Sutura Is Not Covering: What Islam Keeps Apart

Wolof already has a word close to what Kenji Yoshino calls covering. The word is sutura, from the Arabic sitr: a veil, a cover. Sutura means discretion and modesty, keeping private things private, and above all not exposing other people's faults. A hadith in Sahih Muslim puts it directly: whoever covers a Muslim, God will cover him in this world and the next.

So Islam does value a kind of covering. It is specific about what gets covered, though: wrongdoing, intimacy, another person's shame. Prayer, fasting, Eid and the headscarf are public acts by nature. Yoshino's covering is about those. The two get confused in the diaspora, and the confusion is understandable. Discomfort can end up being called sutura.

Islamic tradition does not wait for an employer to make room. "Religion is ease," reads a hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari. Another says the whole earth has been made a place of prayer, which covers a stairwell, an empty meeting room or a parked car. Ibn Abbas reported that the Prophet combined prayers in Medina with no travel and no danger, so as not to burden his community. The legal schools still debate the conditions for doing so.