British Muslim men and clothes: the role of stigma and the political (re)configurations around sartorial choices

ABSTRACT

This article examines the changing perceptions of dress, focusing on the lungi, funjabi and the thobe, amongst the British Bangladeshi Muslim male diaspora in the East End of London. Through various historical trajectories, I argue that the research participants in this article dress their bodies according to the current meanings attributed to the garments. These meanings are (re)-configured using a meta-constructed stigma guideline they interpret using their faith, Islam, and the wider dominant discourse around acceptability and respectability. Drawing on in-depth interviews with British Bangladeshi Muslims in East London, I demonstrate how the ubiquitous presence of the Islamophobia arc is invisible yet dictates everyday behaviours and responses. In addition, framing masculinity via the Muslim gaze has intensified clear demarcations of what constitutes religious and/or ethnic dress. To extrapolate the continuous interplay in constructing a British Bangladeshi Muslim male identity via clothing, I explore this as paradigmatic of how stigma is located, consequently determining men’s sartorial choices. The article ends by considering how the socio-positioning qua the political landscape facilitates a structural restriction that trickles down to individual’s choices in what the appropriate Muslim male body can look like in the public sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• British Bangladeshis
• British Muslims
• Tower Hamlets
• identity
• Islamophobia
• Islam

Introduction

The nineteenth-century Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Datta once shocked his friends and acquaintances by attending a Raja’s party in full European dress. When the Raja asked him why he was not wearing the customary dhoti (waist-cloth) and chadar (shawl), the poet replied with a laugh: ‘If I came wearing them I’d have to help carry pitchers and napkins; but these are the clothes of the Ruling Race; so there’s no fear of that’. On another occasion, Datta was seen emerging from a lake, this time dressed in a dhoti. When a friend taunted him, ‘Where is your hat and coat now?’, the poet replied, ‘Man is many-formed: he takes on different forms according to the situation in which he finds himself’.

(Radice 1986, 203)

The above extract highlights some of the conflicting and contradictory ways in which racialized people define and often go through a process of (re)defining themselves vis-à-vis the dominant white expectation: adhering to a dress code that does not create unease for others to fit in (Redclift, Rajina, and Rashid 2022). Much of the current literature is preoccupied with dress practices concerning Muslim women’s bodies (Brown 2006; Haw 2009). Meanwhile, others have counteracted this saturated discourse by theorizing and exploring the anxieties around Muslim women’s dress and the push to consider its link to the War on Terror framing and its effect (Ghumkhor 2019; Rashid 2016). The hyper-focus on Muslim women has tended towards a fixation on the dichotomy of being oppressed therefore requiring legal interventions with the ban on clothing (Zempi 2019) or that such clothing choices stand in complete reverse to modernity and secularism. This article, in that sense, hopes to divert from the fixation on Muslim women and thereby interrogate the political imagination and (re)configuration of dress practices among British Bangladeshi Muslim men. I selected these three attires because of what they represent for Bangladeshis. The lungi and funjabi, although associated with Bangladeshis, carry different meanings in the diaspora than in Bangladesh. I want to consider how these two garments are worn in the UK and how they (re)appear in public. In contrast, the thobe projects an Islamic universalism not afforded to the first two garbs and carries a different form of visibility.

In so doing, I aim to focus on how British Bangladeshis of varying age groups interact with different forms of attire and what it means for their identity negotiation in the public sphere. First, the garments I focus on to explore how societal stigma (Goffman 1963; Toyoki and Brown 2014) operates in the choices made are the thobe, funjabi and lungi. Second, I use the research participants’ responses and their relations to the different attires by locating them with theoretical grounding pertaining to stigma to engage with the place of these garments. Finally, as a fundamental pivot of my research, I want to draw attention to the politics and political consequences of the dress choices made by the participants while also attending to what informs this choice. I thus attempt to conceptualize and name this marginal dressing. Marginal dressing, through the discursive landscape – an arrangement of ideas and imageries – places the pressure on marginalized Muslims, men and women, to dress in ways that make them legible as a non-danger to broader society. However, I want to consider how participants dilute their heritage identity while catering to a Muslim gaze. While broader political framings, space and locality inform sartorial choices, interrogating this requires understanding how racist and Islamophobic logic represents and asserts the trope of the ‘dangerous Muslim man’ (Bhattacharyya 2009; Razack 2004). Consequently, how the visual media has circulated this discursive imagining informs where such clothes are worn.

