First Qibla Cola, now al-Quds jeans (updated)
Last September the British Muslim run company which produced Qibla Cola, a Coke substitute which donated 10% of its profits to various good causes and was intended to relieve Muslims’ apparent dependence on the products of big drinks companies, went bust. A Guardian journalist interviewed a Muslim food shop manager on why he thought the product failed, and he started out with a political explanation, but ground to a halt and admitted that the product was a bit flat. Today, I read on a Muslim blog called The Scent an entry from this March about a product called Al-Quds Jeans – loose-fitting jeans which are supposedly easy to pray in. Dynamite Soul, the sister behind The Scent, has the following to say:
Well the Ummah’s love for jeans has been acknowledged. The Al Quds Jeans brand provide jeans for high-frequency prayer. The main features of these jeans are said to be the high-waist, wide leg, and padded knees.
The designer is not a Muslim, but said,” I wanted to respect (the fact) that if these are the first jeans for Islam, they should be built by Muslim hands.” The jeans are made in Karachi, Pakistan.
Although I am sure this is more about money than it is about the desires of a Muslim, I am happy that there are some Muslims working and hopefully being paid a fair wage.
I did actually comment on the entry, but I’d like to expand on my point here. There are a number of reasons why I object to this enterprise. The first of these being that the company making Al-Quds Jeans is not Muslim-owned; it is based in Italy. The website contains material written in both English and Italian, but not Arabic or Urdu, which is strange given that the jeans are made in Pakistan. This is, of course, so that Muslim hands made them. Never mind that there are no shortage of Muslim hands in Italy. Or, for that matter, in Bosnia, a country with a large Muslim population a stone’s throw from Italy with massive unemployment.
So it looks a lot like a cash-in to me. It looks like an attempt by an enterprising Italian to make money off Muslims by selling them baggy jeans, and because baggy jeans are readily available in Muslim countries (you can find some other objections in that article), they put Al-Quds on the jeans despite the fact that the jeans are made nowhere near Al-Quds. (They could have had them made in Jordan, which would have circumvented any Israeli boycott issues.)
I write as someone who gave up jeans within months of converting to Islam precisely because of the problems they presented when I was praying. I’m not entirely sure they were causing the problem, as sitting in the position we sit in when we pray has always been a problem for me because of short ham-strings. But I gradually replaced my jeans with chinos, which are generally much more comfortable. It was not for a few months after this that I heard Shaikh Hamza Yusuf relate the opinion one of his teachers had expressed that the sight of so many people wearing jeans “reeked of atheism”, with everyone dressing like a factory worker, as in some communist countries (notably China). I once explained to a sister who approached me for marriage why I would not like her to wear jeans, especially in front of me, and compared it to me approaching her in a builder’s overall (not that I’m a builder, but you get the point).
The AQJ website does not have any pictures of what the jeans look like on someone. They just have pictures of folded-up jeans, and close-ups of pockets and rivets. So you don’t know if they really look much different from commercial western jeans. You don’t have anyone telling you how they feel to wear. You don’t have a diagram comparing the fit of the loosest generally-available western jeans to theirs. You don’t have a price list (the catalogue will be on-line in a few days, they tell us). And you certainly do not have any assurance that they are not made in a sweatshop (unlike Shukr Clothing, which assures the buyer that its Syrian workers are well-paid). Pakistan is a notorious centre of sweatshop labour.
But my biggest objection to the jeans is that they are, well, jeans. If jeans were just one type of trousers among many, they wouldn’t be so bad. But there are just so many of them around and every pair of jeans looks more or less the same: they are nearly always blue, with thick, rough fabric riveted and stitched together. While men’s clothes offer more variety than this (even chinos come in different colours), it’s women who lose out in the variety stakes by wearing jeans most of the time. When I was first exposed to large numbers of females my own age in 1993, after getting out of boarding school at 16, quite a number of them wore skirts, and there’s so much more you can do with a skirt (or dress), design-wise, than with a pair of jeans, or any other trousers for that matter. It’s not that they wore them all the time or that all (or even most) of them wore them, but there were always some. Nowadays, women who were quite happy to wear them in the 1980s and early 1990s, and looked nice in them, don’t. (By the way, if you like denim, you can get long denim dresses, both from shops here and from Islamic retailers like Shukr and al-Hannah.)
I’m not going to go into the other ugly aspects of western fashion, because the point is that Muslims shouldn’t be aping the worst aspects of western culture. Abdul-Hakim Murad, writing as Kerim Fenari back in 1998, wrote that Saudis, in particular, throw out traditional Arab culture and then replace it not with beautiful western imports but with ugly ones. To me, the jeans fad is a classic example (admittedly, there are far uglier and more un-Islamic western fashions). They don’t wear traditional Tyrolean dirndl-type outfits (which women still wear in Tyrol, not just on special occasions) or Little House on the Prairie dresses; they wear plain, boring blue jeans, sometimes (but not always) under an abaya. (And some women, though certainly not all, complain about having to wear an abaya, but do not wear under it something brighter and more feminine, and more suited to the climate, than thick, rough, boring blue jeans.) A friend of mine who married a Syrian woman told me that traditional local feminine fashion had been totally lost, and what remained was rejected by urban women as “fellahi” (peasant).
