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Medieval · Middle East & North Africa · 500 - 1500 CE
How people dressed across the medieval Islamic world — from Abbasid Baghdad and Fatimid Cairo to Seljuq and Mongol Persia — with luxurious tiraz textiles, robes of honor, silk and cotton, and the dress laws that marked rank and religion.
By Dan Schnau · Last updated
Medieval Middle Eastern clothing spans a thousand years, from the Arab conquests of the seventh century to the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and the Timurid rulers of Iran around 1500. Islamic courts inherited the luxury dress of Byzantium and Sasanian Persia and made textiles one of their great arts.8,9 The same layered wardrobe recurs throughout — shirt, trousers, robe or coat, and headdress — but its cut, color, and ornament announced rank, loyalty, and faith.
Long shirts, trousers, robes, and headwear recur in descriptions of medieval Middle Eastern dress, with differences between regions and social groups.16,1,10 This guide uses “medieval Islamic clothing” as a broad heading and distinguishes particular communities and periods below.
| Part of the wardrobe | Examples and differences |
|---|---|
| Shirts and trousers | The qamis was a long shirt; sirwal were tailored drawers. A woman's basic wardrobe in Mamluk Egypt included drawers, a qamis, and a gown.16,1 |
| Robes and coats | Persian and Seljuq dress included caftans; luxurious robes of honor marked court favor.10,2 |
| Headwear and outdoor coverings | Men commonly wore turbans over caps. Women's veils and wraps varied by place and social class.16,1 |
| Work clothes | Laborers wore fewer layers and shorter tunics; some occupations required much lighter dress.13 |
For a narrower period, start with early Islamic Arab clothing or Islamic Golden Age clothing. For regional differences, see Persian dress below.
The following objects and records provide evidence for clothing in this period:
Some pieces survived far from home: a silk tiraz woven around 1025 for a ruler of Diyarbakr, from a tunic probably made in Baghdad, was found in the tomb of Saint Ambrose in Milan.6
The rise of Islam created a vast cultural zone stretching from Spain to the borders of China, and with it came one of history's great textile traditions. Tiraz — fabrics bearing embroidered, woven, or occasionally painted inscription bands, often with the name of the ruling caliph — served as both luxury goods and instruments of political authority.2,8 Produced in state-controlled workshops called dar al-tiraz, these textiles were given as robes of honor (khil'a) to officials and foreign dignitaries, making clothing a direct expression of caliphal power.8,7,9 The khil'a ceremony became an important ritual of Islamic court life, more widespread under the Abbasids, with the quality of the garments bestowed reflecting the recipient's standing — the Seljuqs had at least seven grades of robes.9 For a closer look at Abbasid black, the tiraz workshops, and robes of honor from 750 to 1258, see Islamic Golden Age clothing.
One of the oldest surviving tiraz names an Umayyad caliph Marwan (either Marwan I or Marwan II, 684–750) and was made "in the tiraz of Ifriqiya," modern Tunisia: a red silk imitating Byzantine designs, embroidered in yellow silk and dyed with madder, kermes, indigo, and Persian berries.3,5 By the Fatimid period in Egypt, tiraz was also a significant source of revenue for the caliphs; a linen tiraz of 981 names the caliph al-Aziz and his vizier Ibn Killis.2,7
The conquests put thriving workshops of the former Byzantine provinces, such as Alexandria, Tyre, and Antioch, into Arab hands, and new capitals such as Fustat, Kairouan, and Cairo became centers of textile production; lampas weaving, which appeared in Baghdad in the eleventh century, spread to Syria, Egypt, and Spain.8 Damask (named for Damascus) and muslin (named for Mosul) entered European languages as testaments to the region's prestige.27,28 The region's textiles, with their stylized, endlessly repeated motifs, had much in common with Islamic architectural decoration.8
The Arab conquerors took over lands with sophisticated court dress and largely adopted it. Umayyad-period wall paintings, stucco, and silver show a Sasanian-style outfit: a close-fitting tunic with a jeweled belt, and for men stiff decorated caftans over full trousers. Women also wore full trousers, sometimes with turbans whose cloth could serve as a veil.10 For the izar and rida', early rules on silk and veiling, and the dress of the Umayyad desert palaces, see early Islamic Arab clothing.
