History of the Keffiyeh | Palestinian Symbol

Looking for what a keffiyeh means, what the pattern represents or what the Palestinian scarf is called? That is a different question, and we answer it in our complete guide to what a keffiyeh is. This page is the history.

The keffiyeh's documented history begins in the twentieth century. Until the 1930s it was the working headwear of Bedouin and peasant men in Palestine, and usually plain white. It became a national symbol during the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939, and a worldwide symbol of solidarity from the 1960s onwards.

Last updated: 20 September 2026

Before the 1930s: everyday working headwear

Before the 1930s, wearing a keffiyeh in Palestine told people which class you belonged to, not which politics you held.

The anthropologist Ted Swedenburg records that the keffiyeh of that period, "in those days usually pure white", "marked its user as a fallah (peasant) or a Bedouin, that is, as a man who occupied an inferior position on the Palestinian Arab sociocultural hierarchy". The Victoria and Albert Museum describes the same garment in the same years as "the characteristic head-covering of the Bedouin, or Arab nomads".

Townsmen dressed differently on purpose. Swedenburg records that the urban middle and upper classes "distinguished themselves from those lower down on the social scale either by wearing the tarboosh (fez) or, if more modern-minded, by going bare-headed". Headwear was the class line, and anyone could read it at a glance.

What the cloth actually did was practical. AramcoWorld sets the function out in one line: it protects from the sun in summer, from cold in winter, and from wind and dust in the desert. The Fashion History Timeline at the Fashion Institute of Technology, drawing on the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, records the keffiyeh and its agal cord as giving "protection from the hot sun and blowing sand", and as able to be "wrapped around to shelter the face if needed".

You will often read that the keffiyeh began with Sumerian or Mesopotamian priests around 3100 BC. We went looking for a museum, an excavation, an academic journal or an encyclopaedia of record behind that date and could not find one. The researcher Anu Lingala, quoted by Middle East Eye, gives the honest position: "Its origins are open to speculation." This page starts where the record starts.

The black and white chequered cloth most people picture is not the oldest form either. Wafa Ghnaim, a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, records historic keffiyehs "woven from cotton, wool, or silk" in colours including "gold, purple, white, black, green, and red". Black and white is a twentieth century form, not an ancient one.

1936 to 1939: when its meaning changed

The keffiyeh became a national symbol during the Arab revolt against British rule in Palestine between 1936 and 1939. The first reason was not symbolic. It hid faces.

The historian Matthew Hughes, in Britain's Pacification of Palestine, published by Cambridge University Press, puts it in one sentence: "Kufiyyat hid the faces of the gunmen at the roadblock." The Victoria and Albert Museum records that "the important role of peasant farmers (the fellahin) in the Great Arab Revolt of 1936 to 39" politicised the garment, and Swedenburg dates its emergence as "a national sartorial symbol of Palestinian resistance" to that revolt.

The fighters were rural men, and rural men wore keffiyehs. A townsman in a tarboosh stood out. A fighter in a keffiyeh looked like every other man in the village.

Then, in the summer and autumn of 1938, as guerrilla bands took control of a number of Arab towns, they ran a campaign to make urban men give up the tarboosh and put the keffiyeh on.

Two credible accounts give different reasons for that order, and neither says the other is wrong, so both are reported here. Swedenburg gives the aim as "to impose national unity in matters of dress as well as to compel a symbolic inversion of the social hierarchy". NPR reports it as an order for men to wear the keffiyeh "to express solidarity with the revolutionaries and so that the British could not distinguish the fighters from others".

From class marker to national symbol

A headdress that had marked you as a peasant became the thing a lawyer in Jaffa put on. Nothing about the cloth changed. What changed was who wore it, and what wearing it said about them.

That inversion is why the keffiyeh carries the weight it does. Most national symbols are handed down, from a state or from a ruling class. This one travelled upwards, from the people at the bottom of the social order to everyone above them, during a revolt, in about three years.

Yasser Arafat and the global image

What took the keffiyeh from national to global was one man wearing it for forty years.

Ted Swedenburg wrote in 1990 that "by making the kufiya his permanent headcovering", the PLO chairman Yasser Arafat had nationalised it. The Victoria and Albert Museum puts it the same way: "Arafat's use of the keffiyeh as his permanent head-covering cemented its status as a global icon of Palestinian nationalism and resistance." Al Jazeera calls it "the personal trademark" of the late Palestinian leader.

He appeared on the cover of TIME wearing it in 1968, addressed the United Nations in it in 1974, wore it at the signing of the Oslo Accords and at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, and a keffiyeh was placed on his tomb in 2004.

One story about him is repeated as fact and should not be. You will very often read that he folded his deliberately so that it fell in the shape of historic Palestine. Sources describe the resemblance, but none we found documents him saying he intended it, and NPR calls the story "apocryphal".

Women and the keffiyeh

The keffiyeh was male dress, and then it was not.

The Victoria and Albert Museum records the change and attaches it to one person: "Having been an exclusively male garment, it was adopted by women, such as the resistance fighter, Leila Khaled, who iconically wore it in headscarf fashion." Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that Khaled wearing it "broke down gender norms".

