Hairstyles and adornment of Arab women in the Islamic Middle East

According to various textual sources, pre-Islamic Arabs took care of their hair by regularly washing it and keeping it clean from dirt. They washed their hair with a variety of locally sourced natural plants. The marsh mallow plant (Malva) was commonly used to wash the hair. It was relayed that the Prophet Muhammad used the marsh mallow plant to wash his head to clean himself from junub (impurity), and it was sufficient without washing with water.

Then, they treated their hair with a pomade made from jujube (sidr), Myrtle (Ass), marshmallow plant (khatmi), and a little bit of gum (samgh). This pomade was put in the roots of the hair to protect it from lice, sweat, and dirt. This treatment process was used by pre-Islamic Arab men during the pilgrimage instead of shaving their hair.¹

Visual documentation of medieval Arab women’s hairstyles is remarkably scarce. Unlike the Greco-Roman world, which left behind a rich tradition of portrait busts and sculptures, Arabic art rarely depicted women in unveiled, intimate settings. What we know is pieced together from sporadic poetry, legal texts, medical manuals, and a handful of manuscript illustrations, which is enough to sketch an outline, but not always enough to reconstruct precise styles or track how they evolved over seven centuries.

It’s highly unlikely that Islamic female coiffures and haircutting practices in the Middle East stayed consistent for a period spanning more than 500 years. The contours of the Arabized Islamic world encompassed a diverse array of populations characterized by distinct cultural, ethnolinguistic, and religious identities.

This diversity matters because there was no single ‘medieval Arab hairstyle.’ The Islamic world encompassed dozens of peoples —Persians, Turks, Berbers, Kurds, Copts, Nubians— each with their own hair traditions. Hairstyles would have varied significantly across regions, time periods, social classes, and religious communities. What follows is necessarily a partial picture, drawn from a particular slice of the surviving evidence.

Undoubtedly, these different ethnic origins left a clear cultural imprint that was reflected in foodways, dressing habits, and also adornment. Within this extensive region, female hairstyles likely exhibited considerable variation, influenced by regional customs, religious affiliations, socioeconomic factors, and individual preferences.

Research on female hairdressing in the Islamic Middle East is hindered, as most historical writings on women’s hair and hairdressing practices in the Arabo-Islamic Middle Ages are scarce due to the prevailing socio-cultural and religious mores. Even if accounts of women’s appearances reached us, they were also deficient, as women tended to be veiled for most of their lives, and it was impossible to pry into how they wore their hair under their veils and wraps.

The available information is chiefly derived from sporadic commentary on the beautification routines of female slaves and entertainers, or a trend that broke societal or religious norms, which were often criticized by scholars in their writings for their perceived moral laxity.

Also, given the consistent generational knowledge of matters of beauty and health in the Arab world, we can trace how women in the medieval period took care of their hair by examining contemporary conventional beauty traditions still practiced by elderly Arab women.

Class and status further complicate the picture. In a patriarchal, hierarchical society, free women were expected to distance themselves from adornment styles associated with slaves or prostitutes. And yet, concubines of caliphs and princes sometimes achieved enormous influence and became trendsetters in their own right. Slave women brought from across the empire’s frontiers — from Anatolia, Persia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, North and East Africa — would have introduced their own hair traditions to the courts they entered. The result is that some of the most fashionable styles may have originated at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

The influx of foreign female slaves from the conquered regions to the courts of caliphs, governors, and provincial emirs would’ve brought local trends from their homelands, thus influencing costume, jewelry, hairstyling, and makeup traditions.

Iranian influence on the courts of Muslim rulers could be discerned. Some of the Arab caliphs took wives and concubines who were of Persian origin, and these women would’ve brought many Sassanid adornment styles to their courts, especially to the Abbasid Baghdadi court. Arab ladies would’ve emulated their female Persian peers in their flowing scarves, fillets, and ornamented robes. Abbasid women also wore wrap-over dresses and open coats (qaba’) imported from Transoxania.

Also, the booming Turkic influence that swept the Middle East with the rise of the Seljuk Turks as a sociopolitical force was another longstanding byproduct. The emergence of the military Turkic kingdoms in the 11th–13th century was far too significant, especially with the dissemination of the costumes and styles of adornment of the Eurasian steppe nomads into the vestments of the Islamic East.

Turkic slave soldiers and concubines flooded the caliphal courts, which had sociopolitical implications similar to the booming Persian cultural influence on the Abbasid court. Turkic women brought to the Abbasid harems many Central Asian influences to the vestment of the Arab East, like bejeweled and long headdresses, diagonally-fastened and fitted garments, and short jackets.

The “Arabo-islamic” world we know today didn’t become fully Arabized or Islamized until a few centuries after these regions’ successive waves of conquest in the late 8th century. Some historians approximate that the Arabization process of some regions didn’t completely materialize until around the 11th or 13th century.

Before the arrival of the Arabs, the Mediterranean was entrenched within the political and cultural spheres of the Roman Empire. After the Arab conquest, pre-existing traditions and customs didn’t abruptly change but were gradually assimilated into the sphere of the new conquerors.

Elite Syrian and Egyptian women were likely to have continued following Eastern Roman fashions and styles of hairdressing for a considerable amount of time. Women were sporting elaborately combed coiffures, relying extensively on hair extensions, curls, braids, hairpins, hairnets, caps, diadems, and hair ornaments. Iconography found in excavations from necropolises and late antiquity Coptic art depicts women wearing hairstyles and clothes inspired by Eastern Roman/Byzantine models, and this trend may have lasted right until the 8th century.

However, around the tenth century, fashions in both dress and hair seem to have changed to a greater degree, which appears to have gone hand in hand with the increasing Arabisation and Islamisation of Egypt.² The general craze for Roman attire and ridiculously laborious hairstyles was probably out of fashion by the 10th to 11th century in Egypt.

It seems that within the Middle East, the hegemonic centers were re-oriented from the Western cultural and political hemisphere towards the Eastern. Iconographical representations from Fatimid Egypt (10th-12th) show an increased prominence of Arab manners of dress like patterned wide-sleeved robes, tiraz-inscribed tunics, shalwars, and turbans, different from the typical Romano-Coptic costume of clavi-banded tunics and draped mantles. Depictions of unveiled and veiled women illustrate that attitudes towards hairstyling generally pivoted towards wearing their hair down in low buns and plaits.

Muslim women in the newly conquered territories must have emulated the aesthetic ideals of the Arab conquerors promulgated in their poetry. Black, long, wavy hair with fair skin and dark, wide eyes was the paragon of Arab feminine beauty. Arab poets praised the pitch-black color of the beloved’s hair, which contrasted with the whiteness of her face, and its length emphasized her long and slender neck. This could explain the reason behind the prominence of henna and darkly pigmented hair dyes in Medieval cosmetic recipes.

By this time, the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence had time to crystallize and become codified in law. Stricter enforcement of veiling was set in place even for Jewish and Christian women.

The Islamic position towards female hair adornment was not as rigid and intolerant as that of Christianity. Adornment in itself was not equated to immorality, nor was beautification condemned. Oiling, perfuming, dyeing, and plaiting of hair were not considered reprehensible for either men or women and even seem to have been encouraged.³ Nevertheless, Islamic mores stipulated gender separation and limited the expression of women’s sexuality and beautification to the private domain.

