Ever since the beginning of time, clothes, textiles, and fashion have been embedded in the human narrative. It embodies the history and material culture of any human civilization, no less than art, architecture, music, or literature. Clothes serve multiple functions: a protective function and an aesthetic function.

Clothes are necessary to protect the human body from harsh weather conditions (extreme cold or heat) and external environmental threats like insects, dirt, and rough surfaces. With the advent of religions that usually mandate covering the genital areas to prevent sexual attraction and observe modesty, it may have evolved into a modesty function.

Historically, clothes have played a monumental role in the collective mind of humanity; aside from being an instrument of beautification and adornment, they’re a reflection of wealth, social and even vocational status, gender differentiation, and religious identity.

I stumbled upon a YouTube video about the clothes worn by women in the Victorian era, and I was fascinated with the substantial amount of details in describing the fabrics used, how they layered their clothes starting from the undergarments to the outer garments, headgear, the type of shoes and accessories, even to the hairstyles and makeup they put.

Let’s say I went down the historical costuming/period clothing reconstruction niche rabbit-hole on YouTube, and I am obsessed with it. 

Then a question dawned on me. As an Arab Muslim watching these videos about Western fashion titled “Getting dressed in the [something] century,” I began to wonder, what did Muslims and Arabs wear throughout Islamic history? Starting with early Islam, how did it evolve and change throughout history? How did dress differ across the social hierarchy? How often did fashion change from region to region or decade to decade?

When we look at how the history of “oriental” fashion differs from “occidental” fashion, an intriguing contrast arises. I don’t like to use the word “orient” since it’s a Eurocentric artificial construct viewed as an antipode of the “West”. The “Orient” is an exaggerated set of preconceived ideas filled with a biased and even supremacist lens of Middle Eastern and Asian people in general. The term “oriental”, in addition to its problematic connotations, is an umbrella term that often strikes ambiguity and imprecision, considering that it covers a wide range of peoples, cultures, and epochs.

If we use other terms like “Islamic” and “European,” we can have a baseline for comparison. However, we fall into another dilemma since the “Islamic world”, like European Christendom, has encompassed large swaths of lands that stretched over various regions, ethnicities, nations, and dynasties since its establishment.

Thus, I will narrow the scope to specific regions and timelines, primarily the clothes worn by Arabs since the beginning of Islamic expansion in the Arabian Peninsula in the late 7th century, and the reciprocal exchange of dress influences between the Arabs and the subjugated populations as they spread their empire borders outside Arabia.

As for the geographical sphere of focus, I will choose the “Near East”, specifically the “Arab East” or the Mashriq (as opposed to the Maghreb or the “Arab West”). The “Arab East” includes the modern-day Arabian Peninsula, the Levant region, Iraq, and Egypt since these regions, more or less, were typically controlled under the same Islamic dynasties, sharing a reciprocal history. I will concentrate on five eras in Islamic history, which correspond to the Western nomenclature of the “Middle Ages” that stretched from the 7th century until the 16th century, with the fall of the Mamluk dynasty to the Ottomans.

The clothing of each era is categorized into three sections, with each section having a separate blog post:

A) Introduction/context on the era and its fashion history + undergarments

B) Outer garments,

C) Headwear and shoes.

 

1-The early Islam and the Rashidun Caliphate. (610 – 661 CE)

2-The Umayyad Caliphate. (661 – 750 CE, Damascus/756–1031 CE, Al-Andalus)

3-The Abbasid Caliphate. (750–1258 Baghdad CE/1261–1517 Cairo CE)

4-The Fatimid Caliphate. (909–1171 CE)

5-The Mamluk Sultanate. (1250–1517 CE)

 

My intention in this article series is by no means a one-to-one comparison between the two vestimentary systems since Western fashion wasn’t uniform across all of Europe throughout time. I am simply trying to break down how fashion evolved in the Islamic world whilst trying to make it more comprehensible to an English-speaking audience by using terminology close to European fashions in meaning.

