Widad Kawar
وداد قعوار
Collector and historian of Palestinian dress
Over fifty years she assembled more than two thousand Palestinian and Jordanian dresses and textiles, saving a village-by-village record of dress that 1948 had otherwise scattered.
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
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.
Connected in the archive
11 connected records11 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
born in — 1 record
- Tulkarmطولكرم
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: birthplace: "Tulkarm, Palestine" → Tulkarm (West Bank)
named in this record — 2 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Bethlehemبيت لحم
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: 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.
- The Thobe
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: 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.
names this person — 2 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- What a People Made
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: The woman who spent fifty years assembling more than two thousand dresses, because 1948 had scattered the geography that made them legible.
- The Blue Thread of Beersheba
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The Beersheba district was emptied in and after 1948, and the dresses that survive are largely in collections — among them the Widad Kawar collection in Amman, assembled from the 1960s onward from women who had carried their dresses out with them.
on a related subject — 6 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- Keffiyeh
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "dress".
- Tatreez
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "dress".
- The Qabbeh
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "dress".
- The Shatweh
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "dress".
- The Smadeh
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "dress".
- Thob al-Intifada
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "dress".
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Widad Kawar.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/figures/widad-kawar.- MLA
“Widad Kawar.” Figures, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/figures/widad-kawar. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-widad-kawar, title = {Widad Kawar}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/figures/widad-kawar}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }