The Thobe

The thobe is the long, loose, sleeved dress worn by Palestinian women, cut differently from district to district. Its decorated elements have names and fixed positions: the qabbeh, the embroidered square at the chest; the banayiq, the side panels; the shinyar, the panel across the lower back. Over it might go a jillayeh, an embroidered coat often worn as the outer wedding garment. Where the embroidery itself is the subject of tatreez, the thobe is the architecture that embroidery is fitted to — and it is the cut, the ground fabric, and the headdress as much as the stitch that identified where a woman came from.

The regional differences were sharp. Southern Palestine dressed in heavy cotton and linen dyed deep indigo, a colour also held to turn away the evil eye. Bethlehem, called the Paris of central Palestine, specialised in couching rather than cross-stitch: the malak or “queen” wedding dress carried panels of gold-thread couched work descended from Byzantine vestment technique, and the brocaded back hem panel, the diyal, was fine enough that Bethlehem work was made commercially for buyers elsewhere. Headdresses were equally local. In Bethlehem and Lifta married women wore the shatweh, a tall conical cap that anchored the iznaq, the chin chain of coins. Around Ramallah the smadeh was an embroidered cap with a stiff padded rim covered in coins packed tightly across the top — a woman’s own cash reserve, worn on her head.

Nineteen forty-eight ended the system. With villages emptied and their populations mixed together in camps and cities, individual village styles stopped being made and were gradually replaced by a recognisably “Palestinian” style not tied to any one place. New forms then emerged from the camps themselves in the 1960s, among them the so-called six-branched dress. The thobe went on being made and worn — but as a national garment rather than a local address.

Sources

• Palestinian costumes — Wikipedia
• Tiraz: Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress, Amman