 

Even though Persia and Turkey are a part of the Middle East, Islamic Persian and Turkish dress need extensive research, so they will be allocated a separate series. I will also dedicate a different article on clothing and costume in the Arab West (Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Mauritania) just because it requires research on this subject that needs its own separate blog post, so stay tuned!!

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Upon research, I realized that there is an abundance of written primary sources documenting Western dress, such as wills and wardrobe inventories of the elite, books, sermons, articles, contracts, and documents pertaining to textile trades.

In addition, there were a considerable amount of pictorial sources such as paintings, portraits, mosaics, murals, illuminated manuscripts, sculptural reliefs, tomb effigies, and statuary, as well as extant clothing found in archeological discoveries, alongside other sources that appeared much later, from the end of the 18th century to the 20th century, in the form of costume books, fashion plates, magazines, and dressmaking manuals. All the aforementioned sources are documentary descriptions of the history of Western, and more specifically, European fashion. 

When we compare Islamic Near Eastern and European historical dress, focusing specifically on pictorial and iconographical sources, we are left with the conclusion that Islamic sources pale significantly. Or even thinking of the “Far East,” such as East Asia (like China, Korea, Japan … etc), where there was meticulous chronicling of the attire of the imperial families and the different strata of society across the different dynasties through court portraitures and other mediums, we also find that there is a longer and more extensive history of visual references that were beneficial in documenting the attire of the East-Asian people throughout history. 

This deficiency in information is due to a multitude of compounded factors.

Firstly, Muslims’ aversion to figural representation, whether in painting or sculpture, is due to religious proscription. However, these prohibitions were later circumvented, as seen in the flourishing manuscript artwork starting from the late 12th century onward under the patronage of several Islamic dynasties in different parts of the Islamic world, starting from the Arabized cultural centers in Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo. With the end of the Middle Ages and the termination of the eras of Arab caliphates, the mantle of manuscript art tradition was carried by the Safavids of Persia, the Mughal Empire in India, and the Ottoman Empire (the so-called gunpowder empires). A wealth of iconographic materials was being produced in various secular disciplines.

This scarcity in the visual representation of early 7th-century Muslims until the end of the 12th century created a significant gap in our knowledge of the types of attires worn by Medieval Arabs for the first 500 years or so of Islamic rule, which spanned almost the entirety of the Arab dynasties that ruled over the Middle East (Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid). Unlike European depictions of dress, where you had contemporary portraiture of real people (especially during the Renaissance), including their features, dress, and headwear, no such live portraiture or imagery has come to us about Arab Eastern dress, particularly women’s.

The only surviving portraiture of Muslim Eastern people and their attire, especially those belonging to the higher echelons, comes from Safavid Iran and the Ottoman Empire; however, their vestimentary systems are outside the epoch and geographical scope of focus for this article series.

So, left with a limited amount of artistic sources, that being illuminated manuscript art and human depictions found on various mediums of art (lusterware and ceramics, glassware, brass vessels, and woodwork), we are confronted with the question of the authenticity of these visual representations as a faithful depiction of actual contemporary dress of medieval Arabs.

Are the clothing depicted in these manuscripts reliable indicators of clothing worn by living people from the period, or do they reflect a more didactic and allegorical representation? Do these depictions display a comprehensive image of clothing of all the different strata of the social hierarchy, whether civilian, military, officialdom, clergy, or those belonging to the lowest standing of society?

Not to mention running into the issue of inaccurate anachronisms and inconsistencies between the literary text and the adjacent illustration. Some manuscripts were copied from original manuscripts that were lost or severely damaged. Also, the scribe did not usually draw miniature illustrations, but a separate illustrator handled it. Sometimes, these illustrators did not live during the same time as the manuscripts were copied. The same manuscript can also have multiple reproductions by patrons from several Muslim courts across different centuries, with diverging styles of miniature paintings.

Secondly, information pertaining to women’s dress, whether in pictorial representation or literary sources, was even harder to obtain due to strict gender roles and conservative sentiments. Medieval Muslim women, like most women living in medieval societies, were governed by patriarchal values, whereby women’s participation in public life was often hindered and greatly discouraged. Female seclusion and gender segregation were a part of the sociocultural norm that was prevalent at that time.

