How to tell Arabs apart?
Westerners often think all Arabs look the same. Arabs can in fact tell each other apart. But how?
To the untrained Western eye, all Arabs might look alike. In fact, Arabs themselves can tell each other apart from a simple glance. Here is a short guide to how you can also do the same.
On their heads, Arabs wear a headdress, a kuffiyeh. It can be plain white, in which case it is called a ghitra, or patterned (red or black are the most common pattern colours), in which case it is a shmagh.
On their body, Gulf Arabs wear a thawb, a long single piece dress. This is white in summer, to protect against the heat, but can be beige, grey and even blue in winter. In Kuwait the thawb is called a dishdasha, and in the United Arab Emirates it is a kandoura. Yet if you observe carefully, they are not exactly the same. You can tell apart Gulf Arabs from the design of their thawbs and the way they wear their kuffiyeh.
Remembering these styles will help you tell Gulf Arabs apart. Since what Westerners call an Arab costume originates from the Arabian Peninsula, the further you are from there in the Arab world, the less likely you are to encounter this outfit. Egyptians and Lebanese city dwellers, for instance, mostly wear Western style clothes. In rural Egypt you will find a similar man’s dress, worn with a typical turban. Egyptians call this outfit a gelabbiyah.
Moroccans wear their own loose fitting hooded full bodied outfit, the djellaba, usually worn with a fez (felt hat).
