Safety and Grace
After air and food, dress is the need of all. While it differs due to cultural and geographical context, purpose is the same; to ensure safe and graceful survival. A new born is served with no food but wrapped in clothes first. The dead having no fear of any cold or heat are also enshrouded. For breach of command of Allah the first thing Adam and Eve lost in the heaven was clothes. The first thing they searched for was clothes. Hunger and thirst were not a worry nor shelter a problem.
Dress is not a superfluous thing but a foremost moral obligation. For people the issue and importance of dress is quite different from that of animals that have a covering by nature. Unlike animals the Almighty has not made any such vestment on the body of human beings but deposed in its nature the matter of modesty. To meet this natural requirement Allah has not forced him with any readymade dress code but emphasized upon him the moralistic need so as not to remain nude, or ill-dressed.
Allah has bestowed humankind with necessity for clothes so that they understand through wisdom the purpose of dress. Based on intuition the need for apparels is prime owing to its importance on moral count. Had it been a response to climate, there would have been no need to wear clothes during moderate temperatures or in artificially heated or cooled spaces. All religions have stressed the importance of appropriate dress.
To reinforce its regiment of destruction the evil cashed upon a category of people thinking that nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. There is definitely something good and something bad. Some literary circles applauded the coinage advocating its elongation in precept & practice. Had there been actually nothing good or bad these words too would not have survived in use. The words like sage and savage, sin and holiness, evil and angel, vice and virtue, sober and vulgar would not have born.
Irony of the fate is that for whom the importance of decent dress was held more in earnestness. As males are mostly donned from top to bottom some females do quite the opposite. All this has been given currency under the camouflage of modernity and emancipation.
The vile forces affecting honour and dignity have, as if, insulated her against the instinct of sobriety. The opposite gender onlookers too have gone Faustian enjoying the otherwise inviolable. The prime meaning of dress as a cloak has been relegated to hackneyed mentality with exhibitionism ruling the roost. The more the Muslims were enjoined upon to be dress cautious the more guilt they committed against it. Human being is not an animal bereft of sense of shame and the power of differentiation. If food strengthens, dress gives graces. The trend has to be reversed, else it shall have very harmful impact on our societies.
The author is a former Sr. Audit Officer and Consultant in the A.G’s Office Srinagar.