Muslim women in the west, of course, may be able to experiment with different ethnic fashions to a degree that they may not be in their back-homes: London in particular being such a melting pot of Muslim cultrues, they may be able to wear skirts one day, a sari the day after (though this takes practice), shalwar-kameez the next, an Arabic-style dress the next day and baju kurung (Malay outfit – basically shalwar kameez with a skirt instead of trousers) the day after that. To throw all this variety away is the equivalent of beautiful paintings being taken off the wall to be replaced by ten-a-penny Athena prints or bare walls. (Or worse, if it’s a workplace, one of those hectoring “motivational” notices of the “there is no I in team” variety.)
Then again, it’s likely that most of the takers will be men, because men are in many Muslim countries even less likely to wear traditional dress than women. In some countries, you still run the risk of getting tagged a fundamentalist if you wear a long robe and a turban and grow your beard, unless your robe and turban are dirty and you are obviously poor and work on a market stall, or unless you are actually an imam. When in Egypt in 1999, I was advised not to wear the Malaysian sarong I had been given by Habib Ali Jifri (although the Saudi and Yemeni guests wore theirs, and I had worn mine to jumu’ah with no ill consequences), and the al-Azhar students changed out of their traditional clothes into western-style clothes to go to college. No such strictures seemed to apply to women, who covered (or did not cover) as they (or their families) wished.
We can’t finish a discussion of “Islamic jeans” without mentioning the obvious modesty issues. For women, they should simply not be worn without a tunic on top, because a man’s eyes will usually fall a few inches below your waist – this is a proven fact, and keep in mind that Muslim men are enjoined to lower their eyes rather than look at a woman’s face (most probably do this instinctively). As for the guys (something Izzy Mo should have included in her fashion tips, although she was not addressing Muslims), I wonder if the Italian designer had a man demonstrate the sajda in front of him to see if he could see the shape of the man’s tackle? I have seen this so many times with men praying in trousers and probably not realising it, although anyone watching certainly would have. Again, put something on over those trousers when you pray, guys.
I’m sure a lot of Muslims will quickly dismiss this as a cynical cash-in; it would be highly interesting to see their cost and how it compares with loose-fitting jeans from the existing major manufacturers, and to learn the conditions in which they are made. I remember a couple of years ago when looking for clothing for my mother as a birthday present that a lot of what I found was expensive and made in very sweatshop-friendly countries (and prices often don’t fall when production is moved to a third-world country). I don’t doubt that there will, however, be takers as well – but the fact remains that the banal, functional look of jeans won’t be improved by emblazoning “al-Quds” on the pockets. At least Mecca Cola and Qibla Cola represented an attempt to help Muslims and keep the Muslim pound or dollar within the community – something this product will not help in the least.
Update 3rd May: I posted a comment similar to the following on the entry I linked above at The Scent. This is a sort-of reconstruction as it ended up not getting posted, although you can see DS’s reply to it here insha Allah. It was my reply to her reply to my original comment.
In her original post DS talked about the Ummah, while in her reply to my original comment she brought up the issue of American Muslims and how Americans gawked at Muslims for dressing differently while other (immigrant) Muslims did not recognise American Muslims’ dress as Islamic. She did not mention the US at all in her actual entry, and I can’t comment on the situation there as I have never been there.
When she mentioned “the Ummah’s love for jeans”, I thought of the general tendency in the Muslim world to abandon local dress in favour of western styles. A case in point being Malaysia, where a Malay man might wear baju Malayu (a shirt and sarong) on special occasions, to jumu’ah and perhaps in the home, but to work he will probably wear a business suit, if he is salaried. So a Malay man doing business in his own country will wear the business dress of his former colonial master. (Women tend to wear their traditional dress rather more in Malaysia.)
Now, in the west, business suits, like jeans are just normal (although I happen to hate them as much as I hate jeans, the top button and tie arrangement having been a regular cause of run-ins with teachers and prefects at school, because they tend to be too tight around the neck especially when one is still growing). American Muslims who wear western clothes are not imitating anyone as it is their own culture. I was talking about the tendency of Muslims generally to wear foreign styles in imitation of a powerful non-Muslim civilisation.
DS also quoted Shaikh Hamza as saying that masculine and feminine are mainly defined by one’s culture, and that in some places what is a man’s outfit and what is a woman’s differ only in colour. In my observation, with the vast majority of outfits you could take one look at it and know (and not by obvious details like size and cut, but by style) whether it is for a man or a woman. In Pakistan, for example, a man’s shalwar-kameez has clearly different styles and decorations to a woman’s, and the same is true of a man’s robe and a woman’s dress in the Arab world. Of course, some of the Muslim world’s male fashions would be considered feminine here: this was certainly true of the robes some of the African brothers wore when I was in Egypt in 1999, which they had to remove to go to al-Azhar, or for that matter, the Malaysian sarong, worn by men (and absolutely not by women) in India also and parts of the Arabian peninsula.
In our country the archetypal feminine clothing is the long skirt or dress, which were commonplace in the 1980s and early 1990s, came in a huge range of colours and patterns and styles and usually looked very nice, and women (even 16-year-old sixth-form students) were happy to wear them then, and for one reason or another do not do so now. Somebody, somewhere, decided that they were passé, and for a while in the early part of this decade they were very thin on the ground indeed. The replacements tended to be drab, indecent or androgynous, or a combination of two or all three of these. To be fair, you can’t blame women for not wearing things they can’t buy; as was noted in one of the comments at the entry DS mentioned, what is in the shops one year probably won’t be the next (this was certainly the case with the tiered skirts which hit the shelves in 2003, which disappeared at the end of the season, no doubt to be dumped on some third-world country). But the fact is that women reject the clothing they wore gladly a decade or two ago, and this rather smacks of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
