Declining Fortune of Karzai's Hat

[saif]

KABUL, Afghanistan — It once attracted the admiration of trendsetters in the West, the jests of comedians at home and abroad, and the somewhat impotent ire of animal rights advocates.

Hamid Karzai’s hat, while still firmly on the Afghan president’s head whenever he appears in public, is no longer quite the symbol it once was.

Known as a karakul hat, and made of the pelt of fetal or newborn lambs of the karakul breed of sheep, traditionally it was something worn by Tajiks and Uzbeks from northern Afghanistan. When Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun from the turban-wearing south, took office in 2002, the karakul hat was part of his attempt to devise a wardrobe that was Afghan rather than ethnic or regional.

It was a move widely praised at the time, in Afghanistan and abroad. The American designer Tom Ford called the Afghan president “the chicest man on the planet.” Afghans looking for national symbols after decades of ethnic strife inspired a brisk trade in the hats, made of lambskins from Mazar-i-Sharif in the north and fashioned by Kabul’s hatters, whose shops lined both sides of Shah-e-do Shamshera Wali Road.

Now, a tainted presidential election later, and with efforts to make a truly multiethnic government foundering, the sheen is off the shimmery fur headwear.

Young men no longer wear it; Mr. Karzai’s opponent in the aborted election runoff, Abdullah Abdullah, a northerner, preferred a hatless suit-and-tie ensemble. All but 12 of the hatters shops have closed on Shamshera Road, also famous for its shrine covered in pigeons. Those remaining say they are lucky to sell a hat a day.

“I went back to my village in Logar wearing my karakul hat,” said Ahmed, an Afghan in his 50s, who was shopping for a new hat, “and people laughed: ‘There goes the old man who thinks he’s president.’ ” It was not clear which offended him more, “old” or “president.”

“Hamid may be the only guy in Afghanistan wearing that particular kind of hat,” said a post on a satirical Web site, Ridiculopathy.com, “but all the same the pointy wool chapeau has come to symbolize the country to the rest of the world.”

Just as Mr. Karzai’s hat is more than just a hat, the reaction against it is more than just a fashion whim. “It would have been better if he just wore a turban. It would have been more honest,” said Rahnaward Zariab, a novelist and cultural commentator on Tolo TV in Kabul. “Instead he deceived the nation. The costume of Karzai doesn’t mean anything; it’s not a symbol anymore. Now we are seeing his actions, and it’s clear now that he is a Pashtun.”

Mr. Zariab complained that there were relatively few non-Pashtuns in Mr. Karzai’s new cabinet, which is yet to be completely approved by Parliament.

Efforts to solicit a comment from the president on his headgear met with no success, and slight annoyance. “Everything else is finished with,” said his spokesman, Waheed Omer, “Now you’re going to write about the hat?”

Mr. Karzai himself once, at a military ceremony in Kabul, explained his affection for the karakul hats. “I wear them because they are very, very Afghan,” he said, according to an Associated Press account. “And if it looks good, all the better.”

Among the hatters, at least, the president still gets rave reviews for his good taste. He is also one of their best customers.

Mr. Karzai’s affection for the karakul hat is so strong that, if the hatters’ accounts are to be believed, he has purchased dozens of them since taking office. Sayed Habib Sadat, owner of one of the remaining hat shops near the shrine, says he has sold Mr. Karzai 15 karakul hats in various shades, mostly the dark gray he prefers, but also blacks, and mottled brown-and-whites...Karakul hats are not cheap; good ones sell for hundreds of dollars, and some can reportedly cost up to $3,000.

The more expensive ones are made from the skins of lambs taken from the pregnant ewe just before birth, by cutting open her abdomen, sometimes while she is still alive. Less costly are those made from lambs killed immediately after delivery; because karakul sheep are extremely protective of their young, that often means slaughtering both together, or forcibly separating them.

The slaughterer first palpitates the belly of the ewe, feeling the hooves of the fetus; if they are hard, that means a particularly good lambskin if it is harvested pre-partum...Because the sheep is not killed in the way prescribed by Islam...the meat of the sheep from which it is made are haram, or forbidden.

When Mr. Karzai orders a hat, the hatters are summoned to the Presidential Palace to measure his head personally. “When I first made him a hat, he was size 22 ½ inches,” Mr. Sadat said. “Now he’s 23 ½ inches.” Other hatters reported similar measurements, give or take half an inch.

Mr. Sadat said Mr. Karzai was not unique in this regard. He recalled Noor Mohammed Tarakai, Afghanistan’s first communist president in 1978, who also went from a 22 inch hat size to 23 inches, and that was during a much shorter term in office; he was assassinated after a year, reportedly by smothering.

“Presidents get swollen heads,” Mr. Sadat said.

NEW YORK TIMES