Palestinian Men's Clothing: The Qumbaz, the Leffeh, and the Hatta
In 1921 an American observer sat down and listed, item by item, everything a fully dressed Palestinian villager wore, and the list ran to seven garments before it reached his head. The coat at the centre of it was the qumbaz (قمباز), a long tunic that closed across the body and was held shut by a belt. Palestinian men's clothing is the less recorded half of Palestinian dress, and it is the half that almost nobody photographs today, which is exactly why the vocabulary is worth keeping. The same logic that puts a motif on a chest panel put a stripe on a man's coat, and it runs through every piece in the Palestinian clothing collection.
TL;DR
Palestinian men's clothing was built in layers around the qumbaz, a long coat with narrow sleeves worn over a plain shirt called the thob, closed with a belt and topped with a woollen overcoat, the abayeh. Below it went the sirwal, wide at the waist and tight at the calf. Above it went the leffeh, which was not one item but a stack: a cotton skull cap, a felt cap over it, a broad red tarbush, and scarves wound around the rim. Villagers wore the white hatta held by an agal; townsmen and the educated wore the tarbush alone. In 1938 that distinction collapsed in a single month, and it never fully returned.
What Did Palestinian Men's Clothing Consist Of?
The base layer was the thob, and here the word means something different from the woman's garment of the same name. In the nineteenth century the man's thob was a plain shirt of white or blue cotton, or of fine natural wool, as the Palestinian Heritage Foundation's survey of men's attire records it. It carried no embroidery and made no claim.
Over it went the qumbaz, cut with long narrow sleeves in plain and striped cottons and in Syrian silks. The finest were wedding coats, made in white roza or ghabani silk and worn by grooms. A man might own one good qumbaz in his life.
Then the layers stacked. A waistcoat, the sidriyeh, in cotton or satin. A long sleeved jacket, the damer, worn over the waistcoat. An overcoat, the abayeh, in coarse handwoven wool that took the rain, striped blue and white in the nineteenth century and brown and white later, with the better examples in black, brown or cream and embroidered at the neck in gold or silver thread. Village men wore the sirwal beneath, wide at the waist and narrow at the lower leg, in white, black or blue cotton. That garment has its own long history, traced in the story of the sirwal and how it was cut.
What holds all of this together is a belt. Village men wore either a leather belt, the iqshat, or a woven wool belt in multicoloured stripes finished with leather trim and a buckle. Around Hebron, belts were finished with taffeta and embroidery for occasions. The belt is the one place a man's dress was allowed to be decorative, and it is the detail most often cropped out of a photograph.
The Leffeh Was Not a Turban. It Was a System.
The single most misread thing about Palestinian men's dress is the headwear, because English collapses all of it into the word turban. In the 1921 inventory published in Elihu Grant's account of village life in Palestine, leffeh is given as the general name for the entire head dress, and the entire head dress has parts.
The parts, in order off the scalp: a cotton skull cap called the taqiyeh; a second skull cap of woollen felt, the libbad, pulled on over the first; then the hat proper, a broad flat red covering of the fez family. Scarves were then wound around the rim to build a heavy border, a thin one padding out a heavier one. Grant names three of them, the light mendil, the heavy white mahramah, and the keffiyeh, which he records as a yellow and fancy variety of scarf.
Four layers, minimum, to leave the house. A reader who has only seen the modern black and white square has seen the last surviving layer of a much taller structure.
The head dress also worked as a pocket. Grant lists what men tucked into the leffeh for carrying: a small mirror, a comb for the beard, a cigarette holder, tobacco, a brass ring for the thumb and a silver seal ring for the little finger. The belt carried the rest, a cartridge belt, a shibriyeh dagger, a flint and a steel and a wad of tow for striking a light, and a clasp knife on a chain.
That is not costume. That is a working kit, assembled on a man who expected to spend the day outdoors and to come back with everything he left with.
Hatta, Agal, and the Year the Tarbush Disappeared
Before the 1930s the head told you where a man stood. Villagers and peasants wore the white hatta held down by the agal, the dark cord. City residents and the educated wore the Ottoman tarbush. The two headpieces functioned as a class map that anyone could read at fifty paces.
During the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939, rebel commanders ordered every Arab to put on the hatta, so that a fighter coming into a town could not be picked out of a crowd by his head. The order worked with startling speed. Writing to the Foreign Office in 1938, the British High Commissioner Harold MacMichael reported that within a month eight out of every ten tarbushes in the country had been replaced, a passage quoted in the documented history of the headscarf.
