It’s as fashionable now to wear the kaffiyeh, the chequered Arab scarf, as it was once to wear floral print shirts with bell-bottoms or, in later years, ‘I Luv New York’ T-shirts with Lewis jeans. The smiley button that has staged a comeback was all the rage when we were in high school some four decades ago as was New Zealand cartoonist Kim Casali’s awesome ‘Love is…’ series. Modesty Blaise, jointly created by Peter O’Donnell and Jim Holdaway, was the ultimate fantasy of every schoolboy — the love that dared not speak its name lest it fetched a walloping at home.
But let’s not get distracted by fond recollections of smiley buttons, ‘Make Love Not War’ patches on denim jackets, the cherubic faces of Kim Casali’s innocent lovers or the tough-women-don’t-dance act of Modesty Blaise. Like scratchy LPs, they marked an era long gone by and belong to the dusty shelves where memories are stacked away. It’s the age of the kaffiyeh, the Arab roomal is now an accessory without which, it would seem, dressing up for dinner would be considered incomplete. Shahrukh Khan wears them in multi-coloured hues (his favourite seems to be a maroon-and-black kaffiyeh); the less adventurous stick to the traditional black-and-white version.
Some would argue that by flaunting the kaffiyeh they are making a political statement — of defiance against authority and of solidarity with the ‘oppressed masses’. Such is the frivolity that underlies the concerns of our times, shaped by the shallow debates that are manufactured in television studios and peddled as profound discourse on issues of national and international importance. Ignorance breeds further ignorance; knowledge is on a discount or else news telly in this wondrous land of ours would have long gone bust and shut shop.
Hence this brief lesson on the kaffiyeh. The chequered Arab scarf has three variants. The white kaffiyeh, with tassels that designate the social status of an individual, is worn by sheikhs with claims to nobility and is part of the dress code that sets the Arab palace apart from the Arab street. Colonel TE Lawrence, better known as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, wore one, keeping in mind his exalted status. Rudolph Valentino made a fashion statement of sorts by wearing the white kaffiyeh in the 1921 silent film, The Sheik, as part of his costume. Both Lawrence and Valentino contributed to the stereotyping of the Arab sheikh who would otherwise not be seen wearing a kaffiyeh in Monaco, Cote de Azure or the sleazy nightclubs of Phuket. But this version of the kaffiyeh need not bother us.
What is of interest are the black-and-white and red-and-white chequered variants of the kaffiyeh. The first gained global prominence when Palestinian terrorists adopted it as a statement of their faith, initially in Palestinian nationalism and later in radical Islamism. Contrary to popular belief, it was not Yasser Arafat who made the once humble peasant and Bedouin headgear, meant to keep the scorching desert sun out, into a badge of Palestinian identity. That honour must go to Leila Khaled, a leading light of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was among the hijackers of TWA Flight 840. The flight from Rome to Athens was diverted to Damascus where it was blown up in a spectacular display of Palestinian fury. That was in August 1969. Leila Khaled tried to hijack an El Al flight from Amsterdam to New York on September 6, 1970, but was overpowered and captured by Israeli skymarshals.
Between the hijacking of the TWA flight and her failed attempt to hijack an El Al flight, Leila Khaled became an icon of the Palestinian movement which by then had begun to embrace terrorism to further its agenda. The celebrated black-and-white photograph of Leila Khaled the Palestinian terrorist, which became the leitmotif of PFLP posters and Arab propaganda, shows her wearing a black-and-white chequered kaffiyeh and holding an assault rifle, a 1960s version of the Kalashnikov. Her demure appearance is as deceptive as the Facebook profiles of the Indian Mujahideen cadre — between the perception and the reality lurks the mind of a terrorist who can slaughter innocent people without batting an eyelid. Little or no purpose is served by pondering over appearances and educational qualifications — Mohammed Atta was a brilliant student of architecture at Cairo University and was rated highly by his teachers at the Technical University of Hamburg — or sympathising with parents who are unable to accept the bitter truth about their children having grown up into pitiless monsters.
Let us return to the black-and-white chequered kaffiyeh. Arafat, taking a cue from Leila Khaled, was quick to realise the potential of the kaffiyeh as a visible, photogenic statement of Palestinian aspirations. After the first intifada inspired by his belligerence and the second intifada fuelled by the deadly cocktail of anti-semitism and Islamic fanaticism that forms the core of the ideology of hate preached by Hamas, the black-and-white chequered kaffiyeh evolved into an abiding symbol of ‘Palestinian Islamism’. There is nothing innocent or demure about those who flaunt it — it is an aggressive, often terrifying, assertion of militant Islam; for good measure, the Al Aqsa mosque has been incorporated into the chequered design of the kaffiyeh as a declaration of the final objective of those who wear it. Arafat’s stylish arrangement of the kaffiyeh so as to form a triangle symbolising the Palestinian state as perceieved by Fatah, now exists only in fading memories of the man who gave political legitimacy to terrorism.
Which brings us to the third variant of the kaffiyeh — the red-and-white chequered version which is referred to as an ‘Arab roomal’ by Muslims in India. Like the burqa — referred to as the ‘Arab purdah’ — it has been popularised by the Tablighi Jamaat and adopted by many of India’s Muslims, especially the clergy, to announce their religious identity and their allegiance to Wahaabi Islam. Those in India who have adopted this variant of the kaffiyeh — you will find many of them in Muslim ghettos like Jamia Nagar and the area around Jama Masjid, as also in places as far apart as Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh and Malappuram in Kerala — identify it with Islam and the Arab origin of their faith. For them the kaffiyeh is an emotional bridge.
And then there are those who casually fling the kaffiyeh around their shoulder in the belief it makes them look hip.
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