Palestine’s Weavers and the Museum
Image credit: Yasmeen Mjalli
The life of an art historian is not glamorous. Other Muslims think it is, when I tell them I’m researching the history of the Qur’an. They might imagine lots of days spent pouring over beautiful Qur’an manuscripts in dark rooms, with some sort of heavenly light illuminating me and the manuscript; in that moment, I am spiritually activated. But days spent with actual manuscripts are few and far between. In reality, it’s a lot of scrolling through online collections pages of museums and libraries. Sometimes at a cafe, sometimes at home on my sofa. If I’m spiritually activated, it’s the righteous anger that wells up within me against museums and rare books libraries as I try to gather fragments of information for my research.
You learn a lot about museums being an art historian. I’ve learned how museums organize information, since most of my time is spent scrolling through collections. Theoretically, the museum catalog, with details on every piece in the collection, is available for all. You just need to click ‘collections’ at the top of a museum’s online home page. But the same amount of attention and care is not paid to every item in a museum’s collection. As I look for Qur’ans to bulk up my research, I wade through megabytes of pixelated images and incorrect descriptions. Sometimes, there isn’t any information on a given item in a museum collection: just a title like ‘manuscript,’ with a vague guess at what century it was made and no photo whatsoever. This is why it does not make sense that, at the end of a long day of research looking at digital images of Qur’an manuscripts, I flip open my tablet, find my way back to the British Museum’s collections site and type in ‘Palestine’.
I do this all the time, even though I made a conscious choice not to study my own culture. I already had the PhD on Palestine, I told myself, by virtue of being Palestinian. By being a survivor of the occupation, by having to live with the ongoing 75+ year genocide of my people. When I went to my parents for advice, they agreed it was silly to ask a North American university for permission to study Palestinian history, but also pointed out it was equally foolish to do it for Islamic art. They knew to suspect a field of study that professed to understand Islam, but didn’t know Muslims. Their wisdom is what’s getting me through graduate school.
As I look through the results for ‘Palestine’ in the museum catalog, I am not just looking for anything relating to Palestine. I already know that the big splashy encyclopedic museums in the US, Canada, and Europe have a certain way of looking at Palestine. To be ‘encyclopedic’ is an attempt to portray the entire world. That’s why these museums exist. Creating these museums is not a charitable act. Rather, elites build them to reinforce their own ideas, to make them feel certain in their beliefs that they are better than the rest of us. When it comes to Palestine, as museum-goers walk through the various galleries on their visit, what they see in mainstream media is reinforced. In museums, Palestinians are either non-existent or, on the rare occasion you do see representation of Palestine, Palestinians are either extinct or to be pitied. However, that pity also communicates that museums believe Palestinians themselves are to blame for their own awful ‘situation’.
Looking through the online catalog is very much an exercise in looking through the museum’s eyes. But today, I am on a mission. I am looking for something specific. On the British Museum’s website, I scroll past Roman amphoras and 19th century jewelry. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see a sleeve, with particular stripes. It is a thobe in the textile woven in the Palestinian town of al-Majdal ‘Asqalaan. This is what I am looking for.
The thobe on my screen is in a museum because museums claim they save history for future generations. We are open to all, they claim (but many charge for tickets). But few people know these databases, full of information and photographs, exist. Museums don’t advertise their online catalogues. Fewer people know they can request to see the collection items in person at a museum. Barrier after barrier: Communities can’t have access to their own pasts. But no matter. Palestinians don’t need museums. Palestinians preserved the weaving traditions of al-Majdal ‘Asqalaan after it was ethnically cleansed in 1948, not museums. In spite of museums, they carried the art of weaving in their muscles and neurons, even when they could not weave, waiting until the moment they could. They carry them now. And as bombs rain down on Gaza today, it is both Palestinian lives and Palestinian culture that the Zionist entity is trying to destroy.
Because people carry culture, not museums.
I take a break, leaving behind the resplendent blue, pink and green thobe to make a cup of tea. As I do, I think about the thobe. This is where my time with the manuscripts is useful: I’ve learned how to research any piece of art in a museum. Figuring out how something got to the museum is part of the process. Some art historians try not to make assumptions about where a piece was based on the slivers of information available in the catalog. But I dream up the past lives for the manuscripts and Majdalawi thobes I find online in museums. I assume the worst, making guesses based on dates and who gave the piece to the museum.
I drop a spoon into my cup and stir, unsettling the black tea grounds.