While considering what these clothes symbolize for the individuals interviewed, I also observe how subversion is employed in their sartorial choices. I will use the terms ‘clothes’ and ‘dress’ interchangeably. However, according to Tarlo (1996, 16), ‘clothes’ as a term is deemed detachable ‘thereby denying the very permanence they sometimes seem to suggest’, whereas ‘dress’ includes body modifications and supplements, thus giving it a broader application. The primary concern is how this discursive imagining of the Muslim, especially the Muslim man as dangerous becomes the key site where Muslim men code their agency to spatialize their Muslimness through dress. Locality here determines where the boundaries are drawn. Specific locations in East London allow the Muslim man to bring forth a Muslimness merged with their ethnic expressions not afforded in other public spaces. In particular, the prominence of Tower Hamlets for the British Bangladeshi imagination is crucial to capture, as it is the heartland of the Bangladeshi community (Alexander 2011). Wilson (2003, 2–3) makes the following argument to picturize how the spatial marking is coded through what the body wears:

A part of this strangeness of dress is that it links the biological body to the social being, and public to private. This makes it uneasy territory, since it forces us to recognise that the human body is more than a biological entity. It is an organism in culture, a cultural artefact even, and its own boundaries are unclear … .Dress is the frontier between the self and the not self.

The socio-political context plays a significant role in making sense of dress and how it is embodied. These three clothing pieces complicate the expression of Muslimness because they signify different identity articulations. In the dominant Islamic discourse globally, the thobe is repurposed as the garment to represent the Muslim male identity, diluting other expressions via other clothing in different parts of the world. The ummatic space centres the specific Arab male garb as cementing the global Muslim imaginary. The thobe can express an Islamic universality not possible with other dresses. If clothes carry politics, then the thobe, while operating as an ethnic dress, is extracted from the cultural sphere to one expressly aligned with religion. The thobe is usually associated with the Gulf states and forges itself simultaneously as only being associated with Muslimness beyond nationality or ethnicity. Tarlo (2010, 7) remarks how styles, ‘especially those regionally associated with the Middle East and North Africa’ are ‘being accorded the status of authentically “Islamic”’.

In this regard, ethnic dress, according to Eicher and Sumberg (1995, 300), is specifically worn ‘by members of one group to distinguish themselves from members of another by focusing on differentiation. Ethnic dress visually separates one group from another and can also involve other sensory aspects of dress’. This is further complicated by how the lungi and funjabi are posited to meet the demands of expressing one’s Muslimness. While both clothing items can simultaneously be deployed to signal belonging to a specific religious group, they can also merely signify one’s belonging to a particular ethnic group. For example, dhoti funjabi is usually associated with Bengali Hindus, while lungi with funjabi is associated with Bengali Muslims. Eicher and Sumberg (1995, 301) further argue that ‘ethnicity embraces ideas of group cohesion, of insiders versus outsiders, with boundaries that separate outsiders and insiders and symbols that identify members of a group as distinct from other groups. This “we-ness” includes a common heritage with a shared language, similar dress, manners, and lifestyle’.

Clothes, in any culture, are an essential aspect, as they function as an outward, prominent symbol of the culture concerned. They are also one of the first elements of a culture people can utilize to distinguish one group from another. The way one expresses oneself is referred to as ‘personal identity’. Goffman (1963, 57) defines ‘personal identity’ as ‘the assumption that the individual can be differentiated from all others’. Clothing can be seen as a vehicle to identify oneself with an ethnic or religious group, and ethnic and religious dresses can be seen as an expression of pride and love for one’s heritage and group cohesion. Clothes can also indicate the individual’s identity expression and demonstrate that ‘group inclusion and exclusion are made apparent through modifying and supplementing the body’ (Strübel 2012, 30). Such expressions of ethnic and religious identities are embodied through managing wider societal stigmas attributed to Muslim men but also from members of their own ethnic and religious communities, explored further below.

An interesting point to have arisen during my research is the mention of a politician from Bangladesh who was known for wearing the lungi everywhere he went. Alom (early 50s, interviewed in January, 2014) and Shamim (mid 20s, interviewed in November, 2013) – both grew up in East London, with the former arriving in the UK as a child while the latter was born and raised in Tower Hamlets. They both spoke of Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani, a religious scholar and political leader in British India and later in East Pakistan. Alom mentions: ‘We have a famous politician, I don’t know if you know of, Maulana Bhashani. He used always to wear lungi wherever he went’. Shamim, on the other hand, goes into much more detail, relating the story of the politician’s presence in his father’s political life:

My dad used to do something really funny. He used to be very well dressed, at home he would still wear a shirt and a jumper at home and then he’d wear a lungi. I found it really interesting. My dad, on purpose, he’s a very educated man, very well known, and when he saw people wearing lungis much in Brick Lane, he used to walk out in a lungi, he didn’t care coz he never didn’t care. He used to have this political leader that he was following in Bangladesh his name was Abdul Hamid Bashani, my dad was like quite high up in his political party and that guy came to the UK in a lungi, boarded the plane, came to the UK in a lungi – very similar to what Gandhi did in his dhoti, so there was a demonstration, which is ‘I am here but I am me and if I am from somewhere else this is a part of it’.

