Petra Sijpesteijn

Beards, Braids and Moustachios: Exploring the Social Meaning of Hair in the Mediaeval Muslim World

The way the hair is worn, by whom it is cut and in what context, either voluntarily or under compulsion – as a ritual necessity, as punishment or in retribution – carries, needless to say, important symbolic charges. The exact force of these charges, however, is notoriously hard to identify. The visual prominence and plasticity of (head) hair imbue it with unusual decorative potential, and ensure for it a typically critical place in the formation of an individual’s persona and the organisation of his or her self-representation. Yet hair’s mutability, the impermanence of its stylings, its resistance to structure and its dispensability, despite its intrinsicality, make its status oddly ambiguous and its meanings fluid and unstable – and hence continuously open to contestation. On the one hand, hair “interventions” – whether self-selected or imposed – evoke potent associations of (or the violation of) intimacy, privacy, agency, individuality and wholeness, especially in the case of head and facial hair which generally is visible and plays an important role in social interactions. On the other, hair’s winning ability to grow back necessarily limits the duration of these effects, at least to the extent that they are inscribed on the body. This also allows for or necessitates a continuous sequence of (different) interventions in (head) hair styles, allowing for different (temporary) associations and identifications. Of course the stress-invoking trauma of the (forced) imposition of hair styles can have an effect that long outlives any visible signs. Hence, hairstyles are powerful ideological and social signifiers of inclusion and exclusion, group identity and othering, but also subject to the typically meaning-defying vagaries of fashion, adding a dimension of “symbolic noise” that further complicates interpretation. Hair’s being part of the body, and its close connection to the head, allows hair, attached or cut loose from the body, to represent the body as a whole, especially in magical and sacrificial rituals and transitional rites. These kinds of ambiguous and multiple significations in the medieval West and the Byzantine East have been stimulatingly scrutinised in a variety of recent studies that approach the subject from a sociological or anthropological angle. Islam, however, has gone largely unexamined. In sheer complexity and “loadedness”, however, the situation in the Muslim world can more than hold its own against either of these two contemporary cultures across the Mediterranean.

Shaving Hair and Beards in Early Islamic Egypt: An Arab Innovation?

ABSTRACT Three papyri dating from the first 80 years after the Arab conquest record the Arab authorities in Egypt punishing some Egyptian officials by shaving off their hair and beards. Literary sources confirm that in this period the Arab authorities ordered the shaving off of the beards of the native Egyptian population. Later Arabic narrative sources abound in references to this punishment, both official juridical texts and popular descriptions of public punishments and shaming ceremonies in mediaeval Egypt and elsewhere in the Islamic territories. There are, however, no attestations of the systematic use of this punishment from pre-Islamic Egypt, nor does the context fit the later narrative accounts of the shaving off of beards and hair. This article examines where the practice of shaving off of beards and hair as an officially prescribed punishment in early Islamic Egypt came from and why it was – or was deemed to be – effective as a punishment.