Dear Editor,
In the conversation between Professor Dawkins and Mr Joseph Cohen (Yousef Al Katab), as rendered by Mr Justin de Freitas (‘Clash of Cultures,’ SN July 12), Cohen-Katab used a phrase I find very intruiging: “dress them like whores.” What puzzles me is how Cohen-Katab knows how to define the dress of a whore/prostitute/commercial sex worker (CSW), given that such dress is absent (supposedly) from the fundamentalist society from which he draws inspiration.
The miniskirt and other similarly ‘revealing dresses’ were only invented in the late 1950s, whereas prostitution, reputed to be the world’s oldest profession, is as old as mankind and womankind. One wonders how CSW used to dress in the ‘olden days’ such as in Old Testament or New Testament or early Islamic times. Did they dress differently from their more ‘chaste’ counterparts? Would we be able to differentiate between the Holy Virgin Mary (Miriam is the correct Jewish name) and the other Mary out of whom Yeshua cast seven devils (7 men who raped her), by their mode of dress? Or is prostitution more a state of behaviour than a mode of dress?
Examples of prostitutes abound in the Bible: Tamar (Genesis 38) covered herself with a veil and wrapped herself and sat in an open place to fool Judah her father-in-law into having commercial sex with her after he broke his promise to give his last son to her in marriage; Rahab the harlot (Joshua 2 – 6) who later married one of Yehosua’s generals, Salmon; the two harlots (1 Kings 3) in the well-known story of Solomon having to decide whose child it was; the woman at the well (John 4) who had six lovers, the woman caught in adultery (John 8) – the offending man was set free; the woman (Luke 7) who washed Yeshua’s feet.
Although Proverbs 7: 10 does speak of the “attire of an harlot,” no detailed description is given and we are left none the wiser, but can only speculate and try to draw inferences as best as we could.
Perhaps, in those days prostitutes were recognized by the way they walked, caused, possibly, by their mode of commerce. Recently, a doctor who examined a female skeleton recovered from the ruins of Pompeii-Herculaneum (destroyed by volcano in 79 CE), remarked that the structure of the hip bone strongly resembled that of a modern CSW the doctor had once examined. Interestingly, the association of the demotic Greek word ‘saulos,’ referring to the swinging gait of prostitutes, with the good Hebrew name ‘Saul’ may be the reason that the great apostle changed his name to Paul (EW Barnes, The Rise of Christianity, 1947 and D. H. Akenson, Saint Saul, 2000).
The good apostle left no advice on how to determine a woman’s chasteness by her mode of dress, since in his time both genders were appropriately clad as the Mediterranean and semi-arid climate demanded. He gave good advice, though, on behaviour and state of mind. His spiritual mentor, Yeshua, warned against looking and lusting after woman (Matt 5:28). Given that most women in those days were well-covered and knowing the hearts of men, Yeshua certainly knew what he was talking about, as to this day, men still look and lust after well-covered grandmothers and diapered babes in arms to rape them.
The mode of dress of the semi-naked to naked indigenous peoples of the tropics does show that people have no concept of nudity until it is introduced to them. Should we serpent-like try to destroy the Adam and Eve innocence of those peoples by introducing them to religious fundamentalism? One day, if a global catastrophe were to strike, those innocent hunter-gathers would survive to perpetuate humankind, while we hypocritical agriculturalist-industrialists will perish from the face of the Earth. Meanwhile, there ought to be no clash of cultures, but to each, his own.
Yours faithfully,
M Xiu Quan-Balgobind-Hackett
