Khamak: the counted-thread embroidery of Kandahar

At a glance

• Khamak (خامک) is the fine silk embroidery of Kandahar. Women stitch it at home, counting the threads of the cloth, and the best-known pieces are the embroidered fronts of men's long shirts. [2, 6, 7]

• The word names the thread: raw, untwisted silk floss that lies flat and shines. [2]

• Pieces take months. An embroiderer in Panjwai told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2011 that one shirt-front took her three months. [7]

• Since 2008 a Kandahar enterprise, Kandahar Treasure, has paid women for khamak and sold it abroad. [2, 4]

• Reports since 2021 describe a thin market, competition from machine work and Taliban limits on how women sell. [9, 10, 15]

The thread and the stitch

Khamak is what the embroidery is called in Pashto. [7, 12] According to the review of Rangina Hamidi and Mary Littrell's book Embroidering within Boundaries on the ClothRoads textile site, the word means the thread itself: raw, untwisted, unspun silk, which gives the flat shining surface customers want. [2] Afghan reporters and researchers also call the craft khamak dozi, khamak embroidery. [1, 8]

Daly, a researcher at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, wrote in 2000 that Afghans themselves sort embroidery into at least five kinds: gul dozee, easy single flower designs; khamak dozee, more complex natural and geometric designs in repeating patterns, using a combination of stitches; taarshumaar and taarkashee dozee, geometric work that needs counting or pulling threads; and embroideries that add beads or metal braid. She was describing Afghan embroidery as a whole, not Kandahar alone. [1]

The cloth is fine cotton, linen or white silk, and khamak is famous as whitework, though Mr X Stitch also describes patterns worked in a variety of coloured threads. [3, 7, 8] Hamidi and Littrell's account, as the ClothRoads review gives it, puts the base fabric at 70 to 72 threads per inch in warp and weft. An article by Ansie van der Walt on the Mr X Stitch embroidery site gives a thread count of 144 to 160 for high-quality khamak on cotton or rayon blends. The two sources count differently and neither says how. [2, 3]

Both describe the same method. The embroiderer counts the threads of the fabric and covers a set number of them with satin stitches in a fixed order. In the pictures reproduced from the book, the shape of a yoke is first sketched on the cloth, the lower midpoint of the design is counted out thread by thread and the first stitch sewn. The design is then filled in diagonally; once its framework is complete, a small motif is stitched into the centre of each diamond, and more motifs fill the rest. No design can be off by a single stitch, and good work is reversible, with the back as neat as the front. [2, 3] Patterns on yokes are usually symmetrical, and on household cloths they are geometric. [3]

Kandahar Treasure describes the designs as drawn from Islamic geometric patterns. [4] Embroiderers work sitting on the floor at home, without a frame or hoop and without artificial light, among the women of their own family. [3] The stitch itself is easy to learn. Counting and combining stitches into borders and fillings can take a lifetime to master. [3]

Learning it at home

Most Pashtun women learn khamak as girls, from their mothers and grandmothers. [3] The Kandahar Treasure profile at the International Folk Art Market says girls begin as young as five and some master the work by ten. [4] A woman interviewed by Zan Times in 2023, a widow embroidering in Kandahar province, said mothers teach their daughters so that when a daughter is engaged she can sew a shirt for her fiancé. Her fourteen-year-old daughter now helps her. [9]

For many of them it is the only training they get. [3] Razia Marwa, aged 36 and living in the ninth district of Kandahar city, told the news site Alive in Afghanistan in December 2021 that she learned from her mother as a child. She said one wrong point ruins a whole neckline. She quoted the saying kor ya gor, "home or grave", which she said describes where people think a woman belongs. [13]

Daly noted in 2000 that Afghan women favour embroidery because it needs only a needle, thread and cloth, takes little room and travels easily when families have to move. [1]

What it decorates

Nancy Hatch Dupree, writing on Afghan clothing in the Encyclopaedia Iranica (1992), said that the finely embroidered Kandahari shirt fronts, which she transliterates gaṛa or ganḍa, are renowned. [6]

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported in 2011 that khamak was traditionally limited to the shawls men carry on their shoulders and the fronts of their long, loose shirts. The Kandahar Treasure profile adds table linen, women's head-coverings and wedding trousseaus. [4, 7] The Mr X Stitch review lists baby clothes and a young woman's dowry. [3] A photograph in the ClothRoads review shows khamak borders and a drawn-work screen on a burqa headpiece. [2]

Zan Times names the shapes of men's embroidery in Kandahar as rectangular, triangular, royal and round collars, and says women's clothes are embroidered at the neck, sleeves and trouser hems. It gives prices from 5,000 to 30,000 afghani, depending on how much embroidery there is. [9] The Amu TV channel wrote in 2023 that one of the most widespread uses of embroidery in Kandahar is the small skull cap worn by men and boys. [8]

Dupree's famous Kandahari caps are a separate craft. She described the cylindrical caps of the Pashtun of Kandahar as embroidered with gold and silver thread (golābatūnī), and the foldable caps set with coloured glass beads (marīdārā), citing her own 1977 guide. She did not call either khamak. [6] For the cap and the shirt in context, see Pashtun dress; the coloured silk and mirror embroidery of another Pashtun-region dress is in a documented Barech dress; for the women's side, see Pashtun women's dress, and for the men's suit, perahan tunban.

