude, eventually I did inquire. I was right the first time: professional secret.

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Chris Walter has quietly created one of the very best and largest productions of natural-dyed oriental rugs in the world in three separate businesses.

In our last post we mentioned that some Westerners take a very active role producing rugs in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. One of the earliest of these special rugmkers was an American named Chris Walter.

Chris Walter and friends in Haripur Refugee Camp.

Chris Walter is a thoughtful listener, a soft-spoken, serious man, not given to self-promotion. Now in his 40s, he seems most comfortable sitting Eastern style on a carpet with Tibetan or Turkmen friends around a meal of pilaf, lentils, naan, and slices of fruit, speaking Tibetan or Turkmen or, for the sake of Western guests, a pidgin English.

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A finely-knotted Pakistani Aryana rug from Yayla tribal rugs.

Some of the best new oriental rugs are being made in Pakistan by Afghan refugees.

The path for the rug renaissance in Pakistan was paved by Afghanistan’s tragic civil war and the subsequent flood of Afghan refugees into neighboring Pakistan. More than a million Afghans sought refuge there, and hundreds of thousands still live in refugee camps in Peshawar and elsewhere near the Afghan-Pakistan border. Great numbers live in tents pitched in the desert. They segregate themselves by tribal alliances and language groups: Baluchis, Turkmen, Hazaras, and others.

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Even though we choose each rug in our collection carefully and lovingly, some go unsold. We’ll be offering those rugs at greatly reduced prices over the next two weeks, during our March Clearance Sale.

Take a look here to see the hundreds of rugs available at a deep discount.

As always, you are free to try the rugs at home before you buy.

A Pakistani ‘Persian’, meaning a Pakistani rug in a Persian style.

In the late 1970s, Pakistani rugmakers came up with a new product, known in the trade as the Pakistani Persian or the Pakistani 16/18, which is still made. As the second name implies, the knot-count of these rugs is a nominal 16 by 18 per square inch, for a total of 288 knots per square inch. That is really quite a finely knotted rug, and the production has enjoyed deserved success.

Designs almost always are Persian, the pile is Australian or New Zealand wool, body is very heavy, colors, though synthetic, are well chosen and attractive. They are sold in three grades called A, B, and C.

It interests me that three different weavers, all working with the same number of knots per square inch, and all weaving the same design, produce rugs that differ radically in quality. Grade A Pakistani Persians are impressively clear on their surfaces. Details are discernible, designs are coherent. Grade C rugs, with the same number of knots per inch, seem out of focus, muddy, confused. What accounts for the difference? The weaver’s skill. The rugs are graded upon completion, and weavers paid on that basis.

Most likely, Pakistani Persian rugs were produced to fill the vacuum created when the U.S. ceased trading with Iran. At a time when U.S. dealers were no longer able to buy Persian rugs, Pakistani Persians were practically the only finely knotted, Persian-looking rugs available.

Bokharas are a type of handmade Pakistani rug; also known as Bukharas or Bokaras, they predate the rug renaissance.

A typical Pakistani Bhokara, although red is a more common color.

Though Pakistani Bokharas are scorned by collectors, they have turned out to be honest rugs. Most are based on Turkmen prototypes called Tekkes, with repeating octagonal figures called guls, usually on fields of burgundy red, gray blue, or sometimes green.

One line of these rugs is thick and of average weave, and they are known as 9/16 doubles, meaning that they have 144 knots per square inch. They are quite inexpensive, and luxurious feeling because of their thick, soft wool imported from either Australia or New Zealand.

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In 1977, a rug dealer and writer named Georges Izmidlian wrote: ‘In countries where an informed body of opinion has grown up on the subject of oriental rugs, a distinction is drawn between those from Persia, Turkey, Afghanistan and Russia, and those from other areas which produce similar goods. Only the former are entitled to be described as real oriental rugs.’

You will notice that that leaves out the rugs of Pakistan and India. It was rather harsh, even then — not even to consider Pakistani and Indian rugs ‘real Orientals’ — but at the time I might have agreed with him. Many still do. Pakistan was known for one kind of rug, the Pakistani Bokhara, produced by the thousands and sneered at as much for its popular success as for its aesthetic shortcomings. Pakistani Bokharas seemed especially vapid to a generation newly in love with tribal rugs. Further, it was thought that Pakistan had no tradition of rugmaking (no one has ever heard of an antique Pakistani rug, after all), and that rug weaving in Pakistan was strictly commercial. Hence, Pakistani rugs were unreal.

Pakistani Sultanabad by I.M. International, 8 feet 7 inches by 11 feet 8 inches.

Twenty-some years later, Pakistan and India arguably have contributed more to the rug revolution than any country except Turkey. A few people have even realized that if no one has ever heard of an antique Pakistani rug, it may be because Pakistan didn’t exist until after World War II. Until then it was part of India. Some of history’s greatest carpets were woven in Lahore, produced for the Mughal court in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Indeed, Pakistan does have a rug tradition, quite a proud one. But old attitudes die hard, and most people whose knowledge about Oriental rugs was gained some years ago remain leery of Pakistani and Indian products. The truth today is that Pakistan’s and India’s best rugs are as good as rugs made anywhere (and just as expensive).

Stay tuned as we post about the ubiquitous Pakistani Bokhara rug, the so-called Pakistani Persian carpet, and the various producers who are driving the Pakistani rug renaissance.