Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Supporters of the Israeli genocide against tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian women, children, and noncombatant men in Gaza have fixed upon an unlikely villain in their denunciation of the slightest protest against this century’s worst act of barbarity. They are denouncing the patterned black-and-white scarf of cotton called a kuffiyeh or keffiyeh, which is worn by many Palestinians but also by Iraqis, Saudis and others in the Arabian Peninsula (where it is called a ghutrah). The scarf is useful in dusty climates. It can be drawn up over the face when dust is heavy. It can be worn on the head against the sun or the cool desert night, fixed by an agal, a thick, doubled, black cord. The latter can also be used as a horse or camel whip.
This ordinary item of apparel has become associated with Palestinian culture in North America, though it isn’t only Palestinians who wear it, and in the nineteenth century it appears to have been mainly worn by Bedouins.
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“Group of Bedouin men.” Getty Images
From symbolizing Palestinians, it has gone on to symbolize resistance to settler colonialism, which has perhaps understandably inspired panic among settler colonialists. The legislature of the Canadian province of Ontario, my esteemed neighbor, has banned wearing it in its building, though NDP member Marit Stiles protested that “members have worn kilts, kirpans, vyshyvankas and chubas in the legislature, pointing out that such items are not only culturally significant but have also been considered political symbols.” In popular culture, at least, kilts have been associated with rebellion against the British throne, though perhaps Mel Gibson is responsible. A kirpan is actually a knife which symbolizes a sword, worn by many Sikh men. Sikhs are wonderful people but some are involved in separatist politics in India and that nice Mr. Modi has dispatched assassins to Canada over the issue. So Ontario lawmakers are all right with knives but not with a patterned cotton cloth.
Likudniks and Jewish Power fanatics in the US have also battened upon the kuffiyeh as somehow sinister or threatening, as a result of their frantic attempts to shield the current extremist, fascist Israeli government from criticism over the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. One such propagandist likened it to a hammer and sickle. This hate speech has actually gotten Palestinian-Americans shot.
Ironically, in the age of colonialism, white men often appropriated the keffiyeh to signal their omni-competence. The pale, blue-eyed T. E. Lawrence even seems to have imagined that he could pass for an Arab and that his image of himself as the liberator of the Arab peoples was plausible. The Arab revolt against the Ottomans during WW I was actually led by Faisal b. Hussein, and Lawrence was a minor British intelligence officer embedded with the Arab forces.
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Lawrence of Arabia: British military officer and writer T. E. Lawrence (1888 – 1935), circa 1920. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Amira Jamarkani writes of Rudolph Valentino, another white hero who donned the kuffiyeh,
- “The character of the sheikh in popular romance novels both borrows from and builds on the history of the figure in U.S. popular culture. Here I am building on the work of Snitow (1983), Creed (1984), Radway (1991), and Wardrop (1995), to name just a few.
I briefly trace several incarnations of the sheikh figure in order to note the ways the desert romance draws on multiple histories of the sheikh as a noble desert leader, as a savage and potentially dangerous figure, and as an oil-rich, powerful man. A key moment of origin for the sheikh in U.S. popular culture is E. M. Hull’s popular novel The Sheik ([1919] 2004), itself a precursor of contemporary romance fiction, which entered the popular U.S. imagination largely through the success of the 1921 film adaptation starring Rudolph Valentino. Indeed, the caricature of the sheikh in the United States must be contextualized within a tradition of orientalist representations of sheikh characters in Hollywood films such as The Sheik, The Son of the Sheik, The Thief of Bagdad, Harum Scarum, and Lawrence of Arabia.”
The VideoCellar Video: “THE SHEIK (Silent 1921) Rudolph Valentino – Ruth Miller – Adolphe Menjou”
She continues,
- “One of the key features of desert romances, beginning with the progenitor The Sheik, is the need to balance an image of the sheikh as a “fierce desert man” (Hull [1919] 2004, 33)—that is, as virile, powerful, and dangerously sexy—with the reassurance that he has a redeemable, softer side, which he can reveal only to the heroine. If Hull’s The Sheik allayed miscegenation fears by revealing him to be European in the end, contemporary desert romances rely on marking the sheikh-hero as ethnically Arabian (i.e., from the fictionalized geographical region of “Arabia,” which is where most desert romances take place). Indeed, the power of the desert as exotic setting serves to racialize sheikh characters, even when they “look alarmingly Western” (Porter 2004, 23).”
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1920s 1921 The Sheik Rudolph Valentino And Agnes Ayres Romantic Arab Desert Drama Hollywood Movie Still (Photo By Nawrocki/Classicstock/Getty Images)
When the British created the Arab Legion in their new colony of Jordan after WW I, they incorporated the kuffiyeh into their uniforms. John Bagot Glubb “Pasha” became the head of the Legion in 1939. And guess what? Here he is in a kuffiyeh:
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War and Conflict, Transjordan, Circa 1950’s, General Sir John Bagot Glubb, also known as Glubb Pasha, Glubb Pasha was a British soldier best known for leading and training the Transjordan Arab Legion during the 1940’s and 1950’s (Photo by Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)
So I guess the upshot is that the kuffiyeh is good when appropriated by powerful white men who claim authority over colonized Arabs. But when deployed as a symbol of the indigenous resistance to settler colonialism, it must be banned. Suddenly it makes people “afraid.”
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