What Is a Keffiyeh? A Plain Guide to the Square Scarf

A keffiyeh is a square woven scarf, worn on the head, around the neck or over the shoulders. Ours are 110 cm on the side for everyday wear and 131 cm for prayer and shoulder coverage. That is the whole object: cloth, cut square, hemmed, with a fringe on two edges.

The short answer

The word describes a garment and a shape more than a specific weave. A keffiyeh is square, it is worn as headwear or neckwear, and it is usually cotton in a plain or patterned weave. Traditional examples carry a woven check, a fishnet pattern or a bordered design; modern ones carry prints, camouflage or nothing at all. If a piece of cloth is square, worn on the head or neck, and comes from the Levant or the Gulf, someone will call it a keffiyeh.

The names it goes by

The same object is named differently depending on where you are standing. Keffiyeh is the Levantine word, ghutrah and shemagh are Gulf and wider-Arabian words, hatta turns up in Egypt and Sudan, and French speakers say keffieh or chafiye. They are not four different scarves to buy. They are four habits of naming one.

The differences that do exist are in weight, size and pattern rather than in the noun: a desert shemagh tends to be thicker and larger, a light summer keffiyeh thinner, and a prayer version larger and plainer. We wrote a full comparison in keffiyeh vs shemagh vs ghutrah if the naming is the part you are stuck on.

How one is made

Four edges, two of them fringed. The cloth is woven flat, cut square, then the cut edges are hemmed and the two selvedge edges are left to fringe. On our cotton keffiyehs the fringe is twisted short so it survives washing; on lighter polyester it is cut shorter again so it does not tangle.

The pattern, when there is one, is woven in rather than printed on the traditional styles, which is why the reverse of the cloth looks almost like the front. On printed styles the reverse is paler. Neither is better; they fail differently. A woven check hides a crease, a print shows one, and a print is what makes a photograph a photograph rather than a scan.

What size it is

Ours are 110 × 110 cm for the everyday square, 131 × 131 cm for prayer scarves and the cashmere blend, and a small number of styles are cut as 190 × 90 cm rectangles. The 110 cm square is the size that ties without bulk and the one most people mean by the word. The 131 cm square drapes further down the chest and covers the shoulders, which is why it is the prayer size. The rectangles are a different garment in practice: they wrap twice and knot, and they will not hold a head wrap the way a square will.

The numbers matter more than the label, so the keffiyeh size guide walks through what each one does in wear.

Which fibre to choose

Cotton is the default: it takes a woven pattern crisply, it softens with washing, and it grips itself when you tie it. Polyester is lighter, dries faster, holds colour without fading and packs smaller. A poly-cotton net is the open-weave version made for heat and dust. A cashmere blend is the winter shawl: same square, warmer cloth, softer hand.

If you are choosing for the first time, match the fibre to the weather rather than to the photograph. Polyester vs cotton keffiyeh sets the two side by side on weight, drying time, fading and price, and the cotton keffiyeh and polyester keffiyeh ranges are both 110 cm squares if you want to compare in the hand.

What it is not

It is not a prayer rug, and it is not a towel. Both comparisons come up often enough to be worth answering plainly: a prayer rug is a floor covering with a different construction entirely, and a towel is looped pile, which a flat-woven scarf is not. Guide five, prayer scarf vs prayer rug, covers that in detail.

It is also not a costume. The keffiyeh is ordinary clothing in much of the world and a national symbol to many Palestinians, and the two facts sit together. Wearing a keffiyeh respectfully is our attempt to say something useful about that without telling anyone what to think.

Where to start

If you want one scarf and no fuss, take a 110 cm cotton keffiyeh in a colour you will actually wear — the plain black cotton keffiyeh is the one that suits almost any coat. If you want it for heat, take the net or the polyester, like the desert sand net shemagh. If you want it for prayer, take the 131 cm. If you want to see everything at once, the full catalogue of keffiyehs and prayer scarves is one page, and you can always ask us which weave suits where you live.

Shop the styles in this guide: Black & Khaki cotton keffiyeh in traditional weave, 110 × 110 cm, White & Green polyester keffiyeh, palestinian, 110 × 110 cm and Tan poly-cotton net shemagh in open-weave, 131 × 131 cm.