That’s not to say that Muslim women didn’t play any role in the active spheres of society; however, their role was rather strictly monitored and allowed in limited and conventionally feminine-oriented professions like sewing, weaving, midwifery, wetnursing, domestic servitude, washing, matchmaking, hairdressing, beautification, the stewardship of endowments and charities, the supervision of the women’s section of the public bath, and washing dead female bodies.

Although there were restrictions on women’s movement, Islam granted women many civil and judicial rights that were rarely endowed to women in other medieval societies, such as owning and selling properties, inheritance, being a witness in court, and the right to initiate divorce.

Women complying with general rules of propriety often didn’t expose themselves in public and resided indoors unless there was a necessity to go outside, and if they did, they were usually swathed in over-enveloping cloaks and veils; thus, it was difficult to have any privy to the garments worn underneath.

Scholars argue that starting from the Abbasid caliphate, when the Islamic empire was at its height of economic and intellectual prosperity, the institution of concubinage (harem) and the seclusion of free women came about in the Islamized Mediterranean societies. This seclusion and segregation of free women from public life bridled any interaction between the sexes that defied societal conduct, thus making historians’ and chroniclers’ jobs in obtaining details about women’s attire much harder. 

Since historiography is largely written by upper-class, educated, and privileged males, documentation of women’s daily routines, customs, and contributions in Medieval biographical literature was significantly lacking and almost nonexistent. As far as we know, we have no first-person accounts through personal diaries or memoirs left by contemporary women living in the Medieval era.

Furthermore, due to religious considerations, Muslim historians and biographers often shied away from divulging first-hand observations on women’s clothing (specifically free women’s), primarily their undergarments, firstly because of the unfeasibility of its occurrence and secondly, since women are regarded as a man’s “ḥarīm” meaning the sacred and inviolable female members of any man, and by large, detailed descriptions on woman’s intimate garments were highly inappropriate and regarded as an egregious tarnishing of their status. However, historians, poets, and literati were given leeway in writing about female attire within the context of female slaves and entertainers, which helped shed some light on the undergarments of free women. 

Thirdly, historians’ negligence in documenting the social affairs and the day-to-day activities of the medieval average Muslim, particularly their dressing manners, in contrast to the meticulous detailing of the dealings related to politics and warfare in the Islamic empire. The notion of writing about the attire of the Muslim layman (especially women) regretfully didn’t catch the medieval Muslim historian’s fancy, but the bulk of the Islamic historical corpus was rather focused on chronicling the affairs of the caliph and the ruling elite, which extended incidentally and briefly to include a line or an excerpt about a female member of those elite circles.

Regrettably, most medieval contemporary writing on women’s attire was usually silent unless a scandalous fashion trend broke some societal or religious norm that demanded public censure from a historian or a theological clergy.

Relying on observations made by non-muslim travelers and explorers about Muslim countries in medieval times to compensate for the missing knowledge is in vain, as there were little to no records of European travelers who took an interest in exploring the Islamic lands, especially during the early middle ages due to the constant wars between the Muslim and Christian nations over regional and religious dominance. And even if it exists, verifying their commentary’s impartiality and availability is tricky.

Fourthly, despite an enormous treasury of textile fragments that have survived from the Medieval Islamic periods, mainly from Egypt due to its favorable climate in preserving textiles, it still leaves a huge amount of ambiguity on what kind of garment it comprised or its function. No complete extant garments, of male or female adults, have survived from the medieval era, save for the occasional children’s tunics or caps.

The deficiency in extant garments or faithful contemporary artworks of clothing greatly hinders our knowledge about the techniques used by medieval Middle Eastern peoples to construct and sew these garments. On the contrary, a handful of extant complete garments, head-coverings, socks, and shoes have survived from medieval and pre-modern periods in Europe. They are preserved in museums and inventories around the world. These extant garments were indispensable in studying and figuring out medieval European techniques for constructing their garments and head coverings.