Khaled was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. She took part in the hijacking of TWA flight 840 on 29 August 1969, and in an attempted hijacking of an El Al flight on 6 September 1970, after which she was arrested when the plane landed in London and released later that month. Photographs of her from those years, wearing a keffiyeh as a headscarf and holding a rifle, became some of the most reproduced images of the Palestinian cause. We name what she did as well as what she wore. A page that leaves the first part out is decorating, not reporting.

The Palestinian dress historian Wafa Ghnaim, speaking to TIME, described what that image did to the garment: "That move of wearing [the kaffiyeh] on her head as a woman, like a hijab, garnered a lot of attention [and] widespread popularity around the world."

From Palestinian symbol to worldwide solidarity

From the 1960s onwards, people who were not Palestinian began wearing it, and that is now the largest group wearing it.

Swedenburg records that "it became common for US, European, and Third World leftists to don kufiyas, usually worn as scarves around the neck, in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle". In Sweden the practice was widespread enough that the garment acquired its own Swedish name, the Palestinasjal, the Palestinian scarf. TIME, citing its own reporting from 1988, called it a "garment of choice among the political protesters and antimissile advocates of the '70s and early '80s".

The Victoria and Albert Museum records that during the First Intifada in 1987 and the Second in 2000 "it came to be worn worldwide as a symbol of protest and resistance, and solidarity with the Palestinian people".

What it means today

Since 2023 the keffiyeh has been more visible than at any earlier point in its history. TIME describes it "on the necks of students at college encampments, and covering the faces of activists at pro-Palestinian marches". Al Jazeera writes that it "has been adopted globally by individuals, activists and organisations to support the Palestinian cause".

The clearest measure of that is commercial, and it comes from the people who make the cloth. Joudeh Hirbawi, of the family factory in Hebron, told The National in December 2023 that people were willing to wait up to six months for a keffiyeh, "not because our keffiyeh is a work of art. It's a matter of solidarity."

The history above is settled enough to write down. What the pattern means, what the garment is called in different places, and where wearing one is contested today are separate questions, and we answer all three in our guide to what a keffiyeh is. If you would rather wear one than read about one, our Palestinian keffiyeh scarves come in the traditional black and white, the red and white, and our own woven colours.

Common questions about the keffiyeh's history

When was the keffiyeh invented?

No source of record gives a date. The documented history of the keffiyeh in Palestine begins in the twentieth century. The often repeated claim that it started with Sumerian priests around 3100 BC is not supported by any museum, excavation or academic publication we could find, and the researcher Anu Lingala puts the honest position plainly: "Its origins are open to speculation."

Was the keffiyeh always black and white?

No. Wafa Ghnaim records historic keffiyehs woven from cotton, wool or silk in gold, purple, white, black, green and red, and Ted Swedenburg records that before the 1930s the keffiyeh in Palestine was "usually pure white". The black and white chequered form most people picture is a twentieth century one.

Why did the keffiyeh become a Palestinian symbol?

Because of the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939. Rural fighters wore it, it hid their faces at roadblocks, and in the summer and autumn of 1938 guerrilla bands ran a campaign to get urban men to wear it too. A garment that had marked its wearer as a peasant became a national one in about three years.

Sources

Mariam Rosser-Owen, Curator in the Middle Eastern Section, Pandemic Objects: Keffiyeh Mask, Victoria and Albert Museum, 16 June 2021.
Ted Swedenburg, The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier, Anthropological Quarterly, 1990.
Ted Swedenburg, The Kufiya, in Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera (eds), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century, 2021, pages 162 to 174.
Matthew Hughes, Britain's Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936 to 1939, Cambridge University Press.
Wafa Ghnaim, Research Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Curator at the Museum of the Palestinian People, Keffiyeh, The Tatreez Institute, 15 May 2025.
Linah Mohammad, The keffiyeh, explained, NPR, 6 December 2023.
Solcyré Burga, The History of the Kaffiyeh, TIME, 19 September 2024.
Indlieb Farazi Saber, The keffiyeh: A symbol of Palestinian resistance, Middle East Eye, 28 May 2021.
Mariam Shahin and George Azar, Kufiya Nouveau, AramcoWorld, July and August 2018.
Mohammed Haddad, Konstantinos Antonopoulos and Marium Ali, Symbols of Palestine, Al Jazeera, 20 November 2023.
Jihan Abdalla, Demand for traditional keffiyehs surges in last remaining Palestinian factory, The National, 17 December 2023.
Leila Khaled, Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Agal, Fashion History Timeline, Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, citing Betty Wass El-Wakil, Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, 2010.

Where sources disagree, this page reports the disagreement rather than choosing between them. Where we could not find a credible source for a claim that is widely repeated, we say so rather than repeating it.

About Bubble Girl

Bubble Girl is a UK modestwear brand. We stock keffiyehs, and we wrote this page because the history people ask us about is scattered across sources that do not always agree. We report what each one says and we name them, so you can check us.

Written by Atif Tanvir, Bubble Girl. Last updated 20 September 2026.