Widad Kawar

Widad Kawar was born in Tulkarm in 1931 into a Palestinian Christian family; the family moved to Bethlehem in 1941, and she went on to study at the American University of Beirut. She began collecting in the 1950s, at a point when the village dress traditions of Palestine were being broken up by displacement — the women who had made and worn regional thobes were now in camps and cities, and the garments themselves were being sold, cut down, or simply worn out.

Over half a century she gathered more than two thousand dresses, costumes, textiles, and pieces of jewellery, together with the accounts of the women who made them. The value of the collection is that it is documented: a Bethlehem malak dress with its couched gold thread, a Ramallah thobe with its cypress and star motifs, a Galilee or Gaza piece with its own stitch vocabulary, each recorded with its place and its maker where known. The result is a reference for a system of regional identification that the Nakba interrupted. Palestinians came to call her Umm al-libas al-filastini — the mother of Palestinian dress.

She founded the Tiraz centre in Amman, which houses the collection and a museum, and published on the material with the researcher Margarita Skinner. In 2012 she received the Prince Claus Award for her work in culture and development.

Selected works

• Palestinian Embroidery: Traditional “Fallahi” Cross-Stitch (1992)
• Threads of Identity: Preserving Palestinian Costume and Heritage (2011)
• Palestinian Embroidery Motifs: A Treasury of Stitches, 1850–1950 (2014, with Margarita Skinner)

Sources

• Tiraz: Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress, Amman
• Widad Kawar — Prince Claus Fund
• Widad Kawar — Wikipedia