Habibi & Arab Family Hats

Habibi is the word that Gulf News calls the most flexible in Gulf English, and in 2023 the line "habibi come to Dubai" took it onto TikTok and Instagram. Long before that it was just what an Arab family called everyone it loved. This page is for that family: Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian, Iraqi and Yemeni households from Dearborn to Paterson to Bay Ridge. Dearborn, Michigan, home to the biggest Arab American community in the country, is estimated to be 42 percent Arab American, and the 2020 Census counted about 2.9 million Arab Americans overall. April is Arab American Heritage Month, nationally recognised in 2021. The hats keep to what families actually say and do. HABIBI and HABIBTI are the bare words, YALLA means let's go, and KHALAS means enough. One essayist writes that Arabs are only angry when fighting over who picks up the bill at the end of dinner, which is the joke behind I FIGHT FOR THE CHECK AND I WIN. The rest cover toum as medicine, a teta whose hummus cannot be beaten, the dabke line leader at every wedding, and Dearborn born and raised. Even the Arab American National Museum sells an embroidered Yalla Detroit cap, so the market exists. Every design is custom embroidered on an unstructured dad hat, a gift for the cousin who always leads the dabke.