The karakul cap: lambskin hat of Afghanistan and the Jinnah cap

The karakul cap is a brimless cap made from the pelt of a newborn karakul lamb, the curled black or grey fur known in the West as astrakhan or Persian lamb. In Afghanistan the Encyclopaedia Iranica records it as qarakolī and says it had marked out educated urban men since the early twentieth century. [2] In Pakistan it is the Jinnah cap. [3, 4] The pelts come from a trade centred on Bukhara and northern Afghanistan, and in 2007 the Associated Press called Afghanistan the world's leading producer. [4, 7]

• Material: the pelt of a lamb skinned within a day of birth, before the tight curls open. [7]

• Afghan sources of pelts: the north, with Balkh and Jowzjan named as key districts. [6]

• Names: karakul or qaraqul; karakuli in Pakistan; astrakhan and Persian lamb for the fur. [3–5, 7]

• Famous wearers: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, Ayub Khan, Hamid Karzai. [3–6]

• Related caps: the pakol, the cloth cap under the turban, and the other headgear in Pashtun dress.

A fur from Bukhara

The sheep takes its name from Karakul, the "Black Lake" near Bukhara. Surat Yusupov, director of the Uzbek Karakul Breeding Institute, told the Associated Press in 2007 that the breed first appeared hundreds of years ago in the Kyzylkum desert around that lake. The emirs of Bukhara, he said, kept a monopoly on the export of the fleece through Persia and Astrakhan, and punished smugglers with beheading. [7]

The sheep reached Afghanistan with refugees from Bukhara. In the Associated Press account the last emir took his best sheep there when he fled the Soviets in 1920. [7] A 1949 report in the files of the US Central Intelligence Agency, from an unnamed source, says something similar of the Bokharans who lived in northern Afghanistan: they had introduced the karakul sheep and carpet weaving and remained the chief workers in both, but could not profit from them because of the Afghan government's export controls. [1] That report is a single informant's view, not a study, and it gives no numbers that can be checked.

By the 1970s the trade was large. Mohammad Salim Saee, head of the agriculture department in Balkh, told Arab News in 2021 that Afghanistan then sent 10 million karakul pelts a year to the West. [6] The Associated Press gives a different count: about 10 million Soviet, Afghan and South African pelts sold worldwide each year at the peak. [7] The two accounts do not agree on whether the figure is Afghan alone, and neither writer gives a source for it.

How the pelt becomes a cap

The value of the fur lies in the curl. The Associated Press describes a newborn lamb's coat as a wave of tight black curls, and says that within days the curls open, turn rough and wiry, and leave an ordinary sheepskin. So on the farm the Associated Press visited, a lamb born that day was slaughtered and skinned before sundown. [7] In Afghanistan, Arab News reports, dealers peel the pelt soon after birth, before the ewe feeds the lamb, because feeding affects the quality of the skin. [6] On the Uzbek farm the Associated Press visited, the skins were then scraped, pickled in coarse salt for a week and fermented with barley flour, and graded by size, pattern and tint. [7]

The cap itself is made by hand. Aamir Yasin of Dawn described the work of Mohammad Raffique, in 2019 the last specialist in Rawalpindi: the hide and wool of one minutes-old lamb is enough for one cap. The leather is moulded round a wooden last, cut to the customer's measurements and stitched. The outer and inner parts are prepared separately and sewn together by hand, and the last step gives the cap its triangular shape. Raffique took about a month to make two caps. He had learned the trade from his father, who kept a karakul cap shop in Peshawar's Qissa Khwani bazaar. [4]

The shapes differ by name. Ahmed Yusuf, writing in Dawn in 2017, quotes a Karachi cap-maker: the Jinnah cap is a perfect oval, while the Liaquat cap is flattened at the bottom and looks like a fez. There were also Lucknow caps of cotton, a tall-crowned form associated with Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, and a Quetta form, like the Jinnah cap "but with a wall in the middle", that the maker said had died out. [3] Dupree describes the Afghan form as a modified cylinder. [2]

An Afghan cap of educated city men

Nancy Hatch Dupree wrote in the Encyclopaedia Iranica that the Persian-lamb hat had distinguished educated urban men since the beginning of the twentieth century, citing C.-J. Charpentier's article on making karakul caps in the Afghanistan Journal in 1977. [2] Pajhwok Afghan News, reporting from Kabul in 2025, found the same picture from the other end. Around the Shah-Do Shamshira mosque, shops once made karakul hats and waistcoats, and an exhibition of the craft was held in the reign of Mohammad Zahir Shah. A 62-year-old tailor there, Ahmad Ahmadi, who inherited the trade from his forefathers, called the cap "an ancient form of headwear, worn even by kings in the past". A 64-year-old resident, Qudratullah, remembered that a man without one had once been thought unfit to marry, and that the cap was worn mostly by the well-off, by officials and by those in power. [8]

Those are memories gathered by a reporter, not a dated record of which ruler wore the cap. For the rulers themselves see Amanullah Khan and Mohammad Zahir Shah.