The comparison with Gandhi’s dhoti is an intriguing one who wore the loincloth as a ‘sign of India’s dire poverty and of the need to improve its wealth through swadeshi¹ and a wholesale rejection of European civilization’ (Tarlo 1996, 75). Gandhi arrived in London in 1931 wearing his loincloth ‘where he had been invited to participate in the Round Table Conference, he argued that it was his duty to the poor that he refused to wear more clothes’ (ibid). He wore the loincloth throughout his stay in Britain, refusing to compromise his dress, even in front of King George V at Buckingham Palace. It functioned as a symbol of asserting his anti-colonial identity. Much has been written about the political career of Maulana Bhashani (Uddin 2015). However, there is no mention of his lungi, which he wore at political rallies and events, as seen in the images used by Custers (2010). I would argue that Bhashani was making a statement about bourgeois politics by wearing the lungi just as much as Gandhi was with his dhoti against the British.

Methodology

In total, 43 British Bangladeshi Muslims were interviewed in semi-structured interviews with individuals offering to participate in the project. To identify the research participants, I used the snowballing technique and social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, to recruit research participants to ensure that the sample was representative. The snowballing method involves current networks and contacts to help find initial research participants, which would help generate more research participants. I also contacted a broader range of relevant organizations and drew on contacts from the participants to ensure sample selectivity was minimized. Most interviews were conducted in English, a few in Sylheti, and occurred in participants’ homes, cafes, local community centres, and libraries. Conducting the interviews in locations comfortable for the participants was essential in ensuring the participants were as relaxed as possible, helping to minimize any power asymmetry between the researcher and participants. The interviews lasted approximately half an hour to 3 hours. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, with pseudonyms used in all cases. The data was coded using Nvivo, and thematic analysis (Joffe 2012; Riger and Sigurvinsdottir 2016) was employed to analyse the data. The examples of data chosen to illustrate the argument are those coded under a theme labelled ‘clothes’ and ‘dress’ followed by ‘fe/male’ and ‘wo/men’. None of the men interviewed wore the lungi, funjabi or the thobe during the interview.

The (re)negotiation of the lungi qua thobe

The lungi is a sarong-like attire worn by men, usually in a hot climate where wearing trousers would otherwise be very unpleasant. The lungi is designed in a skirt style, sometimes easily confused with the dhoti (famously worn by Gandhi), although this is more linear, like sheets. The lungi is worn in Bangladesh’s public and private spheres. It is important to note that while Bangladesh utilizes the lungi as a national dress, no male head of state has ever worn it to any state function because, in Bangladesh, the attire is associated with ‘the working class’ (Ullah 2018). I will argue, however, that the lungi’s value and meanings are remade in the diaspora in East London, and class is not a contributing variable. I also present data to showcase how the lungi rarely appears in public and is confined to the domestic sphere. The thobe is an ankle-length, long-sleeved and robe-like garment worn primarily by men in the Middle East and North Africa, with each nation’s unique styling.

The findings showed that the lungi came to be confined to the private sphere, i.e. the home, and only brought into the public sphere for Friday prayers, Jummah. The interview quotes below reveal how it is the elderly Bangladeshi men, referred to as the murobbis (the respectable elders, usually retired) who came to the UK as young men in the 1950s and 1960s (Riaz 2016) that wear the lungi in public. I interviewed Sohaib (mid 30s, interviewed in January, 2014) in Whitechapel in the Pie Factory opposite East London Mosque. This halal restaurant is run by Muslims, reviving the East End, working-class traditional staple food of pie and mash, sharing recipes and its history on their painted walls. They are reviving an old East End tradition and adding flavours from the South Asian palette, such as spicy chicken tikka pie. Sohaib, whose parents came to Britain, was dressed in a suit and is a lawyer. When we spoke about how men identify with traditional Bengali clothes, he states:

So I wear the funjabi and the fyjama and the lungi; not lungi so much. Some people do, for Jummah; some of the elders, they wear lungi with the funjabi. But it’s not – maybe it’s because of the cold in this country. … but I think it’s just not done around here. I wouldn’t want to be the odd one out.