Fifthly, proper academic research in the field of dress history and historical garment reconstruction, starting from the post-Byzantine/Sassanid Mediterranean territories that were Arabized and Islamized beginning in the 8th century, is severely underdeveloped. Unlike Western fashions, which have a dedicated field of study that has meticulously researched and documented its history from antiquity to the medieval eras up until the twentieth century, there hasn’t been an extensive body of work that compiles the costume of the Near East since its Islamization.

There have been a few scattered books, studies, and monographs written by a couple of Western and non-western authors to chronologically document the history of Arab-Islamic dress like Yedida Stillman’s “Arab Dress: A Short History: from the Dawn of Islam to Modern Times” and “A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza” by S. D. Goiten, and “A History of Islamic court dress in the Middle East” by Patricia Baker, which were tremendous assets to my research. Most books and research materials regarding Arab costumes mainly deal with the folk clothing of contemporary Arab countries that barely date back a few centuries.

 

Despite these setbacks, the prospect of finding information on the subject at hand doesn’t seem to be all that bleak. Thanks to the collective efforts of Muslim and non-Muslim explorers, chroniclers, historiographers, clothes mentioned in the Sunnah (prophetic traditions), Arabic poetry (Jahili and Medieval), government inspection manuals (hisba), trousseau lists (qawa’im al-‘ara’is), legal and judicial litigations, literature and polite education (Adab), biographical dictionaries (tarajim), and archeological discoveries, in addition to artistic representations in illuminated manuscripts and miniatures we can gather some information and try to reconstruct the evolution of the Arab costume throughout several Islamic Empires.

Clothing in Pre-Islamic Arabia

Historiographical Arabic literature has relayed that the Arabs established several kingdoms/tribal confederations on the confines of the Arabian Peninsula. While most of the Arabian Peninsula is arid and barren, the arable lands were concentrated around the coastal areas, mainly the Southern parts, and a few patchwork of oasis settlements were scattered around.

Taking advantage of the connecting nodal cities, the Arabs established their civilizations on the major trading routes, navigating a wide web of caravan posts and maritime ports conducive to the deluge of goods and merchandise from the East to the West and vice versa.

Traces of most of these places have vanished, and the only records left are the Arabs’ oral traditions, as there are very few epigraphical and archeological records of their existence.

The oldest of such kingdoms (ca. 2000 BC-600 AD) were known by Saba’/Sheba, Ma’in, qataban, Hadramout, Awsan, Himyar [South Arabia], Qedar, Edom, Lihyan and Dadan, Hatra, Edessa, Nabatea, Kinda, Lakmids, and Ghassanids [North, West, and Central Arabia]. There were kingdoms on the peninsula’s eastern side, like Gerrha, Characene, Tylos, and Dilmun.

Historians who described the peoples and cultures of the ancient world mentioned the merits of the Arabs, the greatness of their prestige, and the rich wealth they possessed in aromatic substances such as frankincense, myrrh, and Styrax, and precious metals such as gold and silver.

However, they rarely commented on their ways of dressing and grooming habits, especially for women. Herodotus mentions that the Arabs wore the zeira, a sort of long flowing garment caught in with a belt. This most certainly is the earliest mention of that most basic Arab garment, the izar (also found in the forms azr, izara, mizar, and in Middle Arabic texts and vernaculars izar), a large sheet-like wrap worn both as a mantle and a long loincloth or waist cloth.