When the Abbasids took power in the mid-eighth century, they made black their dynastic color. The caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–775) is usually credited with requiring court officials to wear black robes on ceremonial occasions, and the caliph himself wore black with a tall cap, the qalansuwa.13,12 Wearing white, red, or green instead was a political statement: green was the color of the Alids, and the caliph al-Ma'mun adopted it when he named the Alid imam Ali al-Rida as his heir.12 The dye was not always fast: a tenth-century chamberlain recalled a sweating official wiping black dye from his turban off his face.13
Persian officials set the tone for Abbasid fashion, and the caftan, a robe buttoned down the front, spread across the Arab world.13 Murals from the palace city of Samarra show men in heavy ornamented caftans with short, tight sleeves over long-sleeved tunics and trousers gathered at the ankle.10 The caliph al-Mu'tasim wore a turban over a soft cap like the Persian kings, and the public copied it as the mu'tasimi.13
The writer al-Washsha (d. 936) set out the rules of elegance: no clashing colors or saffron, no new garments with washed ones, and for women no black, green, pink, or red unless the fabric was naturally that color, like red silk.13 Modern summaries disagree on what he said about scent: one has him approving musk or rosewater for men's clothes but never ambergris, the perfume of slave girls; another says he rejected garments scented with musk and ambergris as fit only for dancing and serving girls.13,10
Fatimid (909–1171) and Ayyubid Egypt are unusually well documented thanks to the Cairo Geniza. Its trousseau lists, mostly from 969–1250, record the complete wardrobe of a bride, and the historian Yedida Stillman showed that they illuminate Muslim women's dress too.14 One merchant's letter mentions "my cotton robe, which I used to wear above my iridescent robe," left behind with papers in its pocket.15
Under the Mamluk sultans (1250–1517) the tiraz system gradually vanished, though court dress stayed lavish.2,20 Emblems such as cups, swords, and eagles, appliquéd, embroidered, or woven onto textiles, identified the holders of particular offices, and a fourteenth-century silk cap is woven with "Glory to our lord Sultan al-Malik al-Nasir."4,20
In Islamic Spain, the luxury silk industry centered on Almería.8 According to the historian al-Maqqari, when the musician Ziryab arrived in Córdoba from Iraq in 821, the people copied his middle-parted hairstyle, and he taught them to whiten their linen with salt.22
Persian clothing in the first six centuries of Islam was strikingly conservative, built on the caftan.10 The Seljuq Turks (1038–1194) added Central Asian touches: men wore a stiff decorated caftan, the qaba', closing diagonally from right to left, with high boots and fur-trimmed conical caps or a tall qalansuwa. Women wore similar caftans or wide-sleeved robes over wide trousers, with jeweled diadems. Kashan ceramics show courtiers in robes patterned with dots, scrolls, and palmettes.10,18
Under the Mongol Ilkhanids, the qaba' became a long sashed coat, often fastened under the right arm, worn over trousers tucked into boots, with feathered bonnets, brimmed hats, or turbans.11 Mongol women of rank wore the boghtaq, a tall headdress of felt and willow covered with ornaments.11 "Cloths of gold" — silks heavy with gold thread — were woven primarily for the official costumes of the Mongol court.19
Timurid coats of the fifteenth century were plainer and sometimes buttoned down the front. The ambassador Ruy González de Clavijo saw Timur in 1404 in a cloak of plain silk and a tall white hat crowned with a balas ruby.11
The basic structure of medieval Middle Eastern dress consisted of layered garments. Men and women alike wore a long shirt, the qamis, and over it a variety of robes, usually tunics or wraps, with a mantle over everything in public; only the very poor owned a single wrap or tunic.16 The headdress was always of exceptional importance, and for men that meant the turban, usually wound over a skull cap.16,1 In Mamluk Egypt one man spent two dinars on his robes and four on his turban,1 and turban color could mark religion: Christians and Jews were ordered into blue and yellow turbans.25 Following the example of the Prophet, Muslims were expected to wear long, flowing garments, and robes, cloaks, turbans, and shawls lent their wearers dignity.8
