Thobe

The thobe is worth including precisely because it makes a point that most Western discussion of Islamic clothing omits: modest dress in Islam is required of men as well.

Regional before religious

The thobe is an ankle-length long-sleeved robe, standard mens dress across the Arabian peninsula and worn widely elsewhere for prayer and religious occasions. It is regional dress before it is religious dress, and Arab Christians wear it too. Cut and detail vary sharply by country, the Saudi collar, the Emirati cord, the Omani tassel, and the differences are read as national rather than doctrinal.

The mens side of modesty

Its religious dimension comes from hadith on modest covering for men and from reports that the garments of the Prophet did not trail below the ankle, which is why some men wear it deliberately short. The existence of a modesty rule for men at all is the thing usually left out: coverage of Islamic dress fixes almost entirely on what women wear, and the thobe is a standing reminder that the tradition addresses the dress of both.

The one point of religious law that attaches specifically to men's robes concerns length. A group of hadith warn against letting the lower garment trail below the ankles, and the usual explanation given in the reports themselves is that trailing a garment was a display of wealth and arrogance. From this, Salafi practice generally holds that a man's thobe should end above the ankle, and the shortened hem is accordingly a visible marker of religious orientation across the Gulf, South Asia and the diaspora. Other scholars read the prohibition as attaching to the arrogance rather than to the cloth, so that length is only an issue when it is a display, and men in the same mosque may wear both.

Beyond that, the thobe is regional dress. The cuts are national and are read as such. The Saudi thobe has a shirt collar and cuffs; the Emirati kandura has a round collar with no buttons and a tarboosh, a tassel at the neck; the Omani dishdasha has a distinctive collar and its own tassel; the Kuwaiti and Qatari forms differ again in collar and pocket. Colour follows season and occasion, white in summer and darker shades in winter.

The headdress worn with it, the ghutra or shemagh held by the black agal cord, varies the same way, and the red and white check associated with the Levant and the plain white of the Gulf are markers of origin rather than of piety.

Two things follow. Arab Christians wear the thobe, because it is the dress of the region and not of a religion. And the modest dress requirements of Islam apply to men in specific and enforceable terms, a point that Western discussion of Islamic dress consistently omits.