Herodotus’s testimony is corroborated by Strabo, writing four centuries later, who says of the Arab Nabataeans that “they go without tunics, with girdles about their loins, and with slippers on their feet.” Statues from the ancient north Hijazi kingdom of Lihyan depict the ruler as being bare-chested, wearing only the izar around the waist, just as Strabo described their northern neighbors, the Nabataeans.¹

Pliny the Elder, the most famous Roman historian of the ancient world, recounts the costume of the Arabs as follows:

“The Arabs either wear the mitra, or else go with their hair unshorn, while the beard is shaved, except upon the upper lip: some tribes, however, leave even the beard unshaved..”Pliney the Elder, book VI, chapter 32 (28. Arabia)

As for women, he did not elaborate on them, and this has been the case with many historians in antiquity as well. Finding reliable textual sources on Arab women’s historic dressing modes is challenging and is outright impossible. One of the few contemporary references that describe Arab women’s dress is by the third-century Christian theologian Tertullian, who describes in his book De virginibus velandis, the modesty of Arab women and the manner they veil themselves, and calls upon the contemporaneous women of his time to emulate them:

“Arabia’s heathen females will be your judges, who cover not only the head, but the face also, so entirely, that they are content, with one eye free, to enjoy rather half the light than to prostitute the entire face. A female would rather see than be seen.”Chapter XVII. —-An Appeal to the Married Women.

Early Islam and The Rashidun Caliphate(610 – 661 CE).

 

 

Context of the period of early Islam

The period of early Islam during the Prophet’s lifetime is mostly defined as an era of expansion and conquests. The first 4 Rashidun Caliphs or “righteously guided successors” who took the reign of the Islamic state after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, had their hands full with firmly establishing the borders of the empire by the acquisition of large territories and fending off possible attacks that may try to recapture those territories. Conquering and spreading the message of Islam inside as many lands as possible was the focal goal of the state at this point.

Following the unification of Arabia under one religion (achieved during the Prophet’s life), the Rashidun caliphs spread out and conquered neighboring lands in all directions, incrementally expanding their territories further and further. They began with the Levant in the north, Iraq, Iran in the east, and Egypt and the rest of North Africa. After the Byzantines and Sassanids were defeated, all the provinces under their rule fell under full Islamic control; thus becoming a fertile hub for the migration and settlement of Arab tribes in the urban towns, cities, and even deserts of those lands. These Arab migrants comprised not only the bulk of the invading military forces but also supplanted the pre-existing ruling elites.

Despite Arabs assuming authority in the conquered courts, the management of the established financial and bureaucratic systems was left in the hands of the local non-Muslims until the Arabs gained enough expertise to handle it properly. The early Arabs were keen on promoting the superiority of Muslim and Arab status above the non-Muslim and non-Arab natives. However, the Arab rulers of the newly conquered areas weren’t concerned with trying to convert the mass population; on the contrary, they benefitted from the levied taxes and polls upon the non-muslims, so the percentage of the converted Muslims in those regions remained significantly low compared to the non-Muslim natives’ for a considerable amount of time.

It said that Arabic wasn’t adopted on a wide scale by the Egyptians until about the 10th century. Setting the groundwork for spreading and enrooting the Muslim and Arab identities into these populations proved to be successful.

 The joint contributions made by both men and women in early Islam (especially during the Prophet’s life) to further the cause of this faith and build the Islamic empire were welcomed by both sexes. Women’s participation in public and private life was widely accepted. The biographies of women in early Islam show us that besides their given domestic role in the home as a mother and a wife, women took on many active roles in early Muslim society in all facets of life, just like their male counterparts. She was a teacher, an academic, a nurse in battle, a warrior, a merchant, and even a supervisor over the markets.

The social laxity and egalitarian spirit regarding women’s position promoted in early Islam in Mecca and Medina are to be forsaken as the Muslims expanded out of Arabia, conquering societies with strong patriarchal restrictions on women’s movement in public, such as the Sassanid Empire of Iran and the Byzantine empire of the Levant, notions of veiling and seclusion became more widespread among Muslims.

Viewed as markers of high social class, these restrictions were most feasible for families that did not need women’s labor or income. In some eras of Islamic history, women’s positions appear quite subordinate to men’s. For instance, the Abbasid period saw the disappearance of women from public records and events, as the ideal of secluding women became more fashionable for men who wanted to demonstrate their power.

Concubinage and expansive harems became the rule for political leaders, and women’s social value was viewed as lower than that of men by many in power. Women were largely excluded from religious authority, despite the Qur’anic declaration that men and women were equal in the eyes of God and the role of the female Companions in transmitting the hadith. Patriarchal values became increasingly codified in the Sharia or Islamic law and in the daily life of Muslim women.

