Dear Editor,
A letter from Swami Aksharananda appeared in SN on December 17. It dealt with women and the idea of the role of provocative dress as a factor in rape. It was a response to an earlier letter by Moeen ul-Hack in which Moeen said modest dress would help change the tone in a society and discourage violence and crime. So I interpreted it. The Swami, like William Walker in the comments on Bro Moeen’s letter, seems to have missed the point.
Dress is not at all only about personal taste. Dress is a statement about your society and your place/role in it. You go down the road tattooed and with your pants hanging, in a baseball cap, sports shoes and singlet – it is unlikely that you are coming from or headed to certain places in your society if the outfit is more than a simple imitation of a music video you saw.
You put on a dye cloth (or take saffron) like our Swami and it tells us what your take on religion is, and so on. You grew up seeing women in rumal and long skirt and we can tell your race, age, etc.
Cloth is anything but just covering. Look up the “semiotics of dress” for a deeper analysis of how we signal, and what we signal as we dress. The French government has passed laws banning, in the public space, burqa and head-veil. The interdiction is a recognition that clothing signals and signifies something. The laws state specifically that no religious positions should be displayed in the public space by persons.
The Swami is a learned Hindu leader. He speaks out of or from a religion in which both dress and non-dress (naked “sky clad” Hindu holy men) communicate a person’s statement on a variety of matters. Down to the dot on the forehead and views on sexuality. For the Swami to wonder, in the loud of the pages of a newspaper, “what dress has to do with rape,“ is for him to discard all the scholarly work on the semiology of dress that Islam, like Hinduism acknowledges and controls.
The Quran asks women to dress modestly, and the injunction in the verse is followed by its justification. The Most High says they cover their body and head “so as to be known as modest .” In short, the Creator and Most Wise knows and knew before the social scientists, that dress sends your message.
If you dress “provocatively”, and let us not now pretend that there is no “provocative dress,“ the message you are sending is that you promise to be an easy lay, that your morals are lax; this could play a role in date rape and other kinds of sexual assault.
A lot of the rape that occurs is not, as we may wish to persuade ourselves, about kicking down the door.
The statistics say most rape is apparently done by people who have long known and eyed the victim, by relatives, etc. But there can be no doubt that dress plays a role in signalling the position of one society or another on public sexuality.
Incidentally, Hindus seem to be closest to Muslims on the question of sexual behaviour. A survey I read this month says that about ninety per cent of the members of Hindu and Muslim communities do not believe extra-marital sex should be allowed, followed by Jews, with Christians trailing far behind. The views of Muslims and Hindus seemed not to be affected by their age.
With regard to the other matters concerning Islam and women that were raised by the Swami one says that they merit discussion and response. The newspapers ought to allow this type of discussion. We learn from it.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