What happened after is the part usually left out. When the revolt ended, most men went back to the tarbush or simply stopped wearing a hat. The hatta did not win in 1939. It became a national symbol later, by a longer road, and that road is traced in the history of the keffiyeh and the last Hirbawi loom.
In the south the register was different again. Bedouin men wore the hatta and agal over a white cotton taqiyeh, in cotton, silk or fine wool, red on white or black on white. The checked pattern that reads as Palestinian to most of the world today began as a desert cloth in a range of colourways, worn for shade before it was worn for anything else.
Why Men's Dress Was Plainer, and Why That Matters
Palestinian men's clothing was more uniform than women's. It varied by region and by trade rather than by village, and it carried almost no embroidery. Some occupations had their own uniform: the mukaaris, the horse and mule drivers who moved goods between towns before there were proper roads, wore a short embroidered jacket with the sleeves slit open on the inside, red shoes and a small yellow woollen cap under a tight turban. The boatmen of Jaffa had their own dress as well.
That plainness has had a consequence. Because a woman's thobe is a document, stitched with the motifs of a named village, it was collected, exhibited, catalogued and revived after 1948. The qumbaz was not. It was work clothing, it wore out, and when a household was displaced it was among the first things left behind. The result is that the men's half of Palestinian dress survives mostly in photographs taken by foreigners and in a handful of word lists, while the women's half survives in museums and on living hands, as the history of the thobe and its regional embroidery sets out.
That imbalance is not an accident of taste. It is what happens when the record is kept by whoever finds a thing beautiful enough to keep. A garment that nobody thought was art gets thrown away, and the vocabulary goes with it. Ask most people to name a Palestinian man's garment and the answer stops at the keffiyeh, which is one scarf out of a wardrobe of a dozen named pieces.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is traditional Palestinian clothing for men called?
The central garment is the qumbaz, a long coat with narrow sleeves worn over a plain shirt called the thob. Over the qumbaz men wore a waistcoat called the sidriyeh, a long sleeved jacket called the damer, and a woollen overcoat called the abayeh. Beneath it they wore the sirwal, wide trousers gathered at the waist and narrow at the lower leg.
What is a qumbaz?
A qumbaz is a long coat worn by Palestinian men, cut with long narrow sleeves and closed across the body with a belt. It was made in plain and striped cottons and in Syrian silks. The finest examples were wedding coats made in white roza or ghabani silk and worn by grooms.
What is the difference between the hatta and the tarbush?
The hatta is a square cloth head covering held in place by a cord called the agal, worn mainly by villagers, townspeople and Bedouin. The tarbush is the red brimless Ottoman cap, worn by city residents and the educated. Before the 1930s the choice between them signalled a man's background rather than his politics.
What is a leffeh?
Leffeh is the general name for the whole Palestinian head dress rather than for one item. A full leffeh recorded in 1921 consisted of a cotton skull cap called the taqiyeh, a woollen felt cap called the libbad worn over it, a broad red cap of the fez family, and scarves wound around the rim to build a heavy border.
Did Palestinian men wear embroidery?
Rarely, and never on the scale that women did. Men's dress carried its decoration in the weave of a striped coat, in the finish of a belt, and in the silk of a wedding qumbaz. The exceptions were occupational, such as the short embroidered jacket worn by the mule drivers who moved goods between towns.
What did Palestinian men wear on their feet?
In the early twentieth century many men went barefoot or wore simple leather shoes in brown, yellow or red. Grant's 1921 account describes the common village shoe as a roomy one built with buffalo rawhide soles imported from India and uppers of red or brown goatskin. Bedouin men went barefoot or wore sandals.
The Half of the Wardrobe Nobody Kept
Palestinian heritage writing has a habit of reaching for the thobe and stopping there, because the thobe is the beautiful object and the beautiful object is the one that survives. The qumbaz has no equivalent audience. It was plain, it was worn until it failed, and it left almost no heirlooms.
But a culture is not only its best-made things. It is also the ordinary coat, the felt cap under the red one, the knife on the chain at the belt, and the fact that a man's head dress had four layers and a name for each. Losing that vocabulary is a quieter loss than losing a dress, and a heavier one, because nobody notices it going.
Naming the pieces of Palestinian men's clothing again is most of the work. The words are still there, in a 1921 word list and a foundation's catalogue and the caption on a photograph taken at Dhahiriya in February 1940. What they need is somebody to keep saying them.
Written for FALASTIN by Jad Sahyoun, with the assistance of AI tools and checked against the Palestinian Heritage Foundation's record of men's attire, Elihu Grant's 1921 inventory of village dress, and the Matson Photograph Collection at the Library of Congress.
At FALASTIN, we work to keep that vocabulary in use through the pieces we make.
100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.