Months of work, a thin margin

Time and price vary with the piece and the maker. Gul Ghotai of Panjwai district said in 2011 that a shirt-front took three months and fetched about 200 dollars in the Kandahar market. [7] Lemah, a mother of seven in the ninth district, told Pajhwok Afghan News in 2017 that a good design took one to two months. [11] In 2022 Amna told Pajhwok that one neckline could take three to seven months, and Razia Marwa said up to six or seven. [12, 13] In July 2026 a Kandahar University graduate told Afghanistan International that she spent three months on one neckline and was paid under 10,000 afghani. [14]

The pay is shared out badly, according to the women. Pajhwok reported in 2022 that women who make the pieces profit less than the shopkeepers who sell them. A woman who collected necklines from other women and sold them in the bazaar earned 200 to 500 afghani on each and said half of it went on fares. [12]

Machine embroidery undercut the hand work years before 2021. In 2017 Lemah told Pajhwok that a machine-made chest design cost 600 to 1,500 afghani and the same design by hand 10,000 to 20,000. [11] Afghanistan International reported in 2026 that machine-made necklines are quicker and cheaper to produce, which makes competition harder for hand embroiderers. [15]

Kandahar Treasure

Rangina Hamidi, an Afghan-American whose family had fled to Quetta in 1981, created Kandahar Treasure in 2008 as a social enterprise on the idea that women's traditional khamak skill could earn them an income. [2] NPR, in a 2009 interview in which she is introduced as the founder and president of Kandahar Treasure, said she had gone back to Kandahar in 2003; the programme described the project as one of Afghans for Civil Society. [16] The enterprise gave women thread, cloth and other materials and paid them for the finished pieces, and sold them in Kandahar, to Pashtun communities abroad and at the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe. [3, 11] The Folk Art Market profile says the cooperative worked to revive designs lost during decades of conflict. [4]

The numbers of women involved differ by date and source: almost 300 in 2017, more than 500 in 2018 and more than 1,000 in 2023. [2–4] Hamidi told Pajhwok in 2017 that the company's work had shrunk and hundreds of its workers were jobless, because people preferred machine work from neighbouring countries. She asked the government for lower tax on raw materials and a women's market, and a Kandahar women's affairs official said about 60 shops would be given rent-free for a year. [11]

Government and the market were already interested in 2011, when Zubaida Painda, head of the women's affairs department in Kandahar, told RFE/RL that the government meant to turn the art into a formal cottage industry, and a Kandahar trader said demand outside the south was growing. [7]

Since 2021

Reports from the time since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021 disagree on how the market has fared.

Zan Times reported in October 2023 that the embroidery markets closed for the first three months because traders fled, and that incomes had not returned to earlier levels. A woman from Shahkot district said women could not take embroidered goods to the market themselves but had to bring a male guardian, and that they were not allowed to negotiate with male shopkeepers. [9] Amu TV's report from Kandahar in May 2023 found the local market flourishing, with items from 7,000 to 15,000 afghani, shopkeepers supplying cotton and thread, and an embroiderer who said that 40 to 50 women worked with her. Traders there asked for more support to sell in other provinces. [8]

Kandahar Treasure reopened in November 2021, according to Global Goods Partners, which buys from it. [5] The Folk Art Market says embroidery became one of the only sources of income for many Afghan women when the Taliban returned. [4] In January 2025 Rukhshana Media reported, from local sources, that women artisans were barred from a three-day handicraft exhibition in Kandahar city. The exhibition had over 150 booths, 30 of them for women's handicrafts including embroidery, and male relatives attended in the women's place. [10]

The newest report is Afghanistan International's of July 2026, in Pashto and Dari. It says educated Kandahar women who lost government and service jobs after the ban on women's work have taken up khamak necklines, "لاسي خامکي غاړې" in the Pashto text, and earn little for the labour. A Kandahar shopkeeper said the market had gone cold and that people still like the pieces but cannot afford them. [14, 15]

The same report says that traders used to export the necklines to Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Germany, Britain, Canada and the United States, where Afghans bought them for Eid, weddings and other occasions. [14] For the wider conditions of women in the south, see Pashtun women today and Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021; for the city, see Kandahar.