It seems that throughout the Islamic Middle Ages, the dominant female headdresses consisted of various veils, head shawls, headbands, caps with compound turbans, hairpins, diadems, and combs, accompanied by low hairdos.

With that context in place — the scarcity of sources, the diversity of the empire, and the long shadow of Byzantine fashion — we can turn to what the evidence does tell us, starting with the women who made these hairstyles possible: the hairdressers.

Hairstylists/hairdressers

Hairdressing was one of the few professions considered socially acceptable for women in the medieval Islamic world, precisely because it kept women within female-only spaces. But it was also a closely watched profession. Market inspectors (muhtasib) and their inspection manuals (hisba) repeatedly flagged hairdressers as a moral risk, so women with intimate access to other women’s households were seen as potential vectors of gossip, matchmaking, and the corruption of feminine modesty.⁴

The skills of a hairdresser weren’t solely reserved for making their clients’ hair beautiful; they could also act as a matchmaker. By virtue of their professions, hairdressers were privy to the innermost, intimate female quarters, whether elite or common. They knew the virtues, vices, and physical attributes of every eligible bride in town. They could be commissioned by male suitors looking for a wife to find a woman matching their desired description.

The coiffeuse — māshiṭa in Arabic — was indispensable at weddings, sometimes doubling as a makeup artist as well. Because medieval Islamic society observed strict gender segregation, celebrations took place in separate male and female spheres. This meant hairdressers were summoned to private homes rather than receiving clients in shops, traveling to their clients’ residences to style and beautify them before weddings, Eid celebrations, and other occasions that called for elaborate dress.

The most skilled hairdressers commanded the highest fees, and wealthy women competed to boast of whichever renowned stylist had done their hair. The Sukayna story from Kitab al-Aghani captures this dynamic perfectly: Sukayna bint al-Hussein, described as the most beautiful and refined woman of her time, devised a distinctive shoulder-length hairstyle so elegant that it spread across Baghdad and came to bear her name, the sukayniya. Its influence was apparently so visible that the Caliph Omar ibn Abd al-Aziz ordered men caught wearing it to be flogged and shaved.⁵

Wealthy and noble ladies of the Arab aristocracy had personal professional hairdressers among their retinue of maidservants, ready at all times. Al-Asfahani wrote that A’isha bint Talha (daughter of the renowned companion, Talha ibn Ubayd Allah) had a personal hairdresser attending to her perfumes.⁶ At the Abbasid court, such arrangements were elevated into markers of royal refinement and ceremonial display, where personal grooming formed part of the aesthetic economy of palace life. Jafar ibn Yahya, an Abbasid vizier, had a dedicated hairdresser coiffing his slave girls every night.⁷

In weddings of the elite, a wealthy groom could afford to hire experienced hairdressers among the wedding entourage to style his bride’s hair. In preparation for the wedding ceremony of the Mamluk Atabeg Mintash to Khawand, daughter of the Mamluk Sultan Al-ashraf Shaaban, Mintash prepared many things, such as sheep, cows, horses, sugar, and honey. He also provided her with the money for singers, hairdressers, and the like.⁸

Whereas women of the middle to lower classes had to call professional hairdressers to come to their house, pre-conditioned, she was compensated for her services. In his diary, Ibn Tawq records the gifts his wife regularly sent to her midwife, and the hefty sums she paid to her hairdresser before going to a wedding.⁹

When a hairstylist secures a prestigious position serving elite households during high-profile events such as weddings, Eid celebrations, or circumcision ceremonies, she is rewarded handsomely with money, along with expensive garments. These gifts were offered as compensation for her services or sometimes as Zakat (obligatory almsgiving) during the month of Ramadan.

It appears that certain hairdressers have achieved considerable financial success within their profession, enabling them to amass significant wealth. A woman by the name “ibnat al-‘aris” was a hairdresser who owned property and residences. She died at the end of Muharram in the year ninety-three.¹⁰

The culmination of wealth was not the sole source of capital that these women were able to acquire. For they could rise through the ranks, allowing them to patronize the building of large complexes in their names. Al-madrasa al-shuqaireiya in Yemen was patronized by a hairdresser who worked for bint jawza, the wife of the Yemeni Rasulid Sultan, Al-Malik al-Manṣūr. She was married to a Mamluk called Shuqier but was left with no heir; thus bequeathed her house and a plot of land to her mistress’s children. However, the mistress had no use for her property and decided to build a school in place of the house and endowed the plot of land in her hairdresser’s name.¹¹

The Hairdresser’s Toolkit and Styling Process

A hairdresser was a woman who was knowledgeable in the art of styling and adorning hair, always updated on the newest trends in hairstyles so as not to lose clients, and was able to style the hair properly according to the hair texture and length. She also dressed women’s hair according to their age, social status, and material standing.

The hairdresser came to the client’s house prepared with her beauty kit containing all sorts of oils, aromatic unguents, and pomades, as well as hair styling tools such as combs, pins, bodkins, ties, and clips. Hair styling products were made from herbal and plant substances that perfumed the hair, moisturized it, and prepared it for styling. These varied in their cost and quality based on the socioeconomic status of the client.

Pre-treating the hair before styling was the first step. The hair was washed with soapy-like detergents called ghasul, which were made from a variety of substances like marshmallow plants (Khatmi), Christ’s thorn jujube (Sidr), and clay (tin). Medieval medical texts and some perfumery treatises contain several recipes for scented hair washes (ghislat) and perfumed solutions (nuduh), particularly al-tammimi’s 10th-century perfumery manual, to brush, moisten, and scent the hair.

Then, the hair is moisturized with different kinds of aromatic oil infusions, rose water, and powdered aromatics that contain beneficial substances to hair’s longevity and health, and give it shine and luster. For example, women would often comb their hair with a perfumed solution (nuduh) made from dates and raisins, and when applied, it fixes the hair in place and prevents frizz.¹² To make the hair shiny and healthy, it was common to brush the hair using wine lees (durdi al-khamr), which was supposed to enhance the hair, and apparently, A’isha, the wife of the Prophet, was reported to have prohibited its use.¹³ Finally, the hair is sectioned with a comb or needle into different tresses and styled.

Then, flower bundles or roses are inserted into the hair for extra beauty and smell. Wealthy brides adorn their hair with gold and silver ornaments, and jeweled fillets are placed on the forehead with a drop pendant extending from the center.¹⁴ Those of the moneyed classes could afford to adorn their plaits and tresses with various trinkets and ornaments.

Wealthy women possessed the means to acquire high-quality ingredients, whether produced locally or imported from distant regions. Affluent ladies utilized red clay sourced from Iran to clean their heads, and anointed their hair with coconut oil or jasmine oil imported from India. Additionally, costly aromatic substances such as musk, ambergris, and screwpine—a type of aromatic tree native to Oman, India, and Southeast Asia—were dissolved in oil and applied to the hair for moisturizing and fragrance purposes.¹⁵ Common women would’ve used a much cheaper option, probably a local variety called tīn sarshūr. A local clay that was mainly used to clean the hair and for cosmetics.¹⁶

The gap between a wealthy woman’s scented, imported hair preparations and a common woman’s local clay says as much about medieval social stratification as any legal text.

