February Issue
Joud Mustafa
February
Last summer, not far from Menton, in the neighboring city of Cannes, American-born Palestinian-Dutch model Bella Hadid attended the Cannes Film Festival. She wore a dress adorned with an infamous red-and-white checkered pattern, designed as a recreation of the Palestinian keffiyeh by Michael Sears and Hushidar Mortezai, the designers behind the 2000s label Michael & Hushi. Her buzz-worthy attire was promptly met with the usual outrage that Palestinian cultural expression faces in the West. Yet, unbeknownst to many, the backlash was twofold—not only from Western outlets but also from Arab-Jordanian ones, albeit for entirely different reasons.
On Jordanian social media, the dress became the punchline for playful yet pointed jokes: "Bella Hadid wears El-Shemagh Al-Urduni Al-Mohadab" (Bella Hadid wears the refined Jordanian shemagh). Though made in jest, these remarks stemmed from a deeper cultural tension—the widespread perception that the red-and-white shemagh (the Jordanian term for keffiyeh) is distinctly Jordanian, while the black-and-white one is Palestinian. To the untrained eye or the non-Arab reader, these differences may seem trivial, even silly. Yet, within the Jordanian context, they have shaped the very fabric of national identity construction. In many ways, Palestinians—who, according to national statistics, make up two-thirds of Jordan's population—became the "other" to the Jordanian national identity.
This "othering" occurred because, as Edward Said notes, "the development and maintenance of every culture... involves the construction of opposites and 'others,' whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and reinterpretation of their differences from 'us.'" The Palestinians, in a sense, were low-hanging fruit—an identity to be reinterpreted in ways that emphasized the differences that define what it means to be Jordanian.
Interestingly, during the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank in the 1950s, Palestinians were granted Jordanian citizenship. This policy can be interpreted as an attempt at diluting Palestinian identity by merging it with the Jordanian one. However, simultaneously, as previously mentioned, there were also attempts to depict Palestinian identity as distinct as to highlight the crevices defining Jordanian identity, especially in the 1970s following the events of Black September —an inherently contradictory approach. And yet, anyone who has ever attended the Jordanian derby between the Amman-based club Al-Faisaly FC and the Al Wehdat FC, a Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, knows that this approach—no matter how fraught with contradictions—yields outstanding results.
It yielded results of othering that are echoed in the chauvinistic chants of fans, seeking to declare and assert to the opposing crowd who is in fact Jordanian. Results so astonishing that a subtle difference in headdress seems to have mustered a rhetoric of prejudice almost as natural as the passage of time itself, not unlike the animosity borne out of the conflict between age-old sworn enemies.
For my generation, these classifications are all we have ever known. Yet, like all national identity construction processes, they are not age-old; they are recent, and, one must emphasize again, imagined. The untold truth is that these distinctions are only as old as the colonial Westphalian order—that is, not old at all.
You see, the keffiyeh or shemagh is simply a patterned variant of what is known as the hatta—a plain white headdress worn by the peasantry (fallah) or proletariat in the southern Levant long before the Sykes-Picot borders existed. It was, in many ways, a class symbol. While the bourgeois elite wore the Ottoman fez or tarboush, the lower-class fallah wore the hatta. Following a series of peasant-led Arab revolts against British and Zionist colonialism in Mandatory Palestine during the 1920s and 1930s, the fallah’s hatta was popularized as a tool for grassroots anti-colonial, anti-bourgeois resistance. However, this bottom-up aspect of the movement ended shortly after the hatta was institutionalized by the PLO—not as a tool for fallah-led social action, but rather as a national cultural emblem in the decades that followed.
The irony of its anti-bourgeois origins—whether against the Nashashibis in the 1920s and 1930s, the PLO itself in the 1960s and 1970s, or even Bella Hadid today—was largely forgotten in this effort to collectivize indigenous memory.
The colored variants of the checkered pattern, however, emerged when Glubb Pasha, the British commander of the Jordanian Army in the 1950s, sought to distinguish his East Bank (Jordanian) soldiers from West Bank (Palestinian) soldiers by assigning them red-and-white and black-and-white checkered keffiyehs, respectively. Glubb’s colonial strategy—an archetype of racialized subjectivity—stripped his colonial subjects of their humanity, reducing them to a color-coded system of control.
While the Jordanian nation-building process used the shemagh to assert postcolonial national identity by—ironically—reinforcing a colonial policy at the expense of both the Levantine fallah and Palestinians, the Palestinian national identity project sought to cultivate a memory for an anti-colonial struggle—yet it did so by erasing the fallah’s agency in that very struggle, cutting it at the knees.
Lost in the chauvinistic Jordanian football chants is the memory of our peasant grandparents, whose cultivation of the Levant’s land once transcended Sykes-Picot borders, who led the fight for a homeland untainted by colonial divisions. Lost is the memory of Kayed Mfleh Obaidat—the first martyr for the Palestinian cause—a Transjordanian peasant from the Jordanian town of Irbid who led the Tal al-Thaaleb revolt, the first armed confrontation with settlers on Palestinian land in 1920.
Palestinians and their struggle should not be cast as the “other” to Jordanian “stability.” After all, the very symbol we now associate with stability—our mighty red shemagh—was once a banner of class conflict, just as the Palestinian keffiyeh was.
Both came from a marker of a lower status that later spearheaded the most successful anti-colonial resistance in the region to date. They were then co-opted by elites, stripping the working class of its agency and reducing its role to a hollow cultural one. Worse still, this co-option was cemented by a colonial officer who weaponized the distinction between the two headdresses to sever working-class Jordanians from a cause once inseparable from their own—a struggle once fought in unison with the Palestinian working class in joint defense of the very same land that fed them both.
My grandmother, from the northern Jordanian village of Beit Ras—a village in the Houran Valley stretching from southern Syria to northern Jordan—did not wear a designer Michael & Hushi dress. She wore a red-and-white patterned shemagh her entire life. Her very own sister wore a black-and-white one. My grandfather, older than both, wore a simple white fallahi hatta. I find it difficult to see what truly differentiates them from a fallah in Tiberias—artificial borders and hatta color palettes be damned. But I can easily see who benefits from the internalization of this division.
Make no mistake, I did not endeavor to write this article to deny the existence of inter-Levantine cultural differences. Rather, I aimed to show that these differences, in their original sense, did not conform to Sykes-Picot lines, Glubb’s orders or elite co-option. They followed no imposed boundaries but rather the organic ways of the people themselves in their struggle for self-determination. Any attempt to manipulate these distinctions into reinforcing Westphalian borders and upholding the socioeconomic stratification that preserves the colonial political order should not—and will not—prevail in the face of the Southern Levant’s fight for a dignified existence in its homeland.
If restored to its original role as a subaltern tool of social action, the threads of the hatta will once again weave together the working classes on both banks of the Jordan River in their struggle for liberation. The national meanings now attached to the hatta’s colors are constructs designed to essentialize and divide—a red herring distracting from the real story of our grandparents’ hattas.
That is the story of a simple piece of cloth they donned atop their heads, which—in all its colors, patterns, and glory, once carried the means to invert class power and strike fear into the hearts of colonialists and their collaborators. It is this legacy of cross-Palestinian-Jordanian working class anti-colonial upheaval—not that of imposed national divisions and hollow cultural signifiers—that must be celebrated, reclaimed and re-enacted, whether in football stadiums or film festivals.
Photo credits: Bethany Ann Khan on Flickr