Cleanliness is vital in Islam and it had to be. Just imagine with all that sand flying all over the dunes, mixed with camel droppings, where would you be if strict adherence to the measures of cleanliness prescribed by the Prophet (**pbuh/saw ) had not been imposed!

In Islam, there are five (always five, like the five pillars of Islam, salaat, zakaat, hajj, roza and jihad) items that are prescribed. And they are: (1) Removing the pubic hair; (2) removing the foreskin from the male sex organ or circumcision; (3) removing the underarm hair; (4) trimming (and not removing, in this case) the mustache/beard and (5) cutting of the nails.

One may wonder why is it necessary to prescribe these removals through the medium of credal doctrines! After all, in most other countries, people remove their nails and so on sans any dictat from their Prophets! The real reason is that in Islam, if instructions, any instructions, good bad or indifferent, are not passed on through the Prophet’s faith, reinforced by the Prophet’s own tradition in the matter, then the camel drivers would not or may not follow the instructions. And there might be dirt all over.

So cleanliness is very important in Islam. However, some questions do remain. It is wellknown that there is paucity of water in the land of the camel drivers; while in most other countries their God has amply provided clean H₂O. And it is due to the abundance of water, there has also been an abundance of trees, leaves and grass and so on.

In most other countries, after defecation (which in Arabia and all other lands under the spiritual domination of the Arabs, they observe by facing away from Mecca) people cleaned themselves by wiping their bottoms with leaves. Later on, the same leaves were replaced by soft toilet tissue. Clean water is still used in a great majority of countries, uninfluenced by the practice of the camel drivers. This is the way the dirty part of the body is cleaned in those lands. But not so in Arabia or lands of the Mohammedans. There, they clean that part of the body with dry sand held in the left hand. It is not clearly known exactly how many times this wiping exercise needs to be observed. In any event, even if the posterior part is somewhat ‘cleaned’, undoubtedly the left hand gets unduly ‘soiled’. It is for this reason, in Islamic lands, they do not eat or caress with the left hand, ever.

In Chemistry and Physics, they teach us of ‘the indestructibility of matter’ and of the fact that ‘heat lost is heat gained’. In the same way, the dirt that is removed from one place somehow gets stuck somewhere else. In the case of a devout Mohammedan, man woman or child, a large part of the removed dirt remains attached to the left hand. Verily, the dirtiest part of a Mohammedan’s body is his/her left hand. Woe be to him whose left hand is removed by the laws of the sharia’!

Fortunately or unfortunately, in Islam, whatever is once coded, remains frozen for all time except the agreements made with the kafirs; those agreements can be flouted at will by the followers of Allah depending upon their own convenience. This is so because the Prophet had permitted such an exception to the rule. It is called the rule of Hudaibiyya. It is this exception that permitted Pakistan to flout the Simla Pact with India, a kafir country!

Now, coming back to our subject of clean-liness, one is likely to wonder in what way trimming of the mustache is an adequate measure for cleanliness! Wouldn’t shaving off of the mustache and/or the beard been better? But the matter is such that like in so many other Islamic subjects, no logic or reasoning can be applied. If total removal of underarm hair is considered an adequate measure of cleanliness, that may not be necessarily so in the case of a mustache or beard.

And since, the Prophet himself is known to have preserved a mustache and a beard, more often than not covered with sand particles from the desert, no one, but no one, is authorized to raise the question of cleanliness as far as the mustache and the beard are concerned. They cannot or need not be shaved.

In this case, the ultimate law of Islam is binding. And that is:

Yours is not to question why,

(Yours is to do and die)

Yours is to trim and tie

**pbuh=peace be upon Him; saw=saliullah aliya wassallam.

(means the same thing)