The tarboosh is a felt men’s hat commonly worn by Muslim men, with a flat top and no rim. It has a silken tassel and is often red. The hat has been popular for 200 years and was mandatory in Turkey until 1925. It was also part of the Egyptian military uniform and caused a diplomatic incident in 1932.
A tarboosh is a men’s hat that is usually made of felt. It has a flat top, with no rim, and fits snugly against the head. It is commonly worn by Muslim men, either alone or under a turban. The tarboosh also often has a silken tassel attached to the top. Red is the most common color for this hat.
Derived from the Persian word sarpush, meaning ‘headdress’, the tarboosh is also known as a tarbush. It has also been called fez and checheya. The fez is a hat originally produced only in Fez, Morocco, and is slightly smaller than a tarboosh. Regardless of the name, all hats of this type have a similar truncated cone shape, tapering as they extend upward from the head.
This hat has been popular in various nations for the past 200 years. In Palestine, two different types of this headdress were often seen, the maghribi tarbush and the istambuli tarbush. The first type was made of a soft material and had a rounded shape. In contrast, the second type was straight-sided and rigid. The softer commoners were worn by commoners and the stiffer versions were worn by men of power.
Starting in Turkey in the early 17th century, the tarboosh was a mandatory item of formal dress for men. This changed in 1925, when Young Turk leader Kemal Atatürk banned the hat in an effort to make Turkish fashion more Western. The edict from him was not taken well, resulting in riots.
The tarboosh was also used as part of the Egyptian military uniform, under the rule of Mohamed Ali, who ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1848. Two tarbooshes per year were issued to soldiers. Initially, all of these hats had to be imported, but Ali commissioned a factory that began producing Egyptian-made tarbooshes in 1825. In time, the tarboosh became the headdress of all members of the government, but in 1952 the Republican government of Egypt withdrew the official head wear requirement.
On October 29, 1932, this hat almost caused a serious diplomatic rift between these two countries. Egypt’s diplomatic envoy to Turkey, Abdel Malek Hamza Bey, arrived at a Republican Day celebration wearing his tarboosh, only to be told by Turkish officials that he should remove it because his presence would offend Atatürk. Bey refused and left the celebration. Although the Turkish leader apologized for the incident, the official position of the Turkish government was that an apology had not been necessary.
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