When the IDF began amassing in Gaza in the aftermath of the 10/7 massacre and Americans started taking sides, several social media influencers pointedly asked their followers to name some Israeli and Palestinian inventions without googling. I cheated and googled the latter, and found a Wikipedia page with 17 entries. Catalogued under the letter K is the best-known item—the famed Palestinian keffiyeh.
The black-and-white scarf with a simple yet fanciful fishnet pattern framed by gray stripes, mustache-like waves, and tasseled fringes has long become a fashion staple. In the West, the rectangular cloth is worn by both sexes, typically wrapped around head or neck—a statement piece, and a versatile accessory. It becomes practical when keeping warm, shielding from the sun—or concealing identity in a riot. The distinct geometric patterns have been incorporated into textile design and then turned into any garment imaginable.
Popularized by the terrorist icon Yasser Arafat, the keffiyeh was once marketed by the hipster retailer Urban Outfitters as an antiwar scarf. Amazon sells it as a tactical scarf to Gulf War veterans who swear they find they’ve adopted it purely out of utilitarianism, but it feels like they brought home a trophy. In other words, the keffiyeh is all things to all people.
The genesis of any item of folklore—and material culture like ethnic dress is folklore—is near impossible to pinpoint. In an essay on Eastern European cuisine, I commented on how folklorists treat the issue of origin:
To determine the possible place of origin for customs, folklorists employ the historico-geographic method developed by the Finnish scholar Karla Krohn in the early 20th century. The technique requires gathering all recorded versions of an item and pinning them down on a map along with the year they were collected. Once a visual representation is created, a researcher can observe what appears to be the pattern of diffusion through an area. Using the method is time-consuming, but it can yield some insights for those interested in the origin of oral traditions. For instance, it has been postulated that the older versions of Indo-European folk tales like Cinderella have been recorded in the Far East, and therefore likely originated there. The critics note that this approach amounts to mapping the pattern of the recording of a tradition, not the pattern of its adoption into various tribes and nations. The narrative itself is likely much older than its earliest recorded version, likely dating back to prehistory.
Why bother with the origin then? Lots of people have strong opinions about folklore because material feels both unsophisticated and intimately familiar. A German, an Italian, and a Frenchman can each argue adamantly that Cinderella is their tale, testimony to creativity of their people. An understanding that folklore is rarely unique to a single nation distinguishes a scholar from an amateur. Historical-geographic studies demonstrate this awareness.
Woven rectangular shawls adorned with patterns and fringes have been worn by Middle Easterners for millennia. Because textiles dissipate with age, its earliest preserved appearance is in diorite. A statue dating to approximately 2090 BCE shows Gudea, the governor of Lagash in southern Mesopotamia, with his head adorned in a checkered turban. The garment itself should be assumed to be older, already worn in 2600 BCE—or perhaps earlier. Consider that textiles have been around for tens of thousands years, the Middle East is the cradle of civilization, and shielding one’s head from sun and sand is a precondition for life in a desert.
Scarves answering this need have been around in the Levant since before the seventh-century Islamic expansion. Among the texts documenting the Jewish variant of the garment, called sudra, are the 80–90 CE Gospel of Luke and the fifth-century Babylonian Talmud. The Talmud prescribes a bracha, or blessing, to be recited when dressing into a sudra—“Blessed are you Lord, our God, King of the Universe, who crowns Israel with glory.”
Mizrahim, men and women alike, wore sudras for millennia, and Yemenite Jews arrived in modern Israel with properly wrapped heads. Ashkenazim had to adapt to European customs, and climates changed their attire, with only the tallit, a perhaps related shawl prescribed for ceremonial use, remaining.
Many MENA ethnic groups—the Kurds, the Yezidis, the Iranians, the Iraqi Turkmen, and others—have their variants of the shawl. They can refer to it as shemagh, ghutrah, hattah, mussar, or jamadani. Variations on graphic and color typically indicate tribal allegiances. The fact that the garment is so widespread suggests that it’s old—folklorists believe that the more ancient traditions tend to penetrate greater areas. So how did so many Westerners get the idea that a prehistoric cloth, worn by multiple peoples across a diverse region, many of them under the threat of genocide from Islamism, is a Palestinian invention synonymous with pan-Arabism?
In Memories of the Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past, the staunchly anti-Zionist academic Ted Swedenburg argues that under the British Mandate, the keffiyeh became the national signifier for the Palestinian Arab cause. During the revolt lead by the Nazi ally and grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Arab masses were ordered to don the keffiyeh to make their fighters indistinguishable from the regular folk. In Swedenburg’s telling, Arabs enthusiastically embraced this sartorial patriotism.
The legend is as romantic as it is disputable. Hussain Abdul-Hussain, research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, has posted multiple pictures of Palestinian leadership well into the early ’60s not wearing the prized national headwear. Moreover, Swedenburg’s own data contradict his claim. He acknowledges that al-Hussaini’s fighters snatched the Ottoman-style tarbush hats off the heads of disloyal Arabs—in other words, not everyone was onboard. He further describes the Jewish press documenting “the ‘terror’ of the armed ‘gangs’” intimidating the Arab population—the same gangs that likely were attacking the British forces, Jewish self-defense units, and Jewish civilians.
That said, the biggest bummer for the progressive fashionistas must be not the illiberal nature of the Arab revolt but the fact that under the British Mandate Arabs wore plain white keffiyehs. The iconic Palestinian keffiyeh was introduced two decades later. Swedenburg explains:
The origins of black-and-white checkered kufiya as the distinctive Palestinian headscarf apparently date to the early 1950s. Glubb Pasha, the English commander of Jordan’s armed forces, distinguished his Palestinian soldiers from his Jordanian ones by outfitting West Bank Palestinians in black-and-white kufiyat and East Bank Jordanians in red-and-white ones.