Women's dress varied considerably by region and social class. Persian influence had introduced the sirwal, tailored drawers worn by women in particular, and in Mamluk Egypt a woman's basic wardrobe was drawers, a qamis, and a gown, with a hair veil and scarf.16,1 Veiling practices ranged from the light head covering worn in daily life to the large outdoor wrap and separate face veil, such as the burqu', worn by many urban women in public.1 Surviving fragments show the decorated cloth in circulation: cottons patterned by ikat dyeing, probably brought from India, at Nahal 'Omer, a village on the trade route between Petra and Gaza, and Indian block-printed cottons in Egypt.26,16 Fine garments reached Abbasid Baghdad from across the Muslim world and beyond: from India came the futa, a long cloth worn as a loincloth, an apron, or headgear, and from China oilcloth rain cloaks.16
Clothing was expensive: in ninth-century Iraq a fine man's outfit cost five to thirty dinars, when a skilled laborer earned half a dinar to a dinar and a half a month.13 Laborers wore wool, fewer layers, and knee-length tunics; sailors, fishmongers, and bathhouse attendants worked in briefs.13 Seljuq-era paintings show butchers and bakers in loose white trousers and foot soldiers in wrapped leggings and short jerkins.10
Linen remained important in Egypt, where fine linen and silk were the most precious textiles of the Fatimid period, and cotton and silk spread westward across the Islamic world.16,8 Besides damask and muslin, the English word "tabby" comes, through French, from Arabic 'attabi, a cloth made in the 'Attabiyah quarter of Baghdad.29,13 For linen in pharaonic Egypt, see ancient Egyptian clothing.
Fustat's rubbish mounds show how far trade reached. The Newberry Collection in Oxford holds more than 1,200 printed textiles collected in Egypt, most of them Indian block-printed cottons; radiocarbon dates on a sample of them run from about 1010 to the seventeenth century.16 Many are stitched with flax, common in Egypt but rarely used in India, so the cloth arrived uncut and was sewn into clothes locally; one was cut down into a child's tunic, and many are mended.16 Mamluk-era printers adopted the technique, block-printing cotton with designs such as rows of fish.21
Medieval Islamic dress law was chiefly about who could look like whom. The rules known as ghiyar required Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslim subjects (dhimmis) to wear distinguishing marks.24 In the Pact of Umar, a text of uncertain date, they promise not to imitate Muslims' "garments, the qalansuwa, the turban, footwear, or the parting of the hair," and to bind the zunnar, a belt, round their waists.23 The caliph Umar II (717–720) seems to have been the first to order such marks; al-Mutawakkil (847–861) reissued them, requiring yellow shawl-like head cloths called taylasan.24,13 Enforcement varied from reign to reign, and in Mamluk Egypt a decree of 1301 ordered Christians into blue turbans, Jews yellow, and Samaritans red.25
Clothing also encoded loyalty. Abbasid dignitaries wore black to show support for the dynasty, and robes of honor, their borders often embroidered with Qur'anic inscriptions, echoed the court dress of Byzantium and Sasanian Persia.12,9 Mamluk elites still gifted lavish garments as symbols of honor.20 The Byzantine side of that inheritance is covered in Byzantine clothing.
"Fustian is named after Fustat." This is often repeated, but it is only one proposed origin; the word may instead come from Latin fustis, "stick," translating a Greek phrase for cotton, "linen of wood."30
"Ziryab invented the fashion seasons." The stories of Ziryab's influence on Andalusian fashion come from al-Maqqari, who was born around 1578, more than seven centuries after Ziryab reached Córdoba.22
"Medieval Islamic dress was purely Arab and never changed." The caftan came into the Arab world through Persian influence, the Seljuqs brought Central Asian boots and caps, and the Mongols brought Chinese motifs such as the cloud collar.13,10,11
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