Twentieth-century texts show the relationship between Muslim tailors, their trade and their faith

In 1909, Sheikh Khwaja Muhammad, an “expert in the art of sewing” and a tailor in the city of Allahabad, published a short, seven-page history of his trade through a small local press. Titled the Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah (The treatise of Idris), the community history articulated a Muslim past for tailors, known in Urdu as darzīs or khayāt̤s. Tracing the precepts of sewing to the Prophet Idris (Enoch), Khwaja Muhammad sought to provide a religious lineage for Muslim tailors in North India. In doing so, he spoke to and for members of an artisan community that sought new forms of social status in the context of stratified North Indian Muslim society.

Framing the work of tailors as a divinely inspired art with a prophetic genealogy, Khwaja Muhammad claimed that it was Idris who first sewed a garment to clothe himself and that tailoring skills were revealed to him by God. He maintained that sewing was “perfect and complete” upon its revelation to Idris and that the responsibility of contemporary tailors was to pass on this knowledge. He went on to position tailors as fundamental to Muslim belief and practice. He referenced, for instance, the “holy tunic” (pīrāhan-i sharīf) that the Prophet Muhammad wore on the night of his ascension to heaven (miʿraj), noting that the garment was made following the principles revealed to Idris.

In addition to providing a Muslim past for sewing, Khwaja Muhammad articulated a set of moral and social precepts for tailors. The Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah taught Muslim tailors not only how to be good Muslims but also how to demonstrate their religious piety through their trade. For a young or apprenticed tailor to fail to adhere to these precepts and morals would, in Khwaja Muhammad’s terms, “bring shame to the teacher and unemployment to the student.”

“These are the rules that the eternal tailor [khayāt̤-i azal], the pure God, taught the Prophet Idris,” he wrote, describing first how a tailor must stay outwardly and inwardly pure and say bismillah and other prayers over his needle and other tools. For instance, in his fourth rule – for cutting fabric – he declared: “When you take scissors in your hand, recite this prayer: ‘God is truly most strong and mighty.’ And when you begin to cut, recite ‘Children of Adam, did I not command you not to serve Satan, for he was your sworn enemy.’” Khwaja Muhammad’s valorisation of the piety and religious genealogy of tailors was published and circulated in a competitive North Indian artisanal knowledge economy. By the time of its publication, other writers and educators also sought to explain the work of sewing in print.

For instance, just two years earlier, in 1907, another, notably different text about sewing was printed in Lucknow, 220 kilometres to the northwest. Written by a woman named Shabihunnisa, this alternative narrative of how to sew was titled Muft kā darzī (The free tailor; free in the sense of costless, not independent). The 60-page, heavily illustrated manual sought to train young women to be seamstresses, as well as the basics of weaving and embroidery. It was written, according to Shabihunnisa, to “provide full aid” to the “teachers at girls’ schools when they teach how to cut patterns and sew clothes.” Shabihunnisa’s manual focused on the styles of hats, vests, tunics, and coats popular in the region, providing a series of patterns for her students to use, her text emphasizing technological flexibility. Shabihunnisa – a teacher at a state-aided Muslim-led girls’ school in the town of Belahra (also spelt Bilehra), located 60 kilometres from Lucknow – emphasised the use of the hand-powered sewing machines alongside scissors, thimbles, and needles, and provided patterns for clothes ranging from North Indian kurta pajamas to a European-style waistcoat and a “Turkish hat.”

For Shabihunnisa, sewing was a form of practical knowledge that could ensure the economic stability and social respectability of her students. It was, moreover, a skill that was appropriate for Muslim women, and a trade that could be executed from the home. Sewing, she claimed, could enable women to secure economic standing without necessarily entering male-dominated social spaces, thus protecting what she saw as a Muslim, feminine morality.

A member of a prominent landholding family, Shabihunnisa dedicated herself to the moral and economic uplift of Muslim women in her region. She sought to initiate poorer girls – those who did not have access to the sort of home education in which she was trained – into ashrāf (genteel) understandings of feminine social respectability. But unlike Khwaja Muhammad, the author of the Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah, she did not tie the practice of sewing and creating garments to the Muslim social and religious identities of the makers. To her, sewing was a skill that served a purpose and promised economic uplift, rather than an intimate part of a tailor’s religious practice and moral development.

This distinction – between the intrinsic piety of specific labour practices and the possibility of a pious life through economic uplift – set community trade histories, such as the Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah, apart from textbooks or treatises written by elite Muslims. Reading the two texts together reveals conflicts over the definition and practice of pious labour between workers and the Muslim middle class, as well as a contestation of the popular gendering of a trade. Reading the Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah alongside the Muft kā darzī emphasizes that Sheikh Khwaja Muhammad sought to masculinise his trade in a context where sewing was increasingly framed as an appropriate practice for women.

Women artisans likely maintained their own forms of piety and their own understandings of their labour, but these narratives are largely absent from both texts. Masculinising treatises such as the Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah elided the presence of women tailors and seamstresses from the darzī’s workshop. But even technical manuals such as Muft kā darzī – which valorised women’s participation in the trade as a social good – presented working women largely as receptacles for middle-class knowledge and colonial technologies, rather than masters of the trade themselves. Even in a debate that centred on the popular gendering of trade, conflict over technical knowledge and authority remained the purview of male artisans and the middle class, providing limited space for women labourers to assert their own claims on technical knowledge.

Together, the Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah and Muft kā darzī suggest the circulation of competing and contested narratives of what it meant to be a tailor and the relationships between Muslim tailors, their trade, and their religion. These texts show that people who sewed – or taught sewing – debated the origins, social positionality, and gendered nature of their trade. They also debated the degree to which sewing should be taught in formal institutions, how tailors should demonstrate technological and material flexibility, and how to appeal to customers. Reading the Risālah-yi Idrīsiyah and Muft kā darzī together provides an opportunity to excavate tensions and conflicts between the Muslim middle class – as well as their educational institutions – and the traditions claimed by members of artisan communities.

Excerpted with permission from Pious Labor: Islam, Artisanship, and Technology in Colonial India, Amanda Lanzillo, University of California Press.