We don’t possess adequate information on the bridal hairstyles of Medieval Muslim women; however, there are indications that these hairstyles were elaborately constructed. The hair was coiffed into intricately braided plaits, tied with silk ribbons, and heavily embellished, likely with hair ornaments.

The subject of brides’ elaborate coiffures was repeatedly addressed in jurisprudential treatises, particularly regarding ritual purification and how a bride should perform ghusl (full-body wash) or ablution (i.e., washing her head) for her prayers on her wedding day. Jurists have opined that a bride (al-‘arus) who decorates her hair (tuzayyin sha’raha) and tightly winds her braids with many ribbons (dhafr bi khuyut kathira) is exempt from the burden of having to unravel all of the braids (la tanqud sha’raha al-madhfur) to wash her head, and simply wipe the head with water, as it would be a waste of time and money (‘itlaf lil mal) spent on styling the hair.¹⁷

Upon completion of hairstyling, women would fragrance their hair using costly preparations known as Khamriyya (or Makhmariyya) and Mahlep. The term Khamriyya is derived from the Arabic word “Khamr,” meaning wine or fermentation. This preparation is a fermented perfume composed of crushed saffron and dried Indian musk, blended with a fragrance made from aloeswood, musk, basil, or other herbs. The mixture undergoes a fermentation process lasting forty days.

The Mahlep is an aromatic preparation made from the principal ingredient, Mahlep (Mahlep seeds), and aromatic herbs like lavender, roses, cloves, and myrtle. They could be powdered or mixed with aromatic oils to become liquid. Sometimes they would be fermented or smoked with incense. The Mahlep powder is mixed with water and applied to the hair for nourishment and scent.¹⁸ Myrtle was especially praised for its medicinal benefits for the hair in various medical encyclopedias and is therefore present in all traditional Arab beauty recipes for hair.

Women residing in rural and Bedouin communities, distant from the luxurious amenities of urban centers, traditionally employed animal fats and clarified butter (ghee) as hair moisturizers. The beauty practices of these desert inhabitants were shaped by the limited availability of natural resources within their environment.

Bedouin women washed their hair with camel urine, as the acidic pH can remove residues and parasites from the hair shaft.¹⁹ The hair was brushed with an aromatic mixture made from dried Gazelle stool that looks like the green, round fruit of the caper flower, and when crushed, it gives a scent of chamomile and thyme.²⁰ Aromatic herbal powders called rashush or mishat were used to scent the hair and were made from dried rose petals, lavender, myrtle, mahlep, and others. Variations on this herbal powder would include the leaves of nifl (sometimes called hangresse) (Trigonella stelatta) and were used in place of rashush.²¹

The hairdresser’s role extended beyond the styling chair. On a wedding day, she did not leave once the coiffure was complete. She accompanied the bride to her new home, helped her settle on the bed, and lifted her veil when the husband arrived. She was a guide for the new life beginning: offering practical advice on managing a husband, navigating difficult in-laws, and adjusting to the demands of married life. In a world where young brides often moved into unfamiliar households with little preparation, the hairdresser was sometimes the closest thing they had to a trusted confidante.

Hairstyles:

In Arab culture, a woman’s hair is her pride and glory. Arabic aesthetic canons preferred long, wavy black hair as an ideal for women’s hair. One Arabic poet would go as far as describing black hair as The Hood of Beauty (burnous al-jamāl).

Detailed, often verbose descriptions and terminology came to describe the color, thickness, length, texture, and style of the beloved’s hair in Arabic poetry. For example, the blackness of the beloved’s hair was often likened to coal (fahm), darkness (Thulma), and pitch-black night (duja), its fullness was likened to the prolific palm panicles (qunu al-nakhla al-muta’athkil) and grapevine clumps (‘anaqid al-‘inab), its length likened to long snakes (‘asawid) or horns (qurun), its style whether let down (mustarsal) or plaited (madfur), and texture whether straight (sabt), wavy (rajl), curly (ja’d), or coily (qatat).

Praising the physical attributes of the beloved occupied a large portion of Arabic poetry and was often subsumed under an entirely separate genre called Ghazal (الغزل), particularly pronounced in the sub-genre called Hijazi or sensual ghazal (الغزل الصريح). The ancient Arab poets were interested in two aspects of human hair, namely, women’s black splendour of thick, soft and fragrant hair (far‘) falling over the shoulders in light waves (diw aba), plaited or worm up and serving as a symbol of beauty, and men’s greying and whitening hair (ghayb), pointing to old age and death and stimulating contemplative meditations.²²

1) Plaits

In Semitic societies, it was customary to braid male children’s hair as a sign of reaching puberty. The coming-of-age ceremony included shaving these plaits and sacrificing them in front of idols. This tradition was carried over to pre-Islamic Arabia. Parents plaited their young children’s hair in seven braids, and Bedouins and semi-sedentary communities still uphold this practice. ²³

As far as textual references and iconographic representations have shown, the predominant hairstyle in the Islamic Middle Ages was plaits and braids. The Arabic language has many terms for plaits like qūrūn, ġadāʾir, and ḏawāʾib, all of them meaning the same thing.

The hair was usually parted in the middle and braided either in one large plait or into several braids. Unfortunately, there aren’t any references on how these braids were arranged, but based on some textual and pictorial sources, these braids were normally left to drape on the back or in front.

How these braids were arranged on the head is unclear from most sources, but one controversial style involved piling them upward. Medieval Muslim exegetes (mūfassir) like Al-qutubi, commenting on proscribed hairdressing forms in the hadith, said that contemporary women augmented their heads like a “camel’s humps” by raising their plaits onto the center part or crown of the head. The specific manner or placements in which these plaits were set on the head are still unknown.

The easiest and most convenient braid style was a uni-braid, which can be styled in many ways: chucked on the back, rolled up in a bun, or arranged around the head.

Wearing the hair in a single braid was a matter deserving of criticism by some jurists since it resembled how young boys wear their hair. However, it was not the single braid itself that jurists objected to, but rather the imitation. Ibn Taymiyya rebuked free women who wore their hair in one braid, let a strand fall along their cheek like a sideburn, and wound it around a turban, because this mimicked the style of prostitutes who were cross-dressing as mirdān or prepubescent boys. The prohibition was based on the fear of transgression of gender boundaries, not hairstyle.

If a woman wished to part her hair into multiple braids, these were more laborious and required the assistance of another person, usually a sister or a mother, but if the lady was wealthy, she could afford an experienced maidservant in the art of hairdressing. These braids would’ve been intricately arranged in multiple ways and decorated with ornaments. The number of braids depends on the hair’s thickness and length, but according to a story in One Thousand and One Nights, it’s said to have ranged from 11 plaits to 25, with odd numbers seemingly being preferred.²⁴

If the hair was short or thin, hair extensions were sometimes used to compensate for the lack of volume and length, despite their use being against religious commandments.

The Islamic Hadith tradition is unequivocal in its condemnation of female practices that alter their appearance, specifically in a permanent manner like tattooing and piercings. A woman using deceitful methods such as hair extensions (waṣl), wearing wigs (wafrat shaʿr), plucking the eyebrows (namṣ), or the ancient Arab practice of teeth spacing (falaj) to enhance her beauty was reprehensible for a woman of true faith. “The Prophet (ﷺ) cursed the woman who joins false hair to her real hair [extensions] and the one who asks for it to be done to her; and the woman who tattoos (others) and the one who has it done (for her).”

