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• 1 2020-10-10T16:53:18+00:00 Robe of Honor from the Emir Faisal 36 plain 2021-02-08T15:45:13+00:00

  Title/Subject: Man’s Arab garments
  Date: ca. 1919
  Type: regional dress
  Components: kafton, kofia, ekal, giba 
  Medium: cotton, silk
  Collection: Henry Churchill King Presidential Papers (RG 2/6)

  Just after the First World War in 1919, President Woodrow Wilson appointed Oberlin College's President Henry Churchill King (seated left), along with businessman Charles R. Crane (seated right), to lead a delegation (King-Crane Commission) to the former Ottoman territories, to meet with local leaders and receive their petitions for self-determination. The petitions and the Commission’s report were presented at the Paris Peace Conference (1919-20).
  
  At the end of Ramadan on Friday, June 28, 1919, the Emir Faisal (Faisal bin Hussein), son of the Grand Sharif of Mecca, held a formal dinner for Commission members at his home on the lower slope of the mountains northwest of Damascus. Faisal provided his western guests with traditional garments to wear to the feast. To Henry Churchill King he gave a "Robe of Honor," a fine white silk robe (kafton) with an abstract design in gold, commonly referred to as cloth of gold. King wore this with a white silk kofia as head covering, secured with a circlet (ekal) of brown yarn.*
  
  Another set of garments given to King includes a blue silk kafton with gold-threaded embellishment, worn with a tasseled olive-brown kofia and an underdress (giba) of pin-striped cotton. Both sets of garments were given to Oberlin College by Ernestine Evans King, Oberlin College class of 1938 and daughter of H. C. King.
  
  In 2011-12, the College Archives had the garments treated by a textiles specialist of the Intermuseum Conservation Association (ICA). After treatment the garments were mounted on mannequins with reference to a 1919 photograph of the Emir Faisal and photographed by John Seyfried of ICA (shown here).
  
  Henry Churchill King's Presidential Papers in the Archives include extensive documentation of the Commission's work, in documents, maps, petitions and photographs. The King-Crane Commission was the subject of a grant-funded project in which the Oberlin College Archives, a faculty member and two students digitized and contextualized Commission materials from H. C. King's presidential papers and other repositories. Commission members other than College President King had kept materials from their work in the Middle East and gifted them to other archives. The King-Crane Commission digital project brought these materials together for the first time.
  
  In the digital collection one can find the menu for Faisal's feast from the Donald Brodie Collection at the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. The feast is described by at least two Commission members, quoted in Harry N. Howard’s The King-Crane Commission: An American Inquiry in the Middle East.

  *Terminology used to describe the costume components was provided by Ernestine Evans King, August 5, 1998, as identified by Dr. Omar Z. Ghobashy, information officer with the United Arab Republic Consulate General in New York in November 1960. 

  Sources
       Harry N. Howard, The King-Crane Commission: An American Inquiry in the Middle East (Beirut, 1963). 
       King-Crane Commission Digital Collection.
  
  Related Collections
       Henry Churchill King Presidential Papers (RG 2/6)
       Near East Relief Digital Collection