My interest in al-Majdal’s textiles began purely because I liked the stripes. Many of the striped fabrics I saw in Palestinian fashion history were made in Syria. So learning about a homegrown Palestinian striped fabric stirred something inside of me. I dug into art catalogs. Slowly, I learned the story of al-Majdal Asqalaan’s weavers, albeit backwards with the revival of Majdalawi weaving. The story goes that in the 1980s and 1990s, the children of weavers from the destroyed Palestinian town of al-Majdal revived the tradition of this distinctive, striped brightly colored textile, which was mostly used for thobes. The weavers’ parents had been displaced when Zionist militias destroyed al-Majdal, which was close to the Mediterranean coast and was in the Ottoman district of Gaza before the 1920s. Some were deported to Jordan and others were forced to what is now the Gaza Strip. Before 1948, the Nakba, al-Majdal was home to hundreds of looms and the textile was used across coastal Palestine. Today, none of al-Majdal’s original Palestinian inhabitants or their descendants live there. Shelagh Weir mentions in Palestinian Costume that many of the displaced weavers continued to rely on weaving as a source of income. However, they didn’t weave Majdalawi fabric, but rather, simpler, more affordable textiles that Gaza’s population needed.
The violence of 1948, 1967 and even the British Mandate is visible in the online museum catalog, especially the ‘provenance’ line in individual entries. Provenance is an academic term meaning the history of ownership. Often, it’ll track who sold or gave a piece to a museum and the owners before that, ideally to the maker itself. But, the provenance line in the case of Palestinian clothing is very thin. Often, just the person who gave it to the museum is listed under ‘provenance’. So I take that line and begin to brainstorm.
It is very rare for a thobe or any Palestinian historical clothing to be given to a museum by a Palestinian. I only know of one case. Overwhelmingly, Palestinian thobes, jillayehs, ghudfehs, and more, were given to museums by white Europeans or Euro-Americans. Many of the cases date to the British colonial period (1920-1948), like the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s item 45.113. The other half came to museums in the 1960s, sometimes right after the 1967 Naksa. Many are ‘purchased in Jerusalem.’ My blood runs cold when I see these fragments of information, which is why I think, watching my tea get redder and redder, that I need a snack. I start looking in the kitchen cabinets.
Palestinian textiles are dragged along a dark, violent path to museums. The pieces acquired during the British occupation of Palestine come from times of scarcity and need. If a Palestinian is parting with a heavily embroidered piece, it is because they have no other choice. During the British Mandate, especially during the Second World War, the British diverted away resources from Palestinians: Sherene Seikaly documents some of this in Men of Capital. The same collecting logic applies for anything acquired by a museum after 1948: Palestinian textile collector Widad Kawar has stories of building her collection off of refugees selling them in Amman.
The darkest speculation I make, one that’s extremely likely, is that when Palestinians were fleeing the Nakba, when Zionist militia attacks, they left things behind, which were seized, appropriated, sold or even destroyed. There are documented incidents about how books were taken, weeded through and added to the collection of the National Library of Israel. Many Palestinians’ possessions were and continue to be sold in Israeli ‘thrift’ shops. Then there’s the willful destruction of Palestinian heritage in the decades after the Nakba and Naksa: the Palestine Film Unit of the Palestine Liberation Organization was looted in 1982 by the Israeli army. With Gaza today, there’s almost too many things destroyed to count and when the human toll is greater, it feels cheap to count the losses of heritage.
As I sift through the thin information in the museum catalog, I don’t see any evidence of the people who made these thobes. Thobes are embroidered by their wearers or someone in their community. But the textiles are made by weavers and sold to the embroiderers.
I wonder if the weavers who revived Majdalawi weaving got to study these textiles. My imagination begins to run and somewhere in Gaza, I see a parent teaching their child to weave. The weavers carried weaving with them for so long and now, they were bringing it back into the world on memory alone. I’ve heard of weavers building their own collections of Majdalawi textiles, for study. They gave these thobes a good home and used them to weave. Are the thobes beneath the rubble now? We know one weaver has been killed since the genocide began on October 7th. I try to think of other things.
The weavers almost definitely did not study the collections of American and European museums. The Zionist entity blockaded Gaza and even before the blockade, they made travel hard, just like museums make collections access difficult.
I wonder if the weavers would even care that the thobes were in museums.
Over the course of my short career, I have learned that asking museums for more information is a waste of time. In the cupboard, I find a package of tea biscuits my mother thoughtfully left for me the last time she visited. I stuff a whole cookie into my mouth and take a few back to my tablet.
While most of my work is with digital collections, I try to see every Qur’an manuscript I’m working with at least once in person. So I go on research trips, to museums big and small. My senses are normally on high alert. I am trying to understand how the institution functions, taking mental notes in my brain. While each museum is distinct, they’re also very much the same. On my last research trip, I was finishing up looking at Qur’an manuscripts when I politely asked the curator hosting me if I could see any documents they had. “For the Kor-raaaaans?” The curator scrunched up their nose. “ It is museum policy not to let people see them.”
I nodded politely and continued to tuck my tablet and notebooks into my tote. I could get another question in before I leave. Maybe it was time to bring up Palestine.