National costume typically takes an ethnic group holiday dress out of context and thrusts it into the world of pageantry—the phenomenon folklorists call folklorismus. The Palestinian keffiyeh, like the Lowland Scottish kilt, is not even that; it is an invented tradition. Both the keffiyeh and the kilt originated in the British Empire and carry romantic nationalist connotations. The Lowland kilt was developed in the early 19th century as a kind of nostalgia for the Gaelic martial glory of the Highlands. Lowlanders made it famous with their own additions: the clan-specific tartans.
The great midcentury folklorist Richard M. Dorson described such innovations as fakelore, which he defined as “a synthetic product claiming to be authentic oral tradition but actually tailored for mass edification.” Dorson introduced the term in the context of fictional characters like Paul Bunyan that are passed on as folklore but have no basis in traditional storytelling. The concept of fakelore quickly expanded to include items such as Chinese-made tchotchkes at souvenir shops. Incidentally, the keffiyehs sold on Amazon are generally made in China.
An invented tradition it might be, but Arabs developed genuine folklore around the meaning of Glubb Pasha’s graphic. What inspired His Majesty’s officer is a mystery, but several sources contend that the fishnet pattern represent Palestinian fishermen, the wavy lines—the olive leaves and the broad grey stripes—ancient trade routes like the Silk Road. All are supposed to signify a rich, long, proud, and peaceful history, a paradise lost to Zionism. It’s tempting to dismiss such a belief as silliness, particularly considering the British colonial roots of the garment, but the yearning for identity is real.
When in 1969 the Marxist terrorist Leila Khaled was photographed highjacking a TWA flight holding an AK-47 and sporting Glubb Pasha’s keffiyeh, she became a feminist darling of sorts—look at her, a fierce decolonizer draped in a male kerchief. Yet it wasn’t Khaled but the male terror chieftain Yasser Arafat who introduced the garb to the mainstream capitalist culture in the late 1960s. Arafat wore it over his fatigues, secured in place with the customary goat-hair rope. He painstakingly arranged the cloth over his shoulder in the shape of a triangle, which was supposed to represent the Palestinian state he claimed.
How Arafat settled on this image is unknown. The PLO mastermind hailed from Egypt, where the locals wrapped themselves in black-and-white shemagh, checkered like a tablecloth. His urban middle-class family presumably shunnedthat type of head cover anyway. Swedenburg suggests that by the time Arafat arrived on the scene in the 1950s, Glubb Pasha’s invention was already in wide use in Jordan, so he simply copied the dress of the local Arabs. The British writer Michael Jacobson points out that then-Kuwait-based Arafat first appeared in a plain white keffiyeh at a Communist conference in Prague in 1956 and switched to the fishnet one later, perhaps for no other reason than it was available to him in eastern Arabia.
It’s purely a speculation on my part, but since we have no documentation for other theories either, I’m going to lay it out: Arafat was a KGB asset, and the Soviets were adept at deploying folklore in the service of propaganda. In the 1920s, following the Bolshevik Revolution, they found themselves in possession of a vast multiethnic empire—a situation for which Marx offered no advice. They devised the policy of Korenizatsiia, literally “rootedness,” taking folkloric forms and filling them with communist content. Agitprop of the era showed people with ethnic features dressed in national costumes doing something Soviet, like an Uzbek girl telling her dwarfish elder that she no longer needs the Qur’an because she has discovered the works of Lenin. Under Stalin, the Soviets made up an entire fakelore genre they called noviny, or new legends, with communist heroes in place of the ancient Rus knights.
Soviet propaganda convention included representations of “friendship of the peoples,” all appointed in national costumes, usually marching under communist banners. Communist leaders made use of ethnic wardrobe; Nikita Khrushchev, for example, wore the Ukrainian peasant shirt called vyshyvanka. If the USSR styled Arafat in Arab folk dress, that would have fit within their ideological framework. The fishnet shawl was the perfect touch in the age of black-and-white photojournalism.
Mass marketing of the desert scarf to Western consumers parallels exertion of Arab power. The wrap didn’t get its 15 minutes instantaneously. In the 1960s and ’70s, Andy Warhol painted radical themes and radical icons, most famously Chairman Mao, but Arafat in the keffiyeh was not on his radar. The scarves were noticed by couturiers during the first intifada in the 1980s and picked up in popularity after terrorists flexed their muscle on 9/11. Jews started referring to it as “hipster swastika,” signaling awareness of the legend of the birth of Palestinian national consciousness out of the rebellion lead by a Nazi ally. It has never been as popular as it is today, in the aftermath of 10/7, the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
With the Palestinian cause emerging as the apogee of DEI, the keffiyeh became ubiquitous at numerous unrelated protests. It’s a cheap and effective way of distinguishing oneself as a leftist. Like, for instance, the self-appointed labor activists in Seattle who cloaked themselves in Glubb Pashas to talk to the media about the closing of their coffee shop.
Anti-Zionists jealously guard their garb, preserving it as signifier for the politically privileged. They simultaneously play up the glamour side, celebrating the model Bella Hadid wearing it to high-profile events and accuse Jews of stealing for reviving the sudra.
In recent years, it has become fashionable to object to cultural appropriation, or drawing inspiration from foreign traditions. Yet folklore, with its ambiguous authorship and wide circulation, is antithetical to the idea of ownership. On the other hand, appropriation of ancient material culture to manufacture national identity while obscuring the ugly details of the appropriation process—like the Nazi connection—deserves a serious discussion.
Regardless, Sir John Bagot Glubb should have patented his keffiyeh. His descendants would have thanked him.