Islamic Biographical Dictionaries (tarājim) contain numerous writings by indignant religious scholars who strongly criticized women’s usage of hair extensions. These writings underscore the fact that the presence of these commands didn’t necessarily mean that women complied with them and were often disregarded. For instance, the 11th-century Abbasid physician, Ibn butlan, mentioned in his book On The Purchase Of Slaves that slave brokers used false hair to elongate the slaves’ hair as a means of making them more appealing to buyers and hence, more profitable.

Some Islamic jurists permit women to employ artificial hair additions if such implements were to improve their appearance for their husbands. They claim that women may use hair additions made of a young camel’s hair and adorn them with colorful silk threads, as this was not human hair, but solely an artificial decoration. Some sources made this permission conditional on receiving the husband’s consent, demonstrating that this custom was permitted for married women, and also female slaves.²⁵ However, the proscriptions on using hair extensions didn’t include using strands of cloth or ribbons to elongate or decorate the hair.

This loophole mattered in practice: cloth ribbons could create the visual effect of longer, thicker hair without technically violating the prohibition on false human hair, giving women an aesthetically similar result through technically permissible means.

Plaits were decorated with silken or woolen ribbons called qaramil or ʿaqīṣa, which were inserted or braided into the plaits. To avoid religious censure, women would’ve used black fabric ribbons or strings to create the illusion of thicker, longer hair without relying on false hair. False braids called bunūd made from colorful woolen threads, cotton, or wicker are sometimes added to braids as decorations. ²⁶ These fake braids or fabric strips would’ve been an anchor for a variety of hair ornaments.

2) Curls:

Exposed sections of hair showing through tightly wound veils, in addition to depictions of female court entertainers in medieval Islamic art, reveal that women styled their hair into snake-like curls, as one poetry line explains.

There were other descriptions in Arabic poetry of these curly hairdos, like Al-ʾasāwid (snakes or scorpions), ʾānābīsh al-ʿanṣal (pulled-out squills). Curls were made by twisting and knotting the hair strands onto the crown of the head for some time and then loosening them. This style was called ʿaqīṣa.

Ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, and Roman women used curling tongs to curl and crimp their hair. The Romans referred to a curling iron made of a hollow tube as a calamistrum. Given the richness of the Arabic hair-curling recipes in medieval medical texts, which involved starches, gums, plant extracts, and tight cloth bindings, it seems likely that chemical and mechanical methods (twisting and binding while wet) largely replaced heat-based tools, though this remains speculative.

Examples of crimped/crinkly hair tresses

The hair of these female figures is slightly wavy and divided into several sections. One of the hair strands is tied in a loop at the end, similar to an onion bulb or a squill.

3) Temporal tresses:

The hair at the front was styled in many ways. Temporal tresses — locks of hair at the temples, curled and arranged against the face — are one of the best-documented styles, pieced together from both literary and artistic sources.

Medieval poetry, scattered across several centuries and regions, describes women curling locks of hair at their temples to resemble the shapes of Arabic letters, specifically noon (ن), qaf (ق), and waw (و). These letters share a common visual grammar: a curved, hook-like shape, similar to a semicircle with a tail. Styled against the cheek, a lock of hair shaped this way would have created a defined, decorative curl that framed the face, intimate enough to be glimpsed beneath a veil, precise enough to be compared to calligraphy.

These curled tresses were achieved using various cosmetic treatments by rolling and stiffening the hair. Arabic medical treatises contain many cosmetic recipes for hair curling and straightening. Albucasis mentions gels extracted from several plants, like flaxseed, marshmallow roots, and psyllium, that can straighten the hair. For curling the hair, he writes:” Remedies which crinkle hair include carob leaves, olives, Christ’s thorn, pomegranate peels, and Myrtle leaves.” Starches and gums were also used to stiffen the hair.

A famous 10th-century Abbasid physician created a recipe in his medical encyclopedia Kamil Al-Sin’ah At-tibbiyah (The comprehensive industry of medicine) for crimping/curling straight hair. He says to apply a mixture of one part Nura (quicklime) and two parts litharge, amla, and oak galls, and pound together and knead with myrtle juice. Then the hair strands are tied tightly with woolen threads, and the curls are left to dry and stiffen for three days and nights. The threads are untied, and the hair is washed with sidr (Christ thorn jujube) and oiled with violet oil or rose oil.

a) Al-‘asdagh Al-qafiyyah /Anooniyyah (noon or qaf temples).

This popular hairstyle worn by women in the Umayyad era was often described as locks of hair at the temples, curled and shaped like noon (the Arabic letter for N). A Umayyad contemporary poet described a certain slave woman to the Umayyad ruler Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik:

“Her hair touches down to her waist, and it runs down like they are date fruit clumps on her shoulders, and a fringe lies on her forehead and her temple locks; they look like a noon is on her cheeks.”

In contemporary 8th-century poetry, the half-circle-shaped Umayyad “noon” temple tresses appeared to have changed shape and were described as a “scorpion’s tail” during the Abbasid period.

b) Al-‘asdagh Al-‘anqudiya (temple clumps)

A distinct but related style, the ‘anqudiya or ‘temple clumps,’ took a different approach to the same area of the face. This hairstyle was achieved by bringing a section of the hair to the side of the face and curling it to achieve a “clumped” look at the temples.

4) Fringes

Fringes (called ṭurra or ghurrah in Arabic) were styled in several distinct ways, pieced together largely from artistic representations. Because women’s hair was almost always covered by caps, crowns, or veils, visible fringes are rare in the sources; where they do appear, they reward close attention.”

Ringlets are an early styling of their forelock hair that can be identified. This hairstyle is found in abundance in the stucco statues of female singers and entertainers in the Umayyad desert palaces. The hairstyles found on these sculptures seem to retain a clear Greco-Roman influence. These ringlets were styled in different ways. The most common type inferred from these statues is curls rolled up and gathered at the front.

Some artworks show fringes formed into small rolls or hook-shaped curls, which were individual strands stiffened and shaped into tight spirals or curved tips, likely with starches and gums. A sticky liquid (e.g., quince seed soaked in hot water) kept both kasmas (ringlets) and ṭorras in their proper shape.²⁸

Other pictorial representations show women styling their fringes as festoons. They were small, evenly spaced loops arranged in a neat horizontal row across the forehead. This style required considerable skill and preparation, likely involving starch or gum to hold each loop in place. Festoons were often combined with noon-shaped temple tresses, creating a composed, almost architectural frame around the face.

Women also parted their fringes in the middle and laid them flat on each side. Sometimes, they took a lock of hair on each temple and twisted it, arranged it on their temples, and tucked the ends behind their ears.

• Ringlets

• Festoons

• Rolls and hook-shaped curls

• Parted fringe

5) Hair buns

Several surviving Fatimid bowls depicting court scenes show that entertainers styled their hair in a low-rise bun at the back, combined with curled temple tresses — a combination that appears frequently enough to suggest it was a dominant style among performers and possibly among courtly women more broadly.

