Gandhi went bare just as Theresa May does
The headlines in October 1931 said: “Gandhi to go to the King’s party in loincloth.” The Associated Press reported on reactions in the capital: “London East End slums tittered today at the first sight of Mahatma Gandhi.” But he, in helping to gain the independence of India, had the last laugh.
Gandhi, when studying law in London from 1888-91, was happy to wear a stiff collar and worsted coat and trousers. His family’s concern then was that he should not pollute himself ritually by touching wine, women or meat.
Theresa May’s appearance in Saudi Arabia this week with no headscarf or even a hat might have made a similar impression there as the bare-legged Gandhi did here.
Her gesture spoke louder than words. But I’m not quite sure what it said. It must have meant at least that she thinks it good to appear without a hat. At the Cenotaph last November, though, she wore a black hat. That ceremony forms part of a religious culture with every nuance of which we are familiar. Michael Foot was mocked for wearing a “donkey jacket” at the Cenotaph – even though it was really a short overcoat that his wife had bought for him at some expense.
What of Saudi Arabian customs? In his immensely learned yet entertaining book Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought Michael Cook remarks that it was, for example, hard for the West to take seriously the Saudi campaign against the playing of mouth organs by street urchins in Jedda (at about the same time as Gandhi’s unclothed visit to Buckingham Palace).
Yet, he points out, “middle-class America has come to regard smoking with an intolerance verging on that of unreconstructed Wahhabism”. In the years since his book came out in 2000, this intolerance has spread to Britain. How would we feel now about a foreign head of government lighting up in the airport building on arrival?
That, you might say, is not a religious prohibition, but I’m not so sure. These taboos gain as much ritual force as the prohibitions of revealed religion that they replace. The hat thing in Britain is nearly divorced from religion, though it derives from religious practice. “Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head,” wrote St Paul. “But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head.”
Mrs May happily prays in church with her head uncovered, but that is the cultural convention of Britain today. It would take an eccentric male prime minister actually to wear a hat in church.
A male British politician would cover his head in a synagogue, even if he had no belief in God. And when the Queen invested Rabbi Aryeh Sufrin with the MBE for work against drug-addiction, she did not shake his hand. To him it would have been unlawful to shake hands with a woman.
Everything we do is bound up with cultural ritual. Gentlemen’s clubs in London require men to wear ties, but not if they are visiting Saudi princes in traditional dress, any more than if they are clergymen in dog-collars.
Mrs May is quite right to think that such things as veils matter. This week she called the dropping of the word Easter from the branding of an Easter egg hunt “absolutely ridiculous”.
She knows well enough that eggs do not figure prominently in the Gospels or the Book of Common Prayer. But like pudding at Christmas, eggs at Easter go with the religious festival, just as Islam and headscarves go together in Saudi Arabia.