Palestinian tradtions

Basic dress

Traditionally, the Palestinian costume for women is centered around the thob, a loose-fitting robe with sleeves, the cut varying by region. A square chest panel on the thob, known as the qabbeh is often decorated. A highly decorated qabbeh could function as a family heirloom, handed down from mother to daughter for use on several different dresses. Embroidery on the lower back panel of the thob used in some regions, is known as the shinyar. In Bethlehem, brocade on the back hem panel of the thob is known as the diyal. Pants or trousers known as libas or shirwal were commonly worn under the thob. The men's shirwal was typically black, white or blue cotton.

Both men and women also donned jackets, known as jubbeh, over their everyday dress. If embroidered, the jubbeh was known as the jillayeh. A short embroidered jacket known as the taqsireh[8], deriving its name from the Arabic verb "to shorten",[9] was worn by the women of Bethlehem on festive occasions. The gold couching of the taqsireh often matched the thob. European influence on local fashions resulted in the addition of pockets sometime in the 1930s.

In villages, men wore a traditional, ankle-length coat (qumbaz) with a rounded neckline and narrow sleeves, often striped. Reportedly, the color of the coat could identify one's village. For Bedouin men, the overcoat or shoulder mantle is known as an abaya. Under such coats, the traditional village or Bedouin costume included a cotton or wool tunic (qamis).

Traditionally, Palestinians wore sandals or were barefoot, donning red or brown leather shoes as needed.

Headdress


It was deemed proper and dignified both for men and women of all religious demonations to cover their heads, whereas it was shameful (´ayb) to leave it uncovered.
The women in each region had distinctive headdresses, often embellished with gold and silver coins from their bridewealth money. The more coins, the greater the wealth and prestige of the owner.[15] The sha'weh a distinctive conical hat "shaped rather like an upturned flower pot," was worn only by married women, mainly in Bethlehem, Lifta and Ain Karm (District of Jerusalem), and Beit Jala and Beit Sahur (Bethlehem District).[16] Hanan Munayyer's research revealed that these hats, often associated with women of King Arthur's court, were seen on Levantine women by the Crusaders who subsequently brought the style back to Europe.



Woman in Bethlehem. Note her sha'weh headdress and her short taqsireh jacket; both typical of the Bethlehem-area. The sha'weh headdress would normally be completely concealed by the white veil, but is here revealed for the photograph.The smadeh, an embroidered cap with a stiff padded rim worn in Ramallah, had a row of coins, tightly placed one against the other, around the top of the rim. Additional coins might be sewn to the upper part or attached to narrow, embroidered bands. As with the other female head-dresses, the smadeh represented bridal wealth, and acted as an important cash reserve. One observer wrote in 1935: "Sometimes you see a gap in the row of coins and you guess that that a doctor's bill has had to be paid, or the husband in America has failed to send money".

The words araqiyyeh and taqiyyeh have been used since the Middle Ages in the Arab world to denote small, close-fitting head-caps, usually of cotton, worn by both genders. The original purpose was to absorb sweat (in Arabic: "araq"). In the Hebron area, araqiyyeh came to denote the embroidered cap with a pointed top that a married women would wear over her taqiyyeh. During her period of engagement prior to marriage, a woman of the Hebron area would sew and embroider her araqiyyeh and embellish the rim with coins from her bridal money. The first time she would wear her araqiyyeh would be on her wedding day.[18] A large veil known as the shambar was also commonly worn in the Hebron area and in southern Palestine.

Until the 1930s, the men wore headwear that would be a clear marker of their wealth, locale, religious and political position. Bedouins wore a hatta or keffiyeh, held in place by black headropes (agal). The urban elite wore turbans (where wide, bulky turbans proclaimed a man´s social importance), until mid- late- 19th century, when they changed to the Turkish tall, stiff, red tarbush istambouli or fez.

The greatest variation of headgear was in the villages. Village men wore a soft, red felt hat (tarbush), with a type of turban (laffeh) wrapped around it, leaving the crown (top) of the tarbush exposed. The laffeh signified status and position, as H.B. Tristram noticed while visiting the Samaritans of the Nablus-region in 1865:

All [Samaritans] wore red turban, the peculiar badge of the sect, while colour white is appropriate to the Moslems, green being the exclusive colour of the shireefs or descendants of the prophet, and black or purple left to Jews or Christians.
Turban colour could also indicate political affiliations. In the early 20th century, a white turban, besides signifying a Muslim or even an Islamic law judge, was also worn by supporters of the Yaman political faction, while the opposing Qays faction wore red.
In the late 1930s, around the time of the Arab revolt, the headress changed significantly, in that many villagers and townsmen, especially the young, adopted the Bedouins keffiyeh and headropes as an expression of Palestinian nationalism. Photographs from this period (1930s-1940s) show that the head cloth was white, but later black and white and red and white checked patterns became popular. Meanwhile, the tarbush and laffeh went out of fashion except among elderly men. After the 1967 war and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the black and white keffiyeh adopted by Yasser Arafat became, according to Weir, a "potent symbol of Palestinian national identity [..] [becoming] a popular motif in Palestinian cartoons, posters and paintings, and its meaning has passed into the international language of costume."