A related style was called the rummana, or pomegranate: the hair gathered at the nape of the neck into a rounded mass that recalled the shape of the fruit. The comparison to a pomegranate — dense, round, bursting with content — was an apt one for a tightly packed bun, and the term suggests the style had enough cultural currency to earn its own name. Whether the rummana was a distinct style or simply a poetic description of the low bun seen in the Fatimid bowls is unclear; the textual references are too sparse to be certain.

6) Al-mayyala’s hairstyle 

Al-mayyala — ‘the deviant’ — takes its name from a Hadith about women destined for Hell whose heads resembled ‘the humps of the bukht camel inclined to one side.’ It is the most legally contentious hairstyle in this post, and the one that tells us the most about the tension between religious prescription and lived practice.

The Hadith in question goes as follows:

“Two are the types of the denizens of Hell whom I did not see: people having flogs like the tails of the ox with them, and they would be beating people, and the women who would be dressed but appear to be naked, who would be inclined (to evil) and make their husbands incline towards it. Their heads would be like the humps of the bukht [double-humped] camel inclined to one side. They will not enter Paradise, and they would not smell its odour whereas its odour would be smelled from such and such distance.”

The key to reading this Hadith is geography. In 7th-century Arabia, the most visible non-Muslim women were Byzantine, and Byzantine women were famous, or notorious, for their towering, elaborate hairstyles created with false hair, braids, and hairpieces.

Ancient authors, as early as the 1st century, attested by the writings of Clement and Tertullian, wrote against the extravagant hair rituals and adornment practices of Roman women. The general silhouette of the average Roman hairstyle was usually domical and imposing, with the hair gathered in a bun on the head, augmented with false braids, hair ornaments, and caps, often worn to support large headdresses.

Islamic jurisprudence was heavily concerned with regulating all forms of a muslim’s social life, including dress and outward appearance, even so for women. Islamic jurists, tempered by the authority of the Hadith, repeatedly warned against the usage of false hair and the imitation of the women of the disbelievers (la yatashabbahna bi al-nisa’ al-kafirat).

According to a narration on Mu’awiyah, he saw Muslim women using false hair locks (qussa), and warns his listeners that the Israelites were destroyed when their women began to use false hair. It is most probable that early Muslim jurists, in an effort to establish a contrarian identity from non-Muslim women, were strict in requiring Muslim women to abide by the prophetic proscription of such enhancements.

However, even after the waves of Islamic conquests of much of the Mediterranean territories, Roman fashions in hair likely continued to be the dominant taste in hairdressing styles. Egyptian Byzantine women had a greater affinity for “larger”, stuffed styles rather than subdued forms. One style that was especially favoured among Egyptian women included a curly fringe (or hairpiece) on the forehead.³⁰

Burial goods from necropolises and iconography from early Islamic Egypt suggest a continuity of Byzantine hairdressing styles up to around the 8th century. Female busts and sculptures from the 8th-century Umayyad desert castles bear considerable Greco-Roman influences, particularly their hairstyles.

The designation “double humps” (‘asnimat al-bukht) was probably an allusion to the shape and style of the piled and protruding Roman hairstyles known by early Muslims, and thus, early Muslim jurists, drawing on prophetic authority, sought to set a standard that would differentiate believing women from the non-Muslim Byzantine women whose styles they would have recognized. Likewise, women whose heads resembled a camel’s hump were described as temptresses inclined to evil and destined to Hell, suggesting that voluminous, stuffed headdresses similar to those worn by Egyptian women were also known in the Hijāz.³¹

Jurists explain how Muslim women achieved this hairstyle by taking their tresses and plaits and adding volume through false hair, strips of cloth, caps, and turbans, gathering their hair at the top so that if a woman walks, it looks like she has two heads or a two-humped camel.

The interpretation of these hairstyles in Hadith commentary (shuruh) specifically designated their use for women in the profession of soliciting male attention or prostitution (mashtit al-baghayyia). However, textual references sporadically attest to such large hairdos being worn also by freeborn Muslim women. During the Middle Ages, there was an increased number of written censures in Islamic legal treatises against some Muslim women’s attire and choice of hairstyles, which even made some jurists call into question the religiosity and righteousness of the women wearing them.

Ibn Tumert, an 11th-century Almohad jurist and puritanical reformer, expressed profound disapproval upon observing the unconventional hairstyles worn by the veiled women (mulathamun) of the Sanhaja Berber tribe, identified as the Almoravids and political adversaries of the Almohads. His condemnation extended to the point of declaring their excommunication. Their women, according to Ibn Tūmart, embellished their heads with an extravagant coiffure, making them look like camels’ humps (ruʾūsuhunna ka-asnimat al-bukht).³²

There were several testimonies from religious exegetes and commentators expressing dismay about the voluminous hairstyles and headdresses visible from the silhouette of women’s cloaks. Ibn al-Ukhuwwa (d. 729/1329), the author of a hisba ̣ treatise, when establishing rules for the proper way of behaving in public baths, makes angry remarks against inmodest women, who not only wear transparent clothes, but also don turbans similar to camels’ humps.³³

What’s striking is not just the persistence of the condemnations, but their geographic spread: Ibn Tumert in the Maghreb in the 11th century, Ibn al-Ukhuwwa in Mamluk Egypt in the 14th, and Al-Suyuti studying in Fez in the 15th. The same voluminous hairstyle was being censured across five centuries and three continents, which tells us both how widespread the style was and how consistently women wore it regardless. The 15th-century Egyptian scholar Al-Suyuti commented on the prevalence of enlarged heads with turbans and headwraps while studying in Fez.³⁴

Depictions of several women in Maqamat al-Hariri showing fully veiled but bulky heads visible from their cloaks illustrate that some free women sport these imposing hairstyles.

Jurists explain that the prohibition on such hairstyles referenced in that hadith is only applied when they are worn outside the home and could be visible from their veils or cloaks, fearing it might garner unwanted male attention, something a free and respectable woman should preclude herself from doing. Yet, wearing such hairstyles inside her home in the company of family or female friends was fine, and wearing the hair down like the mothers of the believers was preferable.

What the centuries of condemnation tell us is that women kept doing it anyway. The gap between the voluminous hairstyle that jurists repeatedly condemned and the voluminous hairstyle that women across the medieval Islamic world repeatedly wore is itself a form of historical evidence, not of supposed “moral failure”, but of women exercising agency over their own appearance despite sustained institutional pressure to do otherwise. This clearly illustrates a dissonance between the practiced reality and the normative, often didactic, culture preached in sermons and religious texts.

Hair Ornaments:

Ornamented hairstyles have an extensive history in the Near East. Ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Persians sported elaborately coiffed hairdos and were decorated with all manner of gold trinkets, which were intricately braided along with their tresses.

In pre-Islamic Arabia, children were lavishly adorned with decorative ornaments braided into their hair.³⁵ Hair ornaments made of small pearls or gold “shathar” and trinkets “shakal” were mentioned in Arabic poetry as early as the 7th century.

It appears that after the Arab conquest, popular fashion and dominant tastes shifted, leading to the adoption of wearing hair down in simple braids instead of the elaborate, towering updos influenced by Roman culture. So, a woman might add emphasis to an otherwise plain hairstyle by adorning plaits and tresses with gleaming ornaments, colorful beads, and jingling trinkets.