 

Clothing in Early Islam

During the lifetime of the Prophet and the period of the first 4 caliphs (Rashidun Caliphate), the majority of the Arab Muslims wore simple and plain clothes with no particular inclination to luxury and lavishness compared to the fancy fabrics and extravagant clothes worn by the Arabs in the Jahiliyyah (pre-Islamic period). Dressing fashionably and exorbitantly was not only discouraged based on religious sentiments but also financially unattainable since the nascent Islamic state was still in its early founding stages and didn’t have anywhere near the resources and riches obtained by the succeeding Islamic dynasties. 

Also, early Muslims were keen on observing their newly revealed faith and fervently abiding by Islam’s teachings. One of those teachings is temperance, where it’s encouraged to live a moderate lifestyle and avoid ostentation and wastefulness in every aspect of life, including dress. Just like their Abrahamic predecessors, Islam emphasizes modesty for both men and women in aspects of dress and conduct and abhors nakedness.

Arab dwellers in Hejaz and Mecca weren’t a particularly skilled society in the craftsmanship of clothes and textiles, yet on a different note, they were renowned traders and merchants across the continent, ergo, they exported many of the fabrics and clothes from countries that were skilled at the said craft like their Arab neighbor, Yemen, the Byzantine Empire, the Sassanid Empire, and Egypt. Many of the garments and outer mantles donned by the prophet and his companions in early Islam were brought over from Yemen, as it was an important clothing exportation nexus for the neighboring Arab countries. Yemen was renowned for producing fine clothes and mantles called “Al-Burud Al-Yamaniyah” or Yemeni Burds, meaning striped mantles made in Yemen.

We must also take into consideration the fact that clothes in the early days of Islam were an extension of the garments worn by the Arabs even before the advent of Islam, but were slightly modified later per Islamic teachings of modesty and decorum. The clothes of the Arabs accommodated the region’s hot and dry climate, so they were usually loose and ample to allow ventilation and protection from the sun and sand.

 

There were two types of clothes worn by the Arabs: tailored and untailored clothes. Tailored clothes are clothes made from two layers of fabric stitched together to cover a specific body part. For instance, the Sirwāl (pants), qamiṣ (shirt), and Jubba (tunic) are examples of such garments. Untailored clothes are unstitched, large wrappers or mantles that wrap around and fully envelop the wearer’s body, like the Izār, Ridāʾ, and Milḥafa.

Arabs who lived within the cultural sphere of one or another of the great Perso-Romanic empires could not help but be influenced by the fashions of the higher civilizations. Draped mantles and tunics were not uncommon garments for the average Arabian dweller since Roman times. Those Arabs who inhabited the oasis towns of the Syrian desert apparently dressed in the fashion of the eastern Hellenistic world; that is, in tunics, wraps, and mantles. Also, we find statues of the Arab rulers of Hatra in Mesopotamia, which depict them wearing Parthian-style dress. Some wear a sleeved mantle and chiton, and others Persian trousers and military festoons.

The main articles of clothing in early Islam comprised an undergarment, a body shirt, an outer garment such as a tunic, and then, worn over it, a mantle or outer wrap, a head covering, and shoes. There are no visual depictions of early 7th to 9th century Arabs due to the aforementioned prohibition on imagery, yet the hadith literature is full of written descriptions of the prophet, his wives, and companions in indoor and outdoor day-to-day situations, which did include some insightful information on the types of clothing worn by a typical early Arab Muslim man or woman.

 

According to Arab sociologist and historian Ibn Khaldun, these types of loose wraps and mantles were a characterizing garment of the vestment of the Bedouin Arabs or the badū (nomads or tent dwellers), reflecting their simplistic and wandering nomadic lifestyle, whereas fitted clothes were a feature of the vestment of sedentary people or the ḥaḍar (urban dwellers), which reflected a more refined and stationary lifestyle.

