A keffiyeh is a square cotton scarf, about a metre across, folded diagonally into a triangle and worn over the head or around the neck. It is worn across the Arab world and is most closely associated with Palestine. Depending on where you are it is also called a hatta, a shemagh or a ghutra. The chequered pattern is woven into the cloth rather than printed on it.
Last updated: 15 August 2026
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What is a keffiyeh?
A keffiyeh is a square of cloth, usually cotton, worn as a headdress.
The Victoria and Albert Museum describes it as “a metre-square piece of cloth, usually woven from cotton, with a distinctive black-and-white checked or houndstooth pattern”, worn “folded in half diagonally and held in place by a head-rope (‘agal)”. The American Heritage Dictionary gives the same shape: “a square of cloth, often embroidered, traditionally worn as a headdress by Arab men, either by winding it around the head or by folding it into a triangle, draping it over the head, and securing it with an agal”.
Two things are worth adding straight away, because both are usually left out.
The black and white version is not the only one, and not the oldest
Wafa Ghnaim, a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a curator at the Museum of the Palestinian People, records historic keffiyehs “woven from cotton, wool, or silk” in colours including “gold, purple, white, black, green, and red”. The anthropologist Ted Swedenburg records that before the 1930s the keffiyeh in Palestine was “usually pure white”. The black and white chequered cloth most people picture is a twentieth century form, not an ancient one.
It is not only Palestinian
The same garment is worn across the Levant, Iraq and the Gulf under different names, and has been for a long time. What is distinctly Palestinian is the black and white chequered form and what it came to stand for during the twentieth century.
What is the Palestinian scarf called?
A keffiyeh. In Palestinian Arabic it is usually called a hatta.
Beyond that the naming changes by region and by who is speaking.
What the same garment is called, and where
| Name |
Where the name is used |
Source |
| Keffiyeh, also spelled kufiya, kufiyya, kaffiyeh |
The usual English term |
Merriam-Webster gives the Arabic source forms as kūfīya, kaffīya
|
| Hatta, also hattah |
Palestine and the wider Levant |
Wafa Ghnaim; NPR; CNN |
| Shemagh |
Jordan and Syria, and commonly in Britain and Canada |
Middle East Eye for the regional use; Ted Swedenburg for the British and Canadian use, following British forces adopting the garment |
| Ghutra |
The Gulf states |
Middle East Eye |
| Chafiyeh |
Iran |
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Single source, so treat it as reported rather than established |
Is a shemagh the same thing as a keffiyeh?
Credible sources give three different answers, so this page reports the range rather than picking one.
Middle East Eye treats keffiyeh, shemagh and ghutra as regional names for one garment. Ted Swedenburg records shemagh as a term used particularly in Britain and Canada, after British forces adopted the garment during Second World War deployments in the Middle East. Saudipedia, published by the Saudi Ministry of Media, draws a different line again, and draws it inside a single country: it describes the shemagh as the red and white cloth and the ghutra as the plain white one, distinguishing them by colour rather than by region.
Where the word comes from
This is contested and the dictionaries do not agree. Merriam-Webster derives keffiyeh from “al-Kufa, town in Iraq”, and the American Heritage Dictionary gives the same derivation. Collins routes it instead through Late Latin cofea, the ancestor of the English word coif. Anyone telling you the Kufa derivation is settled has not looked at the second dictionary.
What the pattern means, and where each reading comes from
Less than you will usually be told.
Search for the meaning of the keffiyeh pattern and you will find the same three readings everywhere: the net stands for Palestinian fishermen and the Mediterranean, the repeated shapes are olive leaves for perseverance, and the bold border lines are trade routes. We went looking for the source of those readings and could not find one. No museum, no university, no textile institution and no encyclopaedia of record states them. The earliest versions we could find date from May 2021, and they spread widely from November 2023.
Meanwhile the people who actually weave the cloth use different names for the same designs.
The keffiyeh pattern: what it is called, and where each reading comes from
| The motif, and what the weavers in Hebron call it |
What it is usually said to mean |
What that reading rests on |
| The net across the field. Called the fatha, literally “opening” and popularly “fishnet” |
Palestinian fishermen and the Mediterranean |
No source of record. AramcoWorld’s 2018 reporting from Hebron attributes a net reading to “the fishermen of southern Mesopotamia”, not Palestine, hedges it as “said by some experts”, and records “honeycomb” and joined hands as competing readings |
| The repeated shapes in the field. Called the qamah, meaning wheat, in reference to Jericho |
Olive leaves, for perseverance and resilience |
No source of record. The earliest version we found is a Middle East Eye feature of 28 May 2021, where the reading is attributed to the novelist Susan Abulhawa rather than to a textile historian |
| The bold lines along the border. Not separately named in the sources we consulted |
Trade routes into and out of historic Palestine |
No source of record. Middle East Monitor reports it as “sometimes interpreted as” trade routes and offers a competing reading of a chain |
Useful? Send this to anyone who has repeated the fishnet and olive leaves story, including us before we checked.
None of this makes the popular readings worthless. People attach meaning to cloth, and a meaning a community took up in 2021 is still a meaning held by real people. What it does mean is that anyone writing “traditionally symbolises” or “has always represented” is claiming more than the record supports, and that the older, better attested names for those designs are the ones the weavers use.
Where the keffiyeh comes from
The documented history begins in the twentieth century. Almost everything you will read about what came before it is either folklore or silence.
The Sumerian origin story
You will often read that the keffiyeh began with Sumerian or Mesopotamian priests around 3100 BC. We could not find a single museum, archaeological publication, university or academic journal that supports it, and none of the accounts that repeat it cite an artefact, a relief, a text or an excavation. The most specific version, with the date attached, traces to one modern author writing without references, who calls the fishermen element a legend in her own text. The researcher Anu Lingala, quoted by Middle East Eye, puts the honest position plainly: “Its origins are open to speculation.”
What is documented
Until roughly the 1930s, wearing a keffiyeh in Palestine marked you as a Bedouin or a peasant rather than a townsman. Ted Swedenburg records that before the revolt the keffiyeh, “in those days usually pure white”, “marked its user as a fallah (peasant) or a Bedouin”, while educated urban men wore the tarboosh or went bare-headed. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes it in the same period as “the characteristic head-covering of the Bedouin, or Arab nomads”. Wafa Ghnaim and reporting by NPR and CNN place the same shift at the same point.
The garment then became a national symbol. 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 keffiyeh, and Ted Swedenburg dates its emergence as “a national sartorial symbol of Palestinian resistance” to that revolt. That history is a subject in its own right and we cover it separately rather than compressing it here.
How a keffiyeh is woven
The pattern is woven into the cloth, and the corner tassels are knotted by hand.
AramcoWorld reports that “ninety-five percent of kufiyas have always been made of pure cotton, mostly from Egypt or India, largely woven in Syria, Palestine and Iraq”. Wafa Ghnaim describes the construction as “a woven kind of design on the edges, as well as some tassels and macrame that hang on the corners”.
We could not find a source of record setting out how to tell a woven keffiyeh from a printed one, so this page does not offer you a test for it. Plenty of retailers will. None of them cite anything.
The factory in Hebron
The Hirbawi factory in Hebron is the one most people have heard of, and two details about it are commonly stated with more confidence than the sources carry.
The founding date is given as 1961 by the Victoria and Albert Museum and by most reporting. AramcoWorld quotes the founder’s son giving 1963. On its place in the trade, the Victoria and Albert Museum describes it as the only survivor of more than thirty keffiyeh factories that once operated across Palestine, while AramcoWorld quotes the same family member saying that when his father founded it “there were no other kufiya-making factories in Palestine. All were made in Damascus.” Those two accounts cannot both be right, and we have not seen either resolved. The looms themselves are well documented: Japanese-made Suzuki mechanical looms, bought from the 1960s onward.
How a keffiyeh is worn
Folded diagonally into a triangle, draped over the head and held with a cord called an agal. It is also very commonly worn folded and draped around the neck.
The Fashion History Timeline at the Fashion Institute of Technology, drawing on the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, describes the agal as “a rope made from animal hair which wraps around a keffiya (square cloth) on the head”, and records the pair as giving “protection from the hot sun and blowing sand” and able to be “wrapped around to shelter the face if needed”. The cord is traditionally made from black goat hair, brown camel hair or brown sheep wool.
AramcoWorld sets out the functional case in one line: the cloth protects from the sun in summer, from cold in winter, and from wind and dust in the desert. That is what it was for before it was anything else.
Sources
- Mariam Rosser-Owen, Curator in the Middle Eastern Section, Pandemic Objects: Keffiyeh Mask, Victoria and Albert Museum, 16 June 2021. https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/design-and-society/pandemic-objects-keffiyeh-mask
- Mariam Shahin and George Azar, Kufiya Nouveau, AramcoWorld, July and August 2018. https://www.aramcoworld.com/articles/2018/kufiya-nouveau
- Ted Swedenburg, The Kufiya, in Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera (eds), Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century, 2021, pages 162 to 174.
- 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. https://www.tatreezandtea.com/tatreezing/keffiyeh
- Wafa Ghnaim interviewed by Linah Mohammad, Courtney Dorning and Ailsa Chang, How the keffiyeh became a symbol for Palestinian liberation, NPR, 4 December 2023. https://www.npr.org/2023/12/04/1217090817/how-the-keffiyeh-became-a-symbol-for-palestinian-liberation
- Indlieb Farazi Saber, The keffiyeh: A symbol of Palestinian resistance, Middle East Eye, 28 May 2021. https://www.middleeasteye.net/discover/palestine-keffiyeh-resistance-traditional-headdress
-
The Palestinian keffiyeh explained, CNN, 28 November 2023. https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/28/style/style-palestinian-keffiyeh-explained/index.html
- Jehan Alfarra, Palestine’s last authentic keffiyeh factory stands strong, Middle East Monitor, 12 May 2025. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250512-palestines-last-authentic-keffiyeh-factory-stands-strong/
-
What is the difference between Shemagh and Ghutra, Saudipedia, Ministry of Media, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 7 February 2023. https://saudipedia.com/en/what-is-the-difference-between-shemagh-and-ghutra
-
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, and Daniel Delis Hill, History of World Costume and Fashion, 2011. https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/agal/
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Keffiyeh, Merriam-Webster Dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/keffiyeh
-
Keffiyeh, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=keffiyeh
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Keffiyeh, Collins English Dictionary, Complete and Unabridged, as displayed at Dictionary.com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/keffiyeh
-
Chafiyeh, Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/chafiyeh
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 because the questions people send us about them are not answered clearly anywhere that is easy to find. We report what the sources say and we name them, so you can check us.
Written by Atif Tanvir, Bubble Girl. Last updated 15 August 2026.