The wearing of these hair ornaments often exemplified spiritual and protective beliefs, in addition to highlighting material and social demarcations or aesthetic preferences. Women would often wear amulets and talismanic jewelry on their heads, hair, or veils to ward off the evil eye or spirit away the djinns and bad luck. These would take shape in different human (khamsa hand and Nazar blue eye), geometric (Zar amulet and coins), astrological (Helal crescent and stars), or animalistic (samaka fish) morphosis that have deep-rooted religious and cultural significance.

The protective properties of these objects weren’t given importance solely on their shapes, but also on their color, base material, and sound. Ancient and Islamic cultures in the Near East valued carnelian and amber stones for their color and therapeutic associations and inlaid them in their jewelry. Talismans (hejab), usually a hollow metal case in the shape of a box, tube, or capsule, would be stuffed with certain scented items or magical scrolls with written spells, and contain drop-pendants and dangling chains that rattle when the woman moves to protect the wearer.

Arab women covered themselves from head to toe with all kinds of jewelry. Each bodily part was adorned with a piece of jewelry, including the hair, forehead, ears, nose, fingers, wrists, arms, chest, neck, waist, ankles, and jewelry for headdresses and clothing. These, of course, varied in terminology and style across the Medieval Islamicate world.

1) Hair tubes/trinkets/chains

Hair plaits and tresses were adorned with tubes, pearls, beads, coins, and decorative metal trinkets that produced a jingling sound as the woman moved — the more precious the materials, the higher the status signaled. Less moneyed women used small bells, amber or coral beads, copper coins, or other affordable accessories. These ornaments were hung on the top, middle, or end of the plaits.

The earliest artistic representation of such hair decorations goes back to the Umayyad period. A plethora of stucco figures at the palaces of Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-Ḡarbī and Ḵerbat al-Mafjar are shown nude to the waist and wearing elaborate torques with pendants, bracelets, anklets, and hair rosettes.³⁶ Mural depictions of female dancers in Qusayr ‘Amra portray female figures semi-clad and bedecked with various necklaces, bracelets, and hair pendants placed at the center of the hair. One bare-chested dancer, who is donning only a checkered skirt, was wearing her hair in a perm with a pearl chain or pins in her hair. These ornaments were inserted between the headdresses or arranged on the hair.

S. D. Goitein observed through his investigation into the Cairo Geniza trousseau lists that women used tubes as hair ornaments. A small tube (masura) was attached to the end of each braid. It measured some three-eighths of an inch long and seemed related to the word for bracelet (siwar), implying encircling or enclosing.³⁷ Finials of jewels or small gold coins were sometimes hung on tiny rings below the masura.

A related but distinct ornament appears in the same trousseau lists under the name “qawādīs” (Ar. pl. of qādos). It was mentioned in the jewelry section of an upper-class bride that a hair ornament translated as gold tubes by Goitein. In Arabic, qādos refer to a pipe or a conduit for water drainage, which is what Goitein based his translation of the word on, since its presence in the jewelry section of the dowry can only mean a tubular hair ornament in this context. They were made of gold and pearls and cost 8 dinars. In another list, they cost 3 dirhams and are possibly made from copper.

A third tubular ornament, the barbakh or culvert pipe, appears repeatedly in lists from around 1200 CE, though always in the singular, suggesting it was a single statement piece rather than a paired ornament. Yedida Stillman has discovered a similar hair ornament called barabekh in modern-day Palestinian headdresses. Stillman describes them as pairs of pipes made of silver or gold attached to the coif near the temple and ending in a hollow ball from which hang four braided chains, a fact which makes Goitein believe that the Geniza hair ornament barbakh had a form and function different from those of the modern barabekh. However, Stillman mentioned in her book “Palestinian Costume and Jewelry” that there was a hair ornament called barabekh worn by Palestinian women.³⁸

I’ve found some tubular hair ornaments from Iran dating to the 12th–13th century in the Met Museum. Since Iran was a popular medieval commercial destination for trade and import in the Fatimid era, I believe they could bear a strong resemblance to the Geniza hair ornaments.

European travelogues describing the Middle East indicate that this particular hairstyle persisted into the 19th century. Although there are no surviving contemporary medieval representations of ornamented braids in Arab art, such styles are documented in 19th-century European travel narratives and photographic records.

Sources mention that women in Mecca tied their plaits with an ornament called al-ʿuṯkōl. It was a decorative tassel or a pompom used to decorate the house or hung on the camel caravans and resembled a panicle of the date palm tree or a grapevine. Affordable versions were made from colorful wool or as leather with cowrie shells or entirely beaded forms, while a more expensive version would’ve been made from precious metal.³⁹

Decorative hair accessories made from beads or pearls strung on a string (nūẓūm, from Ar. manẓūm) were another hair decoration. These were braided with the plaits, hung on the hair, or even worn as headbands.⁴⁰ We see this type of decoration in depictions of women on Fatimid lustre bowls, which show them wearing beaded or pearled necklaces arranged on long ribbons knotted at the back with a knot or bow, and draped over their shoulders. Meccan women decorated their hair with a chain called Al-mukarrasa, consisting of two rows of beads or pearls joined at each side.⁴¹

High-born women would embellish their plaits with ornaments made from coral, pearl, ruby, or small trinkets. A companion of the Caliph al-Hadi narrates the story of two slave girls accused of impropriety and promptly beheaded on the Caliph’s orders. Their severed heads were brought to him on a tray. The companion was bewitched by the beauty of the two slave girls and their finer appearance:

“Then he said, ‘Lift the cover!’ and there on the tray were the heads of two slave girls. And, by God, I have never seen more beautiful faces or lovelier hair in the whole of my life. Jewels were entwined in their hair, and the air was fragrant with their perfumes. We were amazed.”⁴²

Decorating plaits and hair tresses with all kinds of hair accessories is a continuing tradition lasting into the modern age. A plethora of plait ornaments, pendants, tassels, and chains are found in the traditional jewelry of Arab women across the Arab world in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Syria, Palestine, and Algeria.

Two stucco sculptures from Umayyad desert castles, 7th-8th century, show two female figures with a rosette ornament in their headdress.

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Some modern-day versions

A pair of Palestinian plait ornaments is called “quarmal.” Worn hanging over the shoulders on cords and mixed with the hair. With 19th-century Ottoman coins. From Ethnic Jewels Forum.

2) Headbands/diadems/bandeaux:

The most ubiquitous head ornament mentioned in historical literature and artistic representations is headbands (ʿiṣāba in Arabic). These headbands came in different materials, enclosures, and decorations.

The fashion of the headband was pioneered by the daughter of the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi, who wore the band to conceal a scar on her forehead; it was also called shadd al-jabin, or forehead band.⁴³

Headbands made from cloth or textile were the most common. Female (and sometimes male figures) depicted in various mediums of Islamic art (manuscripts, lusterware and ceramics, brass vessels, and woodwork) wear textile headbands wrapped around the forehead and tied on the back of the head with a knot or a ribbon bow cascading down the back. These were profusely embroidered or studded.

The Abbasid contemporary, Al-Waššāʾ, wrote of cord-like bands (Zunnar) that women tied on their fringes. “The singer, Khadi’, wrote on her zunnar cord, which she has tied around her fringe.”⁴⁴ These cords were made from leather and were either gilded or studded with gemstones.⁴⁵ A zunnar is typically a girdle tied on the waist; however, it is simultaneously worn as a headband.

