Tradition · Questions
What is a Palestinian thobe?
The thobe is a loose, long-sleeved dress worn by Palestinian women, built from separately embroidered panels that are stitched together into the finished garment. The chest panel, side gores, back panel and sleeves each carry their own embroidery, and their treatment varied by region and by the wearer's status.
The thobe (ثوب) takes its name from thawb, the ordinary Arabic word for a garment, worn throughout the Arab world; in Palestinian usage it denotes the loose, long-sleeved embroidered dress worn by women.
Its embroidery is organised by panel. The qabbeh (قبة) is the square or rectangular chest panel, made on a separate piece of cloth and set into the dress front. The shinyar (شنيار) is the lower back panel, in some dresses detachable. The banayiq (بنايق) are the triangular gores set into the side seams to widen the skirt. The irdan (أردان) are the long pointed sleeves; on the Victoria and Albert Museum's dress T.65-1913 they are cut from striped majdalawi cloth.
Because each panel was embroidered before the dress was assembled, more than one embroiderer could contribute to a single garment, and the pieces were often joined only once all of them were finished. Regional style is real but looser than popular accounts suggest, and dresses made after 1948 belong to no identifiable region at all.