Pre-1948

Social and gender variations

Bedouin woman in Jerusalem, 1880s.Palestinian costumes reflected how men enjoyed more physical and social mobility than women. For the women of Palestine's towns and villages who rarely traveled, clothing reflected very distinctive styles and patterns unique to where they lived. Conversely, as in most of the Middle East, clothing for men had a more uniform style than women's clothing.

Traditionally, Palestinian society has been divided into three groups: villagers, townspeople, and Bedouins. The villagers, referred to in Arabic as fellaheen, lived in relative isolation, so that the older, more traditional costume designs were found most frequently in the dress of village women. The specificity of local village designs was such that, "A Palestinian woman's village could be deduced from the embroidery on her dress." Townspeople, (Arabic: beladin‎) had increased access to news and an openness to outside influences that was naturally also reflected in the costumes, with town fashions exhibiting a more impermanent nature than that of the village. By the early 20th century, well to-do women in the cities had mostly adopted a Western style of dress. Typically, Ghada Karmi recalls in her autobiography how in the 1940's in the wealthy Arab district of Katamon, Jerusalem, only the maids, who were local village women, donned traditional Palestinian dresses. Due to their nomadic life-style, Bedouin costume reflected tribal affiliations, rather than (as in case of the villagers) a localized geographic area.

Palestinian embroidery


Village women embroidering in locally-distinctive styles was a tradition that was at its height in Ottoman-ruled Palestine. Women would sew in items to represent their heritage, ancestry, and affiliations. Triangles, used as amulets, were often incorporated to ward off the "evil eye", a common superstition in the Middle East. Large blocks of intricate embroidery were used on the chest panel to protect the vulnerable chest area from the evil eye, bad luck and illness. To avoid potential jinxes from other women, an imperfection was stitched in each garment to distract the focus of those looking. Girls would begin producing embroidered garments, a skill generally passed to them by their grandmothers, beginning at the age of seven. Since most young girls were not sent to school, much of their time outside of household chores was spent creating clothes. Much of this would be preparation for their marriage trosseau (or jhaz) which would consist of all dress requirements for future life including everyday and ceremonial dresses, jewelry, veils, headdresses, kerchiefs, girdles, belts, undergarments and footwear.

Diverse motifs were favored in Palestinian embroidery and costume as Palestine's long history and position on the international trade routes exposed it to multiple influences. The cypress tree (saru) motif is found throughout Palestine in many complex and simple forms. Other Palestinian motifs are derived from quite basic geometric forms such as triangles, squares and rosettes. In the late 1930s, new influences introduced by European pattern books and magazines promoted the appearance of curvilinear motifs, like flowers, vines or leaf arrangements, and introduced the paired bird motif which became very popular in central Palestinian regions.[28] John Whitting (collector for parts of the MOIFA collection) has argued that "anything later than 1918 was not indigenous Palestinian design, but had input from foreign pattern books brought in by foreign nuns and Swiss nannies". Others say that the changes did not set in before the late 1930s, up to which time embroidery motifs local to certain villages could still be found. Geometric motifs remained popular in the Galilee and southern regions, like the Sinai Desert.


The qabbeh on a Palestinian dress, circa 1940. Note the use of floral designs introduced by the patterns in European fashion magazines to which Palestinian women were exposed in the first half of the 20th century.Before the appearance of synthetically dyed threads, the colors used in Palestinian embroidery were determined by the materials available for the production of natural dyes: "reds" from insects and pomegranate, "dark blues" from the indigo plant: "yellow" from saffron flowers, soil and vine leaves, "brown" from oak bark, and "purple" from crushed murex shells. Shahin argues that the colors used in Palestinian embroidery include the ancient color schemes of the Canaanite and Philistine coast: red, purple, indigo blue, and saffron and that more recently, Islamic green and Byzantine black were added to the traditional pallette.[30]

Shelagh Weir, author of Palestinian costume (1989) and Palestinian embroidery (1970), demarcates embroidery distribution patterns in Palestine by painting two horizontal lines: the first running south of Mount Carmel and the Sea of Galilee at the longitude of Afula, and the second running north of Jaffa and south of Nablus from the coast to the Jordan River. Her research indicates that in the area between these two lines there is very little history of embroidery, though there remains evidence of traditions of fine decoration, including braidwork and appliqué, in women’s costume.[28] An Arab proverb of this particular region, originally recorded by Gustaf Dalman in 1937, went: "embroidery signifies a lack of work."[28]

Longstanding traditions of embroidery were found in the Upper and Lower Galilee, and in the Judean Hills and on the coastal plain. Weir writes that cross-stitch motifs may have been derived from oriental carpets, and that couching motifs may have origins in the vestments of Christian priests or the gold thread work of Byzantium.