Polish & Purity

This has apparently been a thing for a while, but recently I saw an article about "halal" nail polish. Muslims are supposed to wash before prayer (face, hands, feet). According to some Islamic scholars, water has to touch all the skin, otherwise the washing is somehow invalid. The general consensus seems to be that nail polish, being water-impermeable, prevents complete washing, therefore Muslim women cannot wear nail polish and pray. To meet this problem, some companies have invented polishes that are oxygen- and water-permeable.

At best, I can only believe the scholars who came up with this interpretation are stupidly nit-picky. Like Monsura Sirajee, I think this injunction has more to do with avoiding “corrupting” Western influences, and/or just the bog-standard misogyny often found in the Abrahamic traditions.

It seems to me that this interpretation completely misses the point of the washing, which is not unique to Islam; people wash their hands before entering Shinto shrines in Japan, and while it's not exactly hand-washing, dipping one's finger into the font of holy water at the entrance of a Catholic church to make the sign of the cross is a ritual procedure along the continuum of washing rites. Washing off actual dirt isn't the point.

This point about dirt is emphasized in the Quran itself, in the very sura that outlines ritual ablutions performed prior to prayer. Sura 5:6 states, “But if you are ill, or on a journey, or one of you has come from satisfying a call of nature, or you have touched women, and you find no water, then resort to clean earth, and wipe therewith your faces and your hands.” What, after all, is the meaning of “clean earth?” One cannot wash dirt with dirt, so how is it clean, and what is clean earth washing away?

All of this water is part of an initial act designed to set one off in space and time. Washing is the act of leaving the profane, everyday world, and entering into the sacred, whether it's actually entering into a sacred space like a mosque, or entering into a sacred activity like prayer. Being concerned with removing physical pollution is to miss sight of the aim of ritual ablutions, which is the removal of ritual pollution. The everyday world is impure, is dirty, a term we use even if, perhaps especially if, we're not speaking of actual dirt. It's this kind of abstract dirt, this metaphorical dirt of the world, that ritual washing prior to entering sacred space or time or activity is meant to remove. Permeability of nail polish has nothing to do with that.

But perhaps nail polish is an outward sign of a more pervasive dirtiness, as far as certain purveyors of Islamic jurisprudence are concerned. We see a clue to this in the verse above, that simply “touching” a woman (wink-wink nudge-nudge) apparently renders a person – that is, a man – unclean in a way that needs purification. The burden of ritual pollution lies squarely upon women, and interpreting nail polish as a literal barrier to ritual purity simply adds to that burden.

I think, rather than inventing new polishes, what is needed is new schools of Islamic jurisprudence.