“I have a side project,” I paused. “It’s on Palestinian textiles. I’ve seen some of your collection online. It’s very impressive, lots of it collected in the early 20th century.” I smiled widely and made my eyes bigger than they already are, trying to make myself look like a baby deer. I was trying to wordlessly say I am complementing your museum. Give me more access, please. “I would love to come back and see them one day.”
The curator frowned. “I don’t think we do actually, sorry.” They began heading back to the door of the office, wordlessly saying that I am done here.
But I do my homework: I saw the thobes and jillayehs online. I typed in different iterations of ‘Palestine’ and ‘Gaza’ into the museum catalog until results popped up. There aren’t any photos in the catalog but I can sense there’s a thobe with Majdalawi textile in the collection.
On this particular research trip, I stayed with my aunt; she doesn’t live far from the museum. After we cleared the dinner plates, I mentioned the curator to her. My aunt was not interested in the dismissiveness of white Islamic art historians towards people like me. Along with my parents, she enjoys reminding me I have put myself in this situation.
My aunt is also one of the few Muslims I know who finds my work with Qur’ans uninteresting. But my mention of thobes has got her hooked.
“So where are the thobes in the museum? Are they hanging in a closet?”
I’ve seen museums’ textile storage when heading to see manuscripts. Everything is cold, often hard metal or plastic or big cardboard boxes in freezing rooms with no light. I’ve seen some textiles hanging in closets, also hard metal. I then told her about the boxes and drawers for manuscripts. The whole point of all this storage is to extend the life of everything in a museum as much as they possibly can. It is more like seeing an insect suspended in formaldehyde than a dress hanging in a closet.
My aunt’s eyes were alert. I could tell she was listening. She was quiet for a while, then she asked if she could see the thobes. I pulled out my laptop and I began the same repetitive motion of scrolling through online museum catalogs.
I winced as we looked at them. I’m embarrassed at how awkwardly the thobes are posed. Sometimes, they’re in the shape of a T –with the arms straight out from the shoulder– and others, they’re on mannequins without heads. I shrank into the sofa and a gap grew between my aunt and me.
My aunt didn’t linger on any single dress. She kept asking to see the next and then the next. After about ten minutes, she asked if I wanted a snack or something before she turned in.
“That’s it? You don’t want to see anymore?”
“No. it’s making me a little sad.” She blew air out of her mouth. “Thobes are not like a guccipucci dress. They don’t need fancy boxes. They are made well, to last for many years. And then they die. They deserve that.”
She didn’t wait for a response. She went to the kitchen and cut an apple into segments. Then she grabbed a lemon from the same fruit bowl, cut it in half, and squeezed lemon juice on the apple segments. The lemon halves went into a cup, which she covered with boiling water. She handed me the plate of fruit and took the cup to bed.
I come back to my laptop with the biscuits. After a few minutes of staring at the same thobe, I slam my laptop shut. I don’t return to al-Majdal for a few days. This time, I don’t look for thobes. I don’t think I can stand any more headless mannequins today. Not when the rest of my day is spent watching bodies pile high in Gaza.
I go looking for al-Majdal itself.
My first stop is the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive. Their home page has a glorious photo of Palestinians protesting under our flag, but my hopes are dashed when I type al-Majdal into their search engine in Arabic and then in English. All I’m getting is photos of what remains of the city the Zionist entity built on top of al-Majdal Asqalaan.
I huff and go to an online archive I like significantly less: The Library of Congress. I don’t like it for the simple reason that their many photos of Palestine were taken either by settlers or foreign travelers. They’re often forced or posed. The captions also haven’t been changed for a decade. When I type in ‘al-Majdal’, the first thing I see is a photo captioned “Primitive weaving.” I ignore it: I won’t let it hurt me. I’m happy to see Palestinians alive and well, albeit in black and white.
These are my people.
I am kidding myself when I say I came to al-Majdal’s weavers because of the stripes. I really came because of the Palestinians who brought Majdalawi weaving back to life, without the help of any American or European museums. These institutions don’t preserve art and culture: people do that work. And they do it without museums. They do it with their hands and minds. They do it with each other.
It’s not just about weaving. We cannot fall into the trap of believing that just because something is beautiful, it needs to be preserved; this is the operating logic of museums and it has infiltrated our thinking. Palestinian culture is much more than just food, art, textiles or even the precious little things like shared facial expressions. It’s everything. We all carry some part of it with us. We need all of the culture, not just fragments. And genocide understands this: it aims at destroying totality. Maybe that was what my parents were trying to tell me when I fought with them about a PhD in Islamic art.
I save the photos in a doc file and make a note that I need to start organizing the museums’ thobes into a spreadsheet. Maybe my part in all this is to delve into al-Majdal. Maybe it isn’t.
I’ll figure it out. I close my laptop and go to sleep. That night, I dream of thobes.
Mangal Media is supported entirely by readers like you! If you have enjoyed this content and would like to see more of it, please visit our Patreon page to browse our pledge options and rewards.
