Does it really matter how one dresses? Is dress such a major issue that it can affect things like education and careers? I am assuming that decency and propriety are not an issue here. The point is choice of attire.
Though I lived more than half my life in the West and am quite comfortable with pants and shirts, I find our Arabian attire extremely comfortable and rather elegant.
An American journalist once asked me if I did not find our “conformity” in dress suffocating. He saw that we all wore white thobes and assumed that we had relinquished individuality. I asked him to look at it from a wider perspective: The whole world, more or less, dresses in the same way. We sort of stick out.
Things are changing in Arabia and greater numbers among the young find it more convenient to wear jeans and T-shirts.
I find this rather refreshing. They switch between traditional and Western attire with the same ease as switching between languages.
They might not be reading Kant and Rousseau yet, but it is a start. The broader the horizon, the better the human being.
Yet there are those who find this innocent and basic personal freedom offensive and try hard to curb it. They do not know that such reactionary behavior makes the young more determined to do what they like anyway.
Foolishly, those who want to control the minutest of our daily details are turning an innocent and tattered pair of jeans into a cause. There has been a plethora of articles in the local press decrying this “most sinister” phenomenon that has invaded our society.
Osama Al-Hazmi writes in Okaz that “some of our young people seem to have lost all sense of shame. They are ready to submerge their cultural identity in an alien one.”
What have these young people done? They wear jeans and T-shirts. If our “cultural identity” is as superficial as a dress code, then it really has very little chance of survival.
This paranoid and xenophobic attitude takes forms that are themselves more sinister since Al-Hazmi declares that he has “always been against admitting students — especially university students — wearing Western dress to class.” He goes on to declare that he supported the university professor who “refused to allow one of his students to sit for the exam because the student was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.” I don’t think such a professor would have much to offer the student anyway.
I would like to ask this man and people who are debating this non-issue what their reaction would be if an American professor refused a Saudi student entry into his class for wearing a thobe?
Indeed, what of the female student wearing a hijab? Surely, a professor’s first concern is the student’s brain and not his attire.
- Arab News Opinion 3 July 2003
