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Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| Islamic Dress |
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| struggling |
| 03/24/02 at 18:51:25 |
| [slm] Found the following a few passages quite interesting myself so just wanted to share with you. They are from Charles Le Gai Eaton’s “Islam and the Destiny of Man”, P209 Where, then, are we to find a specifically 'human' art? No art is closer to us both physically and psychologically than that of dress, and if the human figure is excluded - or enters only as an element in the design - elsewhere, it is non the less clothed in splendour at the centre of the Islamic environment. ' No art', says Titus Burckhard, ' has a more telling effect upon a man's soul than that of clothing, for a man instinctively identifies himself with the clothes he wears.' He also dresses in accordance with his idea of himself and of his role in the scheme of things. Burckhardt identifies modern occidental dress as representing 'a turning away from a life entirely dominated by contemplative values, with its bearings fixed on the hereafter'; the lesson implicit in the traditional dress of Islam, however much it has varied from one region to another, is that the human body is among the ‘signs of Allah’, and to veil it, as Burckhardt says, ‘is not to deny it, but to withdraw it, like gold, into the domain of things concealed from the eyes of crowd’. It is common enough in the West to dress chimpanzees in human clothing, either for the amusement of children visiting a zoo or to advertise products on television, and contemporary Western tailoring looks very well on monkey; it looks less well on human beings and absurdly inappropriate on Muslims at prayer; but it is the badge of ‘civilization’ and worn as such. A soldier knows that he is truly in the army when he puts on his uniform and a monk is assured of his vocation when he dons the robes of his order; both Kamal Ataturk and Mao Tzetung, when they wished to make a complete break with the past and create a new kind of Turk and a new kind of Chinese, started by changing their people’s mode of dress, and it is interesting to note how quick Catholic priests are to adopt secular clothing when they lose confidence in their priestly function. Those who think of themselves as clever monkeys will dress as clever monkeys, while those who believe themselves to be the ‘Viceregents of Allah on earth’ will also dress accordingly. Sometimes we are more concerned with peripheral threats than with the threat closest to us; many Muslims are deeply concerned about the threat to their way of life represented by such Western customs as dancing and ‘dating’, but only a few are aware that not merely their way of life, but their very identity as Muslims might be undermined by a mode of dress totally alien to the Islamic concept of man’s role in creation. The argument one hears only too frequently is that ‘outward things’ do not matter; all that matters is ‘what you have in your heart’. This argument is, to say the least, naïve. What we have in our hearts is constantly influenced – and eventually changed – by our immediate environment, and the environment closest to us is the robe, suit or dress we wear; after that comes the home, and after the home, the city. |
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