Religious Dress Codes

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When a woman covers her entire body, following a dogmatic doctrine to the letter to improve her relationship with her community and her god, she is performing a ritual.

A recent article in the Times reminded me of something that upsets me that I have been meaning to get to: traditional garb within religion, its variations, and how they all have similar denotations, when reduced, to dominance via dogma, and how, when a secular viewpoint is applied, every excuse under the sun besides superstition, dogma, and dominance seems to come up. Let’s start with something that the majority of us can agree with.

Being forced to wear something is an administration of power by a governing force. Here’s an example: a nurse must wear clean scrubs, surgical gloves, a mask, and a head covering to protect a patient. This is an administration of power by a governing force. Clinics have different rules regarding dress, but hygiene and sterility are key. It is common sense for a properly trained clinician to protect the patient by taking necessary precaution prior to contact. This seems relatively benign, but let us look at the governing force: reason. Since the advent of germ theory, and as our understanding of the communicability of disease and infection has grown, we have reasoned (and since proved) that hygiene plays a major part in protecting patients.

Now let’s take it one step further: A private educational institution requires collared, solid-colored shirts and slacks, not jeans, save during gym-class and other pre-determined events. As a professor in a large college, I can attest that a student’s way of dressing is the least of an educational institution’s problems, though students under a dress code can please boards, committees, and parents of prospective students (as does a lack of good humor). There are other arguments for the academy dress codes: such limits in dress can limit how students display wealth and status within a classroom (again, not a pedagogical problem I have run into as a teacher, but something probably handled through the education of ethics rather than the enforcement of a law). But again, we have a governing source imposing a dress code on a group under the will of that governing body: faculty and administrators imposing rule-systems on students. To me, it is less reasonable for a kid to have to wear a tie than it is for a nurse to wear surgical gloves, but that must be saved for some other post. The point- reason doesn’t belong so much to the academic dress code. There are many conflicting points of view regarding this point, but we have all heard convincing arguments that attest to both view points.

And then we have the covering of the head, face, legs, et cetera with a hat, wig, or veil before a governing force. The governing force here is either 1) God or 2) The Church. But mainly god- because the fact is that within all of these dress codes in religion the preservation of tradition is a distant second to the rules of  dogmatic worship and pleasing the god. In god, as many religious people will tell you, there is no reason, only an irrational leap of faith. The leap of faith is taken, the religion is practiced as closely to the doctrine as governmental law will allow.  The idea in many of these religious dress codes is that the worshipper cover themself before their god- this, like the academic dress code, is a matter of humility (despite the fact that it seems somehow less humble in civilized nations to stand out so disparately from all others- it seems more a boast than an act of humility before god, and sometimes, to the non-believer, it seems to act as a reminder that some ritual is being followed somewhere that they do not know about, and wouldn’t be allowed access to without years of worship).  Further, as I will go into a bit below, the non-believer sees some of these dress codes as means to diminish one gender, or inhibit them. Whatever a believer will tell you about their attempts to preserve tradition, or protect their religion, or show faith in their god, the sorry fact is that they have been misled: it is simply a matter of dogma that they must don a hadjab, or a yarmulke, or a mark of ash on their foreheads. They are doing it because they believe their god will be pissed if they don’t, plain and simple.

Let’s define dogma: I will be using these definitions as the operative definitions of the word dogma for the remainder of this article. From the American Heritage:

· A doctrine or a corpus of doctrines relating to matters such as morality and faith, set forth in an authoritative manner by a church.

· An authoritative principle, belief, or statement of ideas or opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true.

Dogmatic viewpoints are, by nature, pretty much unchangeable. They are meant to be as solid as god himself. The church, (in our case, the various Muslim and Jewish sects) will dictate a law based on the Q’uran or the Talmud and/or the various apropos texts relating to the specific denomination within the larger umbrella (I am trying to be careful here). Utterly “authoritative,” “absolutely true.” The “absolute” is the alarming notion here. Dogma should alarm us. In Christian belief, some say that the bible is a manual from God (who, it just so happened, made himself the main character). This means that when, in the Ten Commandments, God says, “You shall not make for yourself an [false] idol[…]for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments,” he means it. He will actually wipe out your children if you put a piece of paper on a trash bin and that reads “This is god now.” This is a dogmatic tenet of Christianity. If you are a Christian, then you have to agree (unless you are a cherry-picking Christian, or you have watered down the articles of your primary text for your belief system to the point where certain tenets in it are, to preserve the metaphor, approaching homeopathic levels) that the God in your book has not only threatened you with death, but has threatened your children, too. This is the power of dogma.

Now let’s step back, agree that there probably isn’t a god, and that this graven image law is man-made…doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t it matter? Because the people who follow the law believe it as an absolute dogmatic law rooted first and foremost in supernatural truth, secondly in millennial posterity, and thirdly (among many others), in tradition. This is why tradition is inherently flawed. We know, on the outside, that traditions do change. Rituals mutate and evolve, as do laws. That is why we have rabbis saying that they are so close to being not Jewish that they may as well not be Jewish (see my post on Chris Hitchens in the archives), and yet hold this last vestige of faith in god and his traditions, in the benefits of religion, in the benefits of a dress code.

The religious may be hesitant to explain why they must wear clothes to prove that they are religious, or to prove the intensity of their relationship with their god. This is because they do not remember why they do it, as I’m sure some nurses forget why they cover their hair and wear gloves, or that soldiers may forget why they are fighting the war they are fighting. It is an act of habit and routine more often than not, not an act of god-love or hygeine love- it is instinct. The religious person who promises that they have gone through their own process of doubting their acts of  dressing for their god, but have come around to accept it anyway, probably haven’t fully vetted the issue. Just as it would be considered irrational and dangerous for a nurse to throw out her garments in the middle of an operation, it would be considered irrational for an orthodox Muslim woman to remove her hadjab in mosque. The difference? Of course, there is reason behind the danger of the nurse’s hypothetical act.  There is only dogma behind the religious dress code- millenia-old dogma, but dogma nonetheless.

Even the most religious must believe that their god could not possibly care what they wear, right? Surely their god would be more interested in their lifestyle, their acts of kindness and courage in the face of adversity, than whether they cover their face before their husband, or cover the crown of their head before god, right?

Note on the pictures: The photo on the left appears in the Wikipedia article on the Niqab. The photo on the left is (c) Hazel Thompson, and appears in the New York Times article I reference, link above.

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Filed under Islam, Niqab, Religious doctrine, Women and religion, dress codes, hadjab controversy, religious dominance