Sohaib’s response indicates that the lungi is adopted by the first group of Bangladeshi men who migrated to Britain, who are most likely those in their 50s and 60s, retaining the tradition of wearing it for Jummah. The suggestion that he does not want to be the ‘odd one out’ is pivoted around how a particular subjectivity can avert the stigma, qualifying wearing it as inappropriate. Goffman (1963) describes this as people feeling obliged to ‘fit in’ to some degree, but how they do this is dependent on context. However, the lungi’s presence in the public sphere, in this case across mosques in East London, could also be incorporated into the ‘private sphere’. For example, the first generation who arrived in the area and settled there are already familiar with the local landscape, characterized by face-to-face relations rooted in close personal and emotional ties, especially kinship. Begum (2023, 17), who traces the history of the Bengali squatters in 1970s East London, argues that for ‘Bengali migrants, home extended to zones outside of the physical space, which in Sylhet is known as para.’

In that sense, I would argue that Sohaib recognized the presence of para for a specific generation of Bangladeshis and the extension of the home. However, in its current articulation, the para is being remade by a younger Bangladeshi cohort where the public and private are demarcated differently. The individual, in that regard, is not entirely disqualified from the social fabric (Goffman 1963) of acceptance because of the way the para (neighbourhood) facilitates safety whilst simultaneously presenting the need to answer to a different gaze: the social stigma from peers. The particularities around marginal dressing here are conceptualized through a generational shift with a change in what constitutes appropriate clothing for Friday prayers. Respectability politics operates alongside marginal dressing too. The (re)presentation Bangladeshi men acculturated in Britain seek to adhere to is confined to seeking social approval from their peers. Khalid (mid 20s, interviewed in January, 2014) met me in a café in Canary Wharf after finishing work at the local council. He wore smart trousers, a white shirt, and a brown blazer. We found a quiet spot in the café, and he smiled when we started speaking about the lungi. He mentioned how his dad sometimes wears the lungi with a funjabi for Jummah, but he has never done so himself:

Me:

Do you not wear lungi?

Khalid:

I don’t know. I very rarely wear it (laughs). Lungis are amazing, they’re really amazing.

Me:

But yet you don’t wear it?

Khalid:

Yeah, I don’t wear it because I’m uncomfortable. I’m used to wearing shorts in the house. No, I do akhta (sometimes). I’m not against it. I do wear lungi sometimes at home. Absolutely, only at home. Never-

Me:

Never to the Jummah?

Khalid:

Never ever. Put it this way, when David Beckham wore his sarong, he got plastered for that, he got absolutely laid for that, if I spend time in my house in my lungi, people are going to think I’m a crazy guy. Again, you’re thinking about what other people are going to think of you.

Sohaib, who does not want to be the ‘odd one out’ while Khalid is concerned about ‘what other people think of you’ require further dissection. Stigma and respectability politics are present in both expressions and how such tensions inform sartorial choices while resting on the assumption of how they will be perceived in the public sphere even when this public sphere is a part of the para. Perception, in this instance, is crucial to maintaining the integrity and adhering to the dress code appropriately sanctioned by the wider dominant messaging. Goffman’s (1963, 3) definition of stigma as ‘an attribute that is deeply discrediting’ resonates powerfully with the ‘social marking’ produced by these men’s peers.

The Bangladeshis raised in the UK, even if they arrived as young children, adopt the thobe as the marker of their Muslimness while disengaging with the lungi. Although a specific garment hailing from the Arabian peninsula, the thobe has come to signify Muslimness. It emerged as the de-facto dress for Muslim men with the heightened experience of Islamophobia since the commencement of the War on Terror. This resulted in Muslim men of various ethnic backgrounds forging a stronger Muslim identity, placing the thobe as the appropriate garb to (re)present Muslims, diluting other sartorial experiences of Muslimness. The assumption would be that with the increase of Islamophobia, there would be a reduction in openly (re)presenting one’s Muslimness. However, Tarlo (2010, 7) notes that since 9/11, increasing numbers of young Muslim men in Britain have adopted beards and, to a lesser extent, caps and thobes (robes), and that some attempts are being made to develop new visibly Muslim men’s fashions adapted to a Western environment. This open visibility is due to reacting against the pressures of being Muslim and placing the limitations of wearing the thobe within specific localities and spaces. The marginal dressing of the thobe is thus relegated to Friday prayers with the congregation’s safety and Tower Hamlets operating as a safe area with a significant Muslim demographic.