Headbands varied in width from slim ribbons, bands, ropes, and scarves with flowing ends, to large folded kerchiefs that covered the entire forehead. The degree of ornamentation varied from as simple as having no decoration to luxurious, such as silk or gold embroidery, beadwork, coins decorating the edges, pearls or gemstones studded with tassels, and decorated ribbons flowing down the back.

Several figures in Fatimid ceramic luster bowls wear headbands with seemingly pearl-sequenced designs. The geniza trousseau lists show that women of good circumstances wore fabric headbands made from costly fabrics like silk or high-quality linen, whereas poorer women wore ones made from lower-cost fabrics.

Al-Waššāʾ writes that the elegant women of his time: “studded their headdresses (karzan) with beads (habb) and precious gemstones (sunuf al-jawhar), they inscribed their headbands with gold and silk.”⁴⁶

In One Thousand and One Nights, the Merchant was struck by the beauty of his beloved hubub and her fineries: “Whilst she herself donned one of the richest dresses and crowned her head with a net of pearls of the freshest water. About this she bound a fillet of brocade, purfled with pearls, jacinths, and other jewels, from beneath which she let down two tresses each looped with a pendant of ruby, charactered with glittering gold.”⁴⁷

There were many ways a woman could wear her headband. When stepping outside the house, a woman wears the ʿiṣāba wound turban-like around that part of the overwrap (izar) or veil which covered the hair, similar in fashion perhaps to that of Bedouin women today or Egyptian rural women with their rabtah, except the medieval version was sometimes richly embroidered and adorned with precious stones.⁴⁸ Bedouin and rural village women in Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, up until recently, could be seen wearing their ʿiṣāba in this manner. 

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Metal headbands, such as diadems or fillets, were another elaborate type afforded by the well-off. These were made from precious metals such as silver or gold, encrusted with precious gemstones inlaid with pearls, and richly decorated with filigree. Affluent women, especially those belonging to the elite stratum in the caliphal household, wore metal headbands, crowns, diadems, and tiaras on their wedding days.

Harun Al-Rashid is said to have prepared an obscene amount of jewelry, ornaments, and crowns for his wife’s dowry. Al-Maqrizi mentions in his book on the history of the Fatimids, “Itti‘āz al-Ḥunafā’ bi-Akhbār al-A’immah al-Fāṭimīyīn al-Khulafā,” that Sitt Al-Mulk, a Fatimid princess during her brother’s reign, Al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh (r. 996-1021), gifted him a tāj (crown) on his wedding day.

Trousseaux lists belonging to affluent brides in the geniza documents contain mentions of golden diadems and metal headbands (ʿiṣāba) inlaid with pearls and richly decorated with filigree that reach the price of 80 dinars. The pattern is consistent: the metal headband was a ceremonial object, worn publicly as a display of status on the most significant social occasions. Ibn Jubayr, an Andalusian traveler who visited Mosul in 1217 AD/614 AH, wrote in his travel records that he saw the daughter of the king of Mosul on her wedding day stepping out of her palanquin fully veiled and wearing a headband made of gold, as well as her handmaidens.

Indoors, moneyed women usually wore metal headbands as a diadem on their bare hair or forehead as a head ornament. It was also worn as an adorning element to the turban-cap ensemble. Lane’s account of the modern Egyptians writes that 19th-century middle to upper-class Cairene women usually wore a variety of head ornaments consisting of preciously studded metal headbands wrapped around their rabtah, a headdress consisting of a kerchief called a faroudiyya wrapped around a base cap called a taqqiyah or tarboosh. These headbands are worn on the front or the side of the rabtah, attached by little hooks at the back.

Precise construction remains difficult to establish — no medieval metal headbands have yet been identified in archaeological contexts, and manuscript depictions vary considerably — but the visual evidence suggests a range from simple bands to elaborate studded crowns. Based on some pictorial representations, such as in (The Book of Fixed Stars) and other mediums of art, we can see that they were usually circular or semi-circular metal bands or a string of beads or pearls with a large centerpiece element in the middle. Some headbands were placed on the forehead with two hooks or holes on each side, for a cord or ribbon to pass through to be tied on the back, similar to the manner in which Greco-Roman diadems were worn.

Headbands can anchor a variety of temple tassels, chains, and pendants that hang on the sides or sometimes are fixed on the sides of the hair or veils.

Metal headbands or forehead ornaments are still a part of the traditional costumes of modern Arab countries such as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. These headbands are made from silver or sometimes gold and are encrusted with precious gemstones or beadwork; some are edged with tiers of coins or dangling tassels and very ornamented with various techniques of enamel-work, wirework, granulation, chainwork, and filigree.

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Some modern-day versions

3) Hair strings/bands/ribbons:

Women decorated their hair with different kinds of ribbons and hair bands to complement the beauty of their costumes, jewelry, and headdresses. These ribbons were made from silk, wool, linen, cotton, strings, silver, or gold, and were woven with their braids and hair tresses.⁴⁹

Several Khuyut (strings) were mentioned as head ornaments in the geniza trousseaux. They were gilded strings for the head. Goitein proposes the notion that the wearing of these threads by brides on their henna night served as a ceremonial festivity, leaving her hair down one last time before binding it up forever, a sort of symbolic gesture of leaving girlhood and entering the state of matrimony.

No wonder we read in a marriage contract of April 1243 that at the wedding, the groom provided the expenses for the henna and the strings “as customary.” In one case, they cost only 1 dinar; in another, 20. In still another, they are described as silk strings with gold-plated silver threads worth 3 dinars, and in the earliest instance noted by Goitein, the clerk simply wrote “strings made of silk and other materials-6 di­nars,” a sum that points to the use of silver and gold. In all these cases, “the materials for the khuyut” were included in the trousseau lists. ⁵⁰

Other designations were used for hair ribbons, like the word Qitan (cords made from wool, silk, or cotton), or Zarrouf, which were strings made from silk or wool to decorate or tie their hair.⁵¹

A ribbon called a Fisadiyya (pl. fisadiyyat), according to a nineteenth-century Lebanese dictionary, was used by women to gather the tresses of their hair. The word appears only in two Geniza trousseaux, one of which dates from the late Fatimid period. ⁵² The fisadiyyat ribbons were made from silk, often embroidered with colorful threads in green, red, and blue.⁵³

The rarity of it in that source can be ascribed to it being too basic and inexpensive an item to be worth mentioning among the diverse and often ornate and valuable garments listed.

4) Hairdressing needles or bodkins

Parting the hair for the different elaborate coiffures required a pointed tool to section the hair precisely. Textual reference pointing to dressing needles being in use is found in Al-‘Asqalani’s commentary on costumes mentioned in the hadith. In the chapter on hairdressing, he explained that women used a tool like a bodkin called midra المِدرى to gather their hair or a prong to fix the hair. 

Al-Jawhari defines the midra (Ar. syn. qarn قرن, midrat مِدراة) as a stick or a metal needle with a sharp edge, or a wooden comb with a handle, and it is used to comb the hair if no comb is at hand or as a back scratcher by the elderly.