It’s erroneous to assume that the Arab society consisted solely of nomads; rather, the social composition of the tribal Arab society encompassed both modes of lifestyle, nomadic and sedentary. Urban dwellers of towns and cities in Arabia had access to a wider variety of fabrics and materials since these urban cities were situated at the crossroads between two great civilizations and were a central hub for trade. These central cities contained bustling markets and caravans full of goods brought from all across the continent. Hence, textiles were brought from expert textile-producing cities in India, China, and Iran.

The Arabian urban dweller came into contact with these civilized nations and acquired their taste for splendor and sophistication in dress and adornments. Townspeople, both in Arabia and the more cosmopolitan eastern Mediterranean centers, also wore wraps. However, these were finer quality, often ornate, and were worn over fitted and refined clothing. The Bedouin dress consisted of coarse wraps that were haphazardly arranged, sometimes leaving some body parts exposed. The ḥaḍar lived in urban cities like Mecca, Hijaz, Yathrib, Yammama, and Aṭ-Ṭāʾif, whereas the badū lived in the desert and wore more of these simple body wraps.

 

A) Undergarments:

Most of the undergarments worn by the Arabs in early Islam were identical for both sexes.

 

Unisex

1- Izār إزار

A large sheet of fabric wrapped around the lower body from the waist down, resembling a sarong. It varied in length; some izārs reached beyond the knees, and some were shorter. It’s a ubiquitous garment still used to this day in the Arabian Peninsula and other regions. It is called by different names, like Lungi in the Indian subcontinent, and Sarong in Indonesia in Southeast Asia.

 

It’s also worth mentioning that the izār can refer to either an outer garment (mantle/outer wrap) or a loincloth meant as an undergarment that covers the lower body and is specifically referred to as a mi’zar. The izār comes in many colors, but white is the most commonly used, next to blue or yellow.

The izār (lower garment) and the Ridā‘ (upper garment) constitute the two-piece attire worn by men during pilgrimage (Hajj).

 

2- Sirwāl سِروال

Sirwāl is a Persian loanword from šalvâr (shalwar), meaning trousers or pants, and they mainly refer to underpants or drawers. They are a popular garment throughout the Muslim world, introduced to the Arabs by the Persians probably around the 7th century. There is no mention of the sirwāl in extant Islamic historical references in early Islam. Still, several hadiths stated that it’s forbidden to wear shirts (qamiṣ) or pants (sirwāl) or turbans (ʿImāma) or hooded cloaks (burnous) or Khuffs (shoe) while in Ihram, so based on that, it’s clear that the sirwāl was a pre-existing garment at least since the 7th century.

It’s unknown what materials it was made from or the length of the sirwāls in early Islam, but we can presume it was made from fibers suitable for the hot and dry climate, like cotton or linen.

 

3- Tubbān تُبَّان

Tubbān is probably a Persian loanword from “Tonbān.” Tonbān originally referred to boldly embroidered leather breeches worn by contes­tants in traditional wrestling. As for the Tubbān, it’s a short sirwāl or underwear that resembles briefs or boxers, hovering right below the genital area. 

‘Abd Ar-Rahman Al-Qasim narrated in an Athār (reports about the prophet’s companions and followers) about Sayyida Aisha (the prophet’s wife) that on her way to pilgrimage, while her servants were strapping her saddle, their genital areas became exposed (because they were wearing the untailored sarong), so she asked them to wear a tubbān to cover it up, even when they were in a state of ihram (consecration). (Men in a state of ihram are forbidden from wearing tailored garments like sirwāl or qamiṣ). Arabic historical text rarely mentions the tubbān as a common article of female clothing, but it was referenced sporadically as a garment worn by men involved in menial labor.

 

Women

 

1- Dirʿ دِرْع

It’s a long-sleeved undershirt like a chemise. Arabic dictionaries also define it as a married woman’s indoor lounging gown.  

 

 

 

1. Stillman, N. (08 Jun. 2022). Arab Dress, A Short History. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004491625 ↩︎