On the other hand, Mohammed (early 40s, interviewed in March, 2014) spoke fondly of the lungi but also confined it to the private sphere, in this case, specifically to be worn at home. He notes:

[There] was an East London mosque run – run for your mosque – so what I said was: I’m gonna do something different. So I wore my lungi and did the running, you know, and we did another thing; another one of my friends, he actually said for charity he would wear lungi from Scotland to London, and he did it. But I think the lungis would be a clothing within the home.

Mohammed’s father came to the UK first, and he grew up seeing the lungi worn indoors but did not elaborate on whether men should wear it outside the homes. Interestingly, the use of the lungi as part of a charity campaign indicates its temporary and gimmicky position, and appearance, in the public sphere, as it is a type of ‘craze’ charity campaigns will do to attract attention since it is projected as an odd piece of clothing to wear. Goffman (1963, 107) suggests that when ‘closely allied with his own kind or not, the stigmatized individual may exhibit identity ambivalence when he obtains a close sight of his own kind behaving in a stereotyped way, flamboyantly or pitifully acting out the negative attribute’. However, it is worth noting that the temporality of a charity campaign and wearing an attire deemed appropriate for the home only illustrates how stigma is reduced. Wearing it for a charity campaign not only helps reduce the stigma but also helps manage the potential discrediting of a person. Therefore, by avoiding the tainting, temporality here allows to politically retrieve and subvert with the lungi without devaluing the people involved.

Ismail (mid 40s, interviewed in March, 2014), who came to the UK first in his family, stated his love for the lungi and how he and his friend tried to revive the wearing of the lungi and created ‘the lungi movement’ because he thinks ‘that’s the best thing ever invented for men. It’s just amazing’. When I asked him if he wears it at home, he responded:

I wear it. And I wear the genji (vest top) as well. Anyone that goes Bangladesh they always bring me lungi and genji, that’s all I ever ask for. But I think I tried it with my sons but it’s not happening, they just want their pjs. But it’s gone. It’s a shame.

He also recalls wearing the lungi and the funjabi to Jummah as a child. However, now as an adult attends Friday prayers with a funjabi and wears it with trousers rather than the lungi. As can be noted above, Khalid does not wear the lungi, only sometimes, but to his discomfort. He laughed whilst discussing the lungi because it is like a kilt worn without undergarments. This point was further reiterated by Faruk (mid 40s, interviewed in April, 2014), who noted: ‘I don’t wear lungi, I just feel uncomfortable in a lungi … (laughs) I won’t go into the actual reason why I don’t wear it it’s quite embarrassing I don’t want to say, it feels like a kilt (laughs)’. Shaju (late 20s, interviewed in December, 2014), on the other hand, expressed his love for the lungi and explained:

I wear it at home. If there wasn’t a stigma attached to it and if the weather was nicer I’d wear it all day. It doesn’t make sense, does it? If it’s comfortable, wear it.

As discussed in the above comments, the lungi carries a sense of embarrassment and shame. Its sarong-like style renders the garment too ‘feminine’. Shaju’s reference to the stigma attached to it is also noteworthy, as Goffman (1963) insists that there are expected identity norms, a general feature in every society and community. Thus, to avoid the stigma, wearing the lungi is confined to the home unless it appears in the public sphere as a temporary feature for a cause or campaign. This specific experience of stigma stems from the gaze of fellow Bangladeshis, particularly peers who, like the participants, grew up in East London. As a result, the participants want to access what Goffman (1963, 74) claims are the ‘great rewards of being considered “normal”’. Having internalized a sense of shame and particular meanings with the lungi, the participants avert it by relegating it to the private sphere, as they redraw the boundaries of the para differently to the elders. Notably, the stigma associated with the lungi appears to shrink or is non-existent for those classified as the murobbis (senior members/elders of the community). Stigma here operates within the logics of the significance male participants attribute to the lungi, articulating the desire to ensure there is no perception of being ‘backward’.

To contend with how dress is (re)presented in the public sphere, it is worth considering Bridgwood’s argument that ‘men’s bodies and dress convey different messages’ because ‘a man’s presence is dependent on the promise of power, whether moral, physical, temperamental, economic, social or sexual, which he embodies’ (Bridgwood 1995, 43). The perception of the lungi representing ‘backwardness’ is eloquently illustrated in Haq’s poem, ‘Ode on the Lungi’, who writes:

Hegemony invades private space

as well: my cousin in America

would get home from work

and lounge in a lungi –

till his son grew ashamed

of dad and started hiding

the ‘ridiculous ethnic attire’ (2008, p. 141)

The association of the word ‘backward’s with Muslim and, by extension, to ‘Asian’, although this is often done concerning Muslim women, is frequent (Mirza and Meetoo 2018; Zine 2006). Pathan and Jha (2022) have presented how the wearing of the lungi in the Indian context forms a visual aesthetic of the backward and religiously orthodox Muslim male and is associated with Bangladeshi Muslims in the Assam context. They further contend that ‘this popular stereotype is usually associated with male bodies as they are more visible in public spaces compared to their female counterparts’ (Pathan and Jha 2022, 154). In that regard, the permissible image a Muslim, male or female, can embody in the public sphere is when it conforms to the dominant society’s projection of what encompasses the ‘good’ Muslim man (Isakjee 2016). The plight of not wearing the lungi even within the para accentuates one key dimension: the shunning from peers who will associate it with a specific generation, but precisely because the lungi looks outwardly like a skirt, bringing forth questions around masculinity and its performance in the public realm. In this case, masculinity must be asserted amongst peers because of the dominant acculturation that a skirt is a ‘feminine’ garment. However, those who continue to wear the lungi, feel removed from the stigma, suspending the need to cater to the dominant white, assimilationist gaze because of the safety of the para.

The (In)visibility of the funjabi and thobe

The discussion vis-à-vis the funjabi did not explicitly include the role of stigma as it did with the lungi. In fact, the research participants found the attire more acceptable. With the lungi explicitly confined to the home spaces, the funjabi had more flexibility. However, it was still restricted to Jummah, as with the thobe, and for special occasions like Eid. The funjabi (pronounced with an ‘f’ by Sylhetis and also known as shalwar punjabi suit) consists of wearing a kameez (a long tunic) or kurta (a tunic). Despite this, in Sylheti, funjabi only refers to the top garment. It can be worn with slim shalwar pyjamas (pronounced fyjamas by Sylhetis), jeans, or any other form of trousers. Alom provided a more historical grounding of what he saw men wearing while growing up in Tower Hamlets in the 1980s. Alom expands on how, when he moved to East London in the 1980s, the lungi and funjabi were not clothes visible on the streets of East London. An extract from the interview below illustrates his points:

Me:

When you moved to East London in the ‘80s, was it visible, women wearing saris in your generation?

Alom:

There weren’t women there when I came to East London in the 80s. It was all single men and all the men wore clothes that other, I guess white people were wearing in East London at the time. So they were into flares, bell bottoms, platform shoes. And later on, many of our young men were into fashion, so they would wear Italian clothes, Italian shirts, socks, Farah trousers. Whatever was in fashion, polo shirts and stuff. Yeah, there were no women, really. The only few women that were here would wear the sari. There were a few of our parents generation and they were wearing the saris, yes.

It is interesting to note how flexibility and heterogeneity with clothes are extended to the male body but less so to a female’s body, as Alom states how men perhaps refrain from wearing the lungi due to the cold but then also notes that:

[E]ven then I think most Bengali women still wear the sari, regardless of how cold it may be. The men don’t really wear funjabi or the lungi but older women, our parents’ generation, our mothers’ generation, they still wear the sari. … [P]eople do wear traditional clothing at special events. So Boishakhi Mela, most people do turn up in white saree with red border or men in fyjamas, funjabis, not lungi. Because I think lungi is seen as more something that you wear at home. So if you’re going to formal event, then you wear the funjabi and fyjamas.

Stigma is repurposed by men who were more visible in the public sphere and were responsive to the contemporary fashion around them. This, Goffman contends, is a way for the individual to ‘reduce tension, that is, to make it easier for himself and the others to withdraw covert attention from the stigma, and to sustain spontaneous involvement in the official content of the interaction’ (1963, 102). The identification prioritized ‘merging’ with the dominant culture. Much later, there is a potent desire to prioritize identification with the deen while working through ways to minimize the othering (Moll 2007). Harris and Karimshah (2018, 624), in their research on Muslims navigating stigma in Australia, found that ‘practices of “normality” are closely aligned with the accumulation of certain forms of Whiteness as well as the disavowal of “Third Worldness”: a stigma with not only racialized contours but those of culture, class and religion’. The pursuit of whiteness is not necessarily a concern for the research participants, as much of their preoccupations with stigma is related to their peers, i.e. other Muslims and Bangladeshi Muslims, in particular. Nonetheless, the disavowal of their heritage identity is not entirely disregarded. Instead, that is (re)negotiated to ensure their expressions of Muslimness is aligned with the Muslim gaze. Also, celebrating the Bengali New Year (Boishakhi Mela) makes marginal dressing possible because of location, with Tower Hamlets providing the space to express these overlapping identities (Alexander 2019).

Some male participants struggled to answer questions about male clothes during the fieldwork. For example, when asked about dress and identity, many male participants only responded with references to female clothes. And when I mentioned the lungi many of them would sit up straight and feel shy because it is an intimate piece of clothing, functioning similarly to the kilt, usually worn without undergarments. Others sat in silence, trying to figure out how they felt about clothes and what it meant for their sartorial choices, speculating that many presumed the project, while looking at dress and identity in the Bangladeshi community, was solely going to focus on women. This indicated how much the canon’s fixture and hyper-focus on the specialising of the British Muslim woman’s body is reflected in the discursive focus from the male participants. This was possibly the first time the male participants were ever asked about what clothes meant to them, how they made their choices and what informed such choices.

Clothes and which attires one chooses to wear become part of how people formulate their self-image and self-understanding. Tarlo (1996, 17) argues that ‘just as clothes can challenge social and political norms as much as they uphold them, so they can conceal identities as much as they reveal them’. The claim around concealing, however, resonates the least because the argument below considers how these Muslim men subvert in the face of stigma, thus participating in the desire to reveal an ‘undanger’ whilst being lauded within the wider UK political sphere as ‘dangerous men’ (Bhattacharyya 2009). Although, I would argue that this is the case with the thobe more than the funjabi because, in the broader dominant framing of the Muslim, the funjabi is not the imagined garb for Muslims. The funjabi, also, unlike the lungi, carries a class-blindness, although this is context dependent, conditional on the occasion you are wearing the funjabi along with the cut and material. For example, Khan and Sharma (2020, 221–224) found that for Eid celebrations in Bangladesh, ‘boys wear Punjabi clothes’ while the lungi is ‘offered by the rich to the poor as Zakat’.²

One participant who spoke in detail about the funjabi and what it meant for her father was a female Bangladeshi participant. Shaheda (mid 20s, interviewed in May, 2014), a young Bangladeshi born and raised in the East End, who came to the café in a hijab and jilbab, spoke fondly of her memories of her father’s sartorial choices while sipping her hot drink after tucking away her work lanyard. She associated her father’s change in clothing with his increasing religiosity, shaping these new sartorial choices. She explained below:

My dad, more so after he got married to my mum, especially by the time my second brother came along. Before, he was the full flare wearing, you know, long hair … everything … but after being with my mum she kind of brought him more onto the more religious path and now, he’s, you know … always wearing the funjabi, he’s got the whole, you know, beard, Whenever he’s talking to someone, religion always crops up.

Following marriage, Shaheda’s father ‘activated’ his Islamic identity by wearing the funjabi, enabling him to explore and express his religiosity to the outside world. Once again, Shaheda’s father’s expression of his religious identity demonstrates how the wearing of the funjabi is associated with identifying with a religious identity, attaching his heritage to the garment. Outsiders can locate him as a Bengali because of the funjabi, and how, within the UK, would also attribute it to his dedication to his faith. Dwyer et al (2008) similarly observed how Muslim men merged their Muslim identity into other expressions of the self and how they were visible and consciously asserted in public daily. The lungi, conversely, is a piece of clothing strictly associated with an ethnic/heritage identity expression with no explicit religious connotations.

Ismail, whom I interviewed in his office in Central London, addresses the debate around male religious dress. He was dressed in a pair of trousers with a shirt and blazer while thinking through his conception of religious clothes. He expressed how it vastly differed from that of his father, who believed that the funjabi functioned as the garment to identify with one’s religion. Ismail contends: ‘that’s not to say he is wrong because the Prophet (saw) used to wear long shirts along that line, but it’s not Islamic dress, that’s what the Prophet (saw) used to wear’. While Jassim (late 30s, interviewed in February, 2014) asserts that the thobe is a recent phenomenon, affirming the observation and theory that it has appeared as a popular garment for Muslim men to express an ummatic self post 9/11:

The very fact that we choose to dress in a particular way is no accident. There are conscious choices we make. When you look at our fathers, the way they dress, the funjabis, although the thobes are more of a recent phenomenon. But back home many of our people, whether religious or secular, they did dress in a very, very elegant semi-Bengali religious way.

Circumstances, in this instance, dictate what can be worn in the public sphere to avoid mockery from others or wearing the funjabi to Jummah, which is regarded as more acceptable for men and carries no stigma among peers. Respectability politics and acceptance from others are essential for many and function as measures for determining the choice of clothing, thus cultural identification. Ismail contends that the funjabi has room for an Islamic positioning because Prophet Muhammed also wore something similar, asserting that whatever Muslim men wear, it has to align with the Sunnah.³ On the other hand, the thobe has forged a specific presence in the Bangladeshi community. Islamophobia and defilement in society for British Bangladeshi Muslim men have meant the possibility of (re)creating a relationship of oneness with a perceived global Muslim community, the Ummah. In addition, the Islamic revival movements at varying stages (Rawlinson 2021), not to mention its proliferation post-7/7, have shaped Muslims’ identities and their sartorial choices (Hamid 2011). Tarlo (2020, 385) notes the rise in Islamic fashion and the demand for trendy thobes as an avenue to encourage ‘young Muslim men and boys “to dress Islamically”’. However, this expression of oneness inextricably homogenizes Muslim men, suspending the possibility of expressing Muslimness from different geographical locations and cultures.

In a way, as Bangladeshi Muslim men have discursively consumed sets of imageries and tropes around Muslims for over two decades, thus the subversion to Islamophobia appears in the form of appropriating the stigma-ed identity and repurposing it to counter this dominant discourse. However, this repurposing is done moreso through the thobe than the lungi and/or funjabi. The funjabi was regarded as more of a religious garment than the lungi. The cited interviews above showcase how many attributed religiosity to the funjabi because they grew up observing their uncles, fathers, and other male members of their families wearing it to the mosque. However, others located the funjabi as a marker of one’s ethnicity here in the UK, marking out one’s Bengali heritage and having no relation to Islam. Despite some relegating the funjabi as a non-religious garment, they would still wear it for Jummah. So, in social interactions, Goffman (1963, 6) argues, ‘there is some expectation on all sides that those in a given category should not only support a particular norm but also realize it’. In that regard, whether it is the lungi, funjabi or the thobe, all are, to some degree, worn and visible in Tower Hamlets. The garment with the most visibility is the thobe denoting an explicit Islamic and Muslim identity. With the borough’s sizable Muslim demographic, marginal dressing is a possibility in the borough. However, this is done through a meta-negotiation to ensure their sartorial choices align with their fellow Bangladeshi Muslims and other Muslims they encounter.

Conclusion

Goffman (1963) delicately identifies that in any society, the desire not to be discredited is heightened, and this is, I would argue, omnipresent for Muslims at a macro and micro level. Just like the veiled female Muslim body is imbued with backwardness, the Muslim male encounters this too – albeit informed via a liberal muscular underpinning of society. By focusing on British Bangladeshi Muslim men, I have attempted to showcase how men partake in separate negotiations compared to women. The men’s sartorial choices, although also informed by geopolitical moments, especially the thobe, are not bound by the gaze of the state. The state has, at times, started or inflamed discussions about Muslim women and their clothing, but this has not been the case with Muslim men. It would be untrue to suggest that the thobe does not carry particular meanings because it has been ‘perceived as an indicator of religious fanaticism or political extremism’ (Tarlo 2020, 385). However, it has never, in the way the hijab or niqab have, informed changes in legislation, as has been the case in numerous European countries. On the contrary, the Muslim male body, extracted from embodying clothing, has been used to legislate the danger Muslim men present via terrorism.

The research participants showed how the lungi and funjabi serve different purposes: the former is entirely located within the domestic space to avoid stigma-related pokings from peers and younger British Bangladeshi Muslim men. The latter exhibited a more fluid presence with different religio-cultural framings. Meanwhile, there appears to be an acceptable presence of the thobe as providing a more uniform way of (re)presenting one’s Muslimness. Although discussed as something stifling a community or individual, stigma is facilitating the possibility of a paradigm shift for Bangladeshi Muslim men and redefining the boundaries of the para. This shift is enabled by internalizing a form of masculinity that aligns with the dominant underpinnings informed by the Muslim gaze. That is to say that the Muslim male has to calibrate masculinity with most Muslims around him and ensure the encounters with stigma are minimized. The findings suggest that the locality informs the marginal dressing involving the three clothing items where Tower Hamlets, operating as a Muslim-majority borough, aids ease for Bangladeshi Muslim men to negotiate their sartorial choices.

Acknowledgements

I would firstly like to thank Luisa Calvete Portela Barbosa and Hafsa Kanjwal for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. I am grateful to all the participants who shared their insights. Last but not least, a thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and useful suggestions for the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The swadeshi (Indian-made) movement became a significant movement against the British in order to ‘restore a declining Indian economy’ (Tarlo 1996, 11). The swadeshi movement surfaced in the Bengal because ‘some of the earliest attempts to redefine Indian dress emerged in Calcutta’ (Tarlo 1996, 58).

2. Charity, an obligation on Muslims to distribute 2.5% of their wealth.

3. The religious norms built on the example set by the Prophet Mohammed.