Hamid Karzai

Hamid Karzai made the cap known abroad. Arab News says the cap became so closely tied to him that the American designer Tom Ford called him "the chicest man on the planet", and that Karzai bought his hats on the Shah-Do Shamshira avenue in Kabul. [6] The Associated Press said in 2007 that he may have been partly responsible for the rise in interest in karakul in Western fashion. [7] Hürriyet Daily News, in 2011, noted that Karzai was born in Kandahar, that his father led the Popalzai, and that he chose an army-style astrakhan hat although the common headgear in the country was the turban. It called the hat an Uzbek style popular in Kabul and read his whole wardrobe, assembled from several regions, as a message of unity. [10] That is the paper's reading. Karzai's own reasons are not given in the sources used here. For his years in office see the Afghan republic and the war.

Jinnah and Pakistan

In Pakistan the cap belongs to Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Dawn gave its history in 2009: he wore it at the Lucknow session of the All-India Muslim League on 15 October 1937, when he gave up Savile Row suits for a sherwani and a karakul cap. [5] Dawn's 2019 account is a little different. It says Jinnah began wearing the sherwani at the 1937 Lucknow session and accepted a suggestion from Nawab Mohammad Ismail Khan to start wearing a karakul cap around the same time, and that the cap soon became known as the Jinnah cap. [4] The same Dawn report says the cap came from Afghanistan and was popularised in the subcontinent by Jinnah. [4]

Jinnah's followers read the cap as a statement. Munawar Hasan, the head of Jamaat-i-Islami, told Dawn that in the last years of the Pakistan movement Jinnah changed his dress from western to eastern and Muslim, and that his cap "was a manifestation of his Muslim identity". The same article says others who wore it were understood to be making a political, not a fashion, statement. [5] A Karachi cap-maker told Dawn that Jinnah's own caps all came with him from India. [3]

What happened after 1947 is described in two ways. Dawn in 2019 says the sherwani and Jinnah cap became a form of national dress, required of the prime minister, president, judges, bureaucrats and diplomats. [4] Arab News in 2019 asks why Pakistan never adopted the cap as part of a national dress code or made it a must at state ceremonies, and says the cap is printed on the country's currency. [11] The Dawn report lists wearers of the Jinnah cap in Rawalpindi: Ayub Khan and his son Gohar Ayub, Mohammad Khan Junejo, Nawaz Sharif and others. The shop's owner said it supplied caps to every military mess as part of officers' ceremonial dress. [4]

Pashtun wearers

The sources used here do not describe how Pashtuns in Afghanistan or Pakistan took up the cap, and nothing found separates Pashtun use from that of other educated town-dwellers. What they show is scattered. Raffique's father sold karakul caps in Peshawar's Qissa Khwani bazaar, and Raffique recalled that in Peshawar it was a custom for a father-in-law to give Jinnah caps to his son-in-law, his brothers, relatives and friends, so work rose in wedding season. [4] Karzai, born in Kandahar and head of the Popalzai tribe like his father, made it his trademark in office. [6, 10]

For the turban, wound round a cap, see The Pashtun turban. The flat woollen pakol, a different cap, has its own article.

The lambs

The cap depends on killing very young lambs, and the practice is criticised. In 2021 Arab News reported that in Afghanistan and abroad many regard the killing of the newborn lamb as cruel, and a Balkh trader named it as one reason for the collapse of demand. A dealer in Jowzjan said some butchers had once cut open pregnant ewes to take the lamb, and that this was stopped as too cruel. Kazim Hamayoun of the National Environmental Protection Agency said no law or regulation banned the practice, and that he saw it as a threat to wildlife. [6]

The fiercest criticism in the sources concerns the broadtail or karakulcha pelt, not the cap. The Associated Press reported that investigators for the Humane Society of the United States visited an Uzbek farm in 2000 and called the industry "cruel, grotesque and inexcusable". It described a method in which older ewes were artificially inseminated and slaughtered two weeks before delivery so the fetus could be skinned. Uzbek officials defended the trade: the director of the breeding institute said toothless ewes were destined to die of hunger anyway, and a farm manager said the carcasses were used for meat, glue and cheese-making. They argued that the Kyzylkum desert was crueller than the harvest and that many Uzbeks lived by it. [7] That account is about Uzbekistan, and the Afghan sources used here do not say whether the same method is used in Afghanistan.

What remains of the trade

Afghan officials describe a trade in steep decline. Arab News quoted a Balkh official in 2021 saying the industry had gone bankrupt over the past ten years, and the head of Balkh's karakul agency said Afghanistan had exported nearly 500,000 skins four years before but only 17,000, to Uzbekistan, the year before. A trader said that 280 shops in Balkh once sold skins and only three or four were left. Caps had sold for up to 3,000 dollars each. [6] In December 2024 Pajhwok reported that nearly 93,000 skins had been exported from Balkh in the first eight months of that year. [9]

Pakistan's makers describe a similar decline. A Karachi maker, Mohammad Sultan, blamed the American invasion of Afghanistan for cutting off the supply, saying the wool was taken for coats; that is his account, and it is given as his. [3] Prices in Rawalpindi in 2019 ran from 6,000 to 18,000 rupees a cap, which the sellers said kept it out of most wardrobes. [4] In Kabul in 2025 two tailoring shops specialising in karakul were left. [8]