
Scotland’s Islamic Tartan

I shared a tweet yesterday that Scotland has an official Islamic tartan. It’s beautiful, both in concept and in execution. Blue for the Scottish flag, green for the colour of Islam, five white stripes to represent the five pillars of Islam, six gold stripes to represent the six articles of faith, and a black square that represents the kabaa.
This tweet blew up unlike any other I’ve ever shared, and I tweet a lot about religious dress (because that’s kinda my job). But I think people responded differently to learning about this because it hits a nerve at a time when hate crimes (particularly those against religious communities) are on the rise, and the news is full of federally mandated nationalistic cruelty around the globe.
Here is an example of two cultures co-creating new identity markers, directly into their innermost cultural circles. Helped along by the huge success of the Outlander series, but true long before then, the connection in the global imagination between Scotland and tartans is powerful, sacred, and entrenched. Likewise, while in reality the majority (around 84%) of Muslim women in North America and Western Europe do not wear a veil, the global imagination draws an almost automatic line between “Muslim woman” and “hijab” (why one item tends to spark sentimental fondness and the other often sparks backlash is a topic for another day).
Beyond the public gaze, there are more significant similarities and parallels between Islamic textiles and Scottish tartans. Both Scotland and many Muslim majority regions suffered centuries of brutal colonialism that included direct legal control and restriction of sacred cultural textile practices.
See, the British were really good at being colonizers. They knew how to use a culture’s dress to their own best advantage — whether this involved eviscerating their identity and communities using dress as a tool of forced assimilation, or utilizing sacred significance in recruiting and retaining their expertise (more on this tactic used with Punjabi Sikh warriors in the 19th century in a later post, but in the mean time check out chapter four).
Scottish Highlanders refused to come to heel, and when harsh penalties for

Photo Credit Sons of Scotland
“disloyalty” (I’m thinking the Highlanders considered it actually maintaining their loyalties, just not to the British crown) and disarming them proved ineffective, the Brits went for the jugular with the Dress Act of 1746. This was not a full tartan ban as some believe, but did put heavy restrictions on Highland cultural dress with harsh associated penalties. Breaking these rules meant six months in prison, and a second offence was a deportation to overseas plantation labour for seven year. They were not messing around.
Likewise, governmental restrictions on Muslim women’s veils are frequently in the news (I’m looking at you Québec, France, Turkey, Germany, etc.), but are nothing new. The uncritical conflation of “hijab” with “oppression” or “threat” was one of the earliest tropes of European colonial rule throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. It is a material example of Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak’s admonition of white men feeling the need to save brown women from brown men, and of Europeans believing they hold the reigns on what an “enlightened” and “liberated” society looks like. If you think this went the way of the dodo with the end of colonial rule (note I do not say “end of colonialism”) then pay close attention to the way (predominantly white) legislators, or some (predominantly white) gender equity (which I’m all in favour of!) activists speak about Muslim women’s veiling practices. Hey, that’s another similarity — both Scots and many Muslims have had their traditions regularly equated with “barbarism.” (There are, of course, also parallel situations where women are forced to veil — governments love to legislate women’s bodies).
The Scottish Muslim tartan was registered in 2012, and some have questioned whether it contributes to a monolithic view of Islam as one thing. Islam, of course, being one of the largest and diverse traditions on the planet with many varieties of interpretation and practice, and when people treat it like one entity, besides being inaccurate, it tends to end poorly for Muslims. But developer Dr. Azeem Ibrahim explains that the idea, to him, seemed,
to be the perfect symbol of the future generation in particular, for the younger, educated Muslims caught between two cultures — East and West, traditional and modern. Instead of conflict, the tartan represents a tightly woven blend of tradition and heritage. By bringing together the strands of two cultures, a symbol is created of something more meaningful than assimilation or accommodation. The tartan represents the new fabric of society, where Muslim Scots with a sense of history and a commitment to the future of Scotland have become an integral part of the New Scotland.

[Not in order] Osama Saeed (Head of International Relations at Al Jazeera), Shazia Akhtar (Solicitor and Legal Fellow at The Scotland Institute), Dr Azeem Ibrahim (Executive Chairman of The Scotland Institute), Shabnum Mustapha (Vice Chair of the Scottish Liberal Democrats), Shaikh Amer Jamil (Solas Foundation and Scotland’s leading Islamic scholar), Humza Yousaf (SNP Member of Scottish Parliament)
Photo Credit Islamic Tartan Gallery
The current forms of tartans and (many) hijab styles are actually both quite historically recent, only going back a few centuries (depending on specific item and location). But they resonate deeply in cultural identities, and public communications of those identities. In reality, no person can be reduced to one part of themselves. A Scottish Muslim tartan is a real-life example of literally embodying two cherished identities.
P.S. For any that might feel this unfairly favours Scottish Muslims, this is not the only tartan of a minoritized religious community – see, for example, the Jewish Scottish tartan or the Sikh Scottish tartan.