The midra came in two varieties. The first was a small bodkin that looked like a blade and had a round head, used only for parting the hair, and was made from ivory, metal, or ebony. The second is a large cone-shaped bodkin made from ebony and other materials, with a handle that has a decorative carving and prongs; the first prong is crooked like a thumb ring, used for combing the hair and scratching the back and the head. ⁵⁴

Hair Bodkins are mentioned in an 8th-century story in Al-Aghani about a bereaved woman called Buthaina after the death of her beloved, Jamil. The titular character says: “After him, I didn’t apply Khol on my eyes or parted my hair with a needle (mikhyat) or a comb, if it’s not the fear of a headache that affects my eyes I oiled my head, nor did I wear a colored veil (khimar) or waistwrap (izar), and I will still grieve for him until my death.”⁵⁵

The word (mikhyat مِخْيَط) in Arabic is any pointed tool used to sew clothing, such as a needle (ibrah) or a bodkin (masallah). The same term is used in a canonical hadith prohibiting men from touching women who aren’t related to them: “For one of you to be stabbed in the head with a metallic needle (mikhyat) is better for him than that he should touch a woman who is not permissible for him.”

A surviving traditional example from Qatar — called Qarn Al-Ghazal, or ‘the ghazal’s antlers’ — illustrates what such a tool looked like in practice: a pointed sectioning tool mounted with a golden-gilt cap and a small loop hook, indicating ownership by someone of means. Similar tools, called mifrag or ‘divider,’ were widespread across Arabia and have largely disappeared from common use, surviving mainly in the possession of elderly women.

It seems that the style and base material of these hairpins & bodkins varied significantly across the regions, depending on the environment and resources available at hand. Bedouins living in the desert would’ve utilized the scarce source materials like animal bones, horns, or hoofs, and trees from the surrounding environment, while elite urban dwellers would have had the luxury to attain elaborate materials such as imported wood, ivory, or precious metals.

5) Hairpins

Decorative hairpins as hair ornaments are also scarcely mentioned or seen in pictorial depictions. Illustrations of some female figures in various artworks show that women decorated their hair with ornamented hairpins or combs. Drawings from The Book of Fixed Stars show female celestial representations bedecked with all kinds of jewelry, including two or three hairpins or rosettes inserted between their headdresses.

While hairpins survive abundantly from the ancient Near East, Egypt, and Greco-Roman contexts, very few Islamic examples have been recovered archaeologically, the main exceptions being a small number of Fatimid and Coptic-period pins.

At the Dallas Museum of Art, I found a gold Fatimid hairpin with a rock crystal bird dating to the 10th or 11th century. The British Museum has a silver hairpin dating to the 14th century from the Mamluk period. It has a decorative head and a blunt edge. This hairpin could’ve been used as a decorative piece for the hair or as a functional tool to part and style the hair. That both surviving examples come from Egypt is consistent with the broader pattern of the evidence: Egypt’s arid climate and strong excavation tradition make it the most productive source for material culture from this period.

In addition to these bodkins, ornamented wooden combs were used to comb the hair to fashion these coiffures.

6) Hair pendant/hairpiece

This hair ornament could be seen in some medieval artistic representations. The hair pendant — a long chain with a decorative drop at the end and a hook that anchors to the hair parting — is one of the most visually distinctive head ornaments in the medieval record. Some versions have two outer chains that encircle the hairline and connect to the central chain at the back, framing the face entirely in metal. It is very similar in shape to the Indian head ornament Shringar Patti, or the Maang Tikka.

Yet, depictions of such head ornaments could be witnessed on female Palmyrene funerary busts and sculptures from at least the 1st century CE and even further back on several female ivory Neo-Assyrian plaques from the 8th-9th century BC. These figures are usually crowned with a rectangular fringed diadem with pendant tassels or pomegranates. A diadem closely resembling the one depicted here, made of gold and inlaid with lapis lazuli and colored stones, was found in the grave of a royal woman at Nimrud.⁵⁶

A similar headpiece could still be witnessed in the traditional jewelry in several countries of Arabia (common to the UAE, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, and other Arab Gulf states). Hyar, Naql, or Majlah are synonyms for names (in the Emirati dialect) for a decorative golden chain that comes in different motifs, similar to a headband worn across connecting ear to ear and ending with small rings for earrings to dangle. At times, it has a medallion (shnaf/taba’ah/tfruqah) attached to the forehead or additional dangling chain layers covering the crown of the head.⁵⁷

We are unsure if this specific style of headgear was widespread in the rest of the Arabic-speaking regions or was considered more local to Arabia. However, there is room for contemplation. The continuity here spans nearly three thousand years — from the Neo-Assyrian plaques of the 8th century BCE to the medieval Islamic manuscripts and through to living Gulf traditions. Whether this represents an unbroken chain of transmission or a series of independent convergences on the same practical and aesthetic solution is impossible to say, but the persistence of the form is striking.

Book of Fixed Stars’ (Kitāb suwar al-kawākib al-ṯābita) by ‛Abd al-Rahman ibn ‛Umar al-Ṣūfī, 1266- 7AD, Syria? (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Arabe 2489)

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Modern-day versions

7) Hair combs

Women used hair combs to brush, detangle, and style their hair into different hairdos. Alongside pins and needles, the most essential hair tool was the comb — and unlike most other hair ornaments discussed here, a reasonable number have survived. Most surviving combs from the Islamic Middle Ages are made of wood or ivory, although historical references mention silver, turtle shells (carapace), and animal horns as other materials.

The majority of extant medieval combs come from Egypt. Due to the arid climate of most of the Middle East and in Egypt, where most surviving combs originate, combs were made out of imported wood such as Pine, Cedar, Boxwood, Ebony, and Oak, making them more valuable and expensive. Combs made out of wood from local Egyptian trees like sycamore fig and Ziziphus spina-christi or Sidr in Arabic, were less expensive.⁵⁸

The Geniza trousseau lists mentioned that wealthy Egyptian Jewish brides had combs made of silver, ivory, and good-quality European Boxwood among the items they brought with them.⁵⁹

Decoration techniques included engraving and carving different geometric, floral, and animal designs, and incising concentric circles and shapes. Text inscriptions were another decorative design feature.

Combs were used as hair ornaments as well. These ornamented combs were usually of precious materials, richly decorated with filigree and encrusted with gemstones.⁶⁰ They were placed on the sides of the hair or the back of the coiffure.

A 16-dinar gold comb listed in the jewelry section of a wealthy bride’s trousseau almost certainly functioned as a hair ornament rather than a brushing tool, an object of display rather than utility, placed in the hair to glitter alongside the headbands and pendants.⁶¹ No surviving ornamented combs have been found from the Middle Ages, but a few have been found from the modern era.

Conclusion

Taken together, what the evidence for medieval Arab women’s hairstyles and head ornaments reveals is not a unified tradition but a layered one — shaped by pre-Islamic Arab practices, Byzantine continuities, Persian and Turkic influences, religious controversy, and the tastes of women across an enormous social spectrum, from Bedouin communities washing their hair with camel butter to Abbasid court ladies adorned with 80-dinar diadems. The gaps in the record are real: we cannot trace individual styles across centuries with confidence, and visual evidence is frustratingly sparse. But the picture that emerges — from poetry, legal texts, trousseau lists, medical manuals, and manuscript illustrations — is of women who invested deeply in their appearance, who pushed against the boundaries of religious regulation, and whose aesthetic traditions were sophisticated enough to persist, in recognizable form, into the living memory of the modern Arab world.

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