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Mark Twain's Christian Clothes

by Ruthie Alekseeva  
12/10/2023 / Christian Living

Haniya Flees Egypt

“Spectacular,” Mark raves, as he surveys the lush palm-leaved vista surrounding his holiday villa.

Lounging beside him, on the villa’s balcony, Ahmed beams. “You like it?” he says,

Mark nods. “Very much so. It’s incredible. So inspiring. Think of all the tales I could dream up if this view burst through my window every morning. My fingers itch for my typewriter just thinking about it.”

Ahmed stares at the scene before him, a view he’s seen every day since the time of his birth. Ivory-white sand dunes. Viridian-green fig trees and, peeking through their leaves, the smalt-blue waters of the Bahr Yussef, a channel of the Nile River.

Ahmed attempts to view what’s before him as if seeing it for the first time, but he fails.

“It’s fortunate that you’re the writer and that I am the tour guide and interpreter,” he says, “because I’m drawing a blank.”

Mark chuckles. “You’re kidding me.”

Mark lowers his voice, and speaking with suspense, he says,

“Haniya leans her panting body on a terracotta fountain, rising tall in the heart of Abu-isa Courtyard. She watches the clear water cascading over its three wide basins with longing in her eyes.

So pretty, she thinks. So free and carefree. I yearn for freedom.

She stares past the fountain and beyond the pale-stone villas bordering the verdant courtyard. Gazing at the talc-coloured sand dunes above the oasis she shelters in, she notices silver sunbeams now flash above the dusty ridges.

Alack, she thinks. The sun. It’s risen higher in the sky. I must reach the dunes before dawn when the sun will tint the sky a turbid shade of blue and yellow, making me visible to all those I am fleeing.

She plunges her hands into the lowest basin of the fountain, scooping a handful of water through the cracked lips of her mouth.

One more gulp, she thinks, then I must scurry.

She shoots her hand into the cool, clear water again, but a movement catches her eye.

She freezes.

What’s that? she thinks.

Her skin tingles as an icy heat prickles over her body.

I see shadows lurking in the arched windows of that villa across from me.

Her limbs tremble.

Please. No, she thinks.

Then, a tall, umbra figure, followed by three more with spears, surges out from a door framed with blue, green and orange stained glass on the villa’s lowest floor.

Haniya’s heart throbs rapidly. She shrieks a blood curdling scream.

“It’s Umah. He’s found me,” she wails, before collapsing on the ground before him, unconscious.”

“Wow. Some story,” Ahmed says, as Mark finishes his saga, “and the way you told it. I felt like I could see Haniya quaking before me and feel her terror.”

"Thank you," Mark says.

Ahmed scratches his chin. “You made that up in your head right now, just like that?”

“Just like that,” Mark says, flattening his voice, as if trying to sound less smug.

“Wow,” Ahmed says, “I have a feeling you will experience world-wide fame someday.”

Different Reasons

In 1867, Mark Twain, the esteemed author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Fin, took a vacation through Europe and the Middle East. As he toured, he kept a travel diary that he later published under the title of, The Innocents Abroad. Today, many countries wear western clothing as their daily attire, jeans and a t-shirt or a suit and tie, but back then, each country wore their traditional dress. I would have found that fascinating. Mark Twain would have seen fez hats and harem pants in Turkey, saia skirts and sombreros in Portugal, pleated foustanella kilts and black, pointed, pom-pom shoes in Greece and embroidered dirndl and hats decked with flowers and fruit when he toured Italy.

While trekking through the Middle East, Mark Twain referred to his own clothing as “Christian clothing,” but although Mark, and many Americans and Europeans of his time, dressed the part, Mark Twain’s clothes cloaked an unchristian heart. I say this because Ray Comfort, in his book, Mark Twain: A Christian Response to His Battle with God, points out that Mark felt “embittered toward God” because the God of Christianity doesn’t approve of fornication or adultery and states that sex will no longer exist in Heaven. Purity Culture often taught women that what we wear reflects our heart, but here, Mark Twain poses as a glaring example of the falseness of that claim.

Mark’s travel diary, The Innocents Abroad, supplies another example of the inaccuracy of this assertion. In his diary, he recounts that while he toured Egypt, the Muslim women, who wore burqas and hijabs, would pull their veils away from their faces and would pout and make kissing movements with their lips at him and the other western men in his travelling group, when their Islamic male escorts faced away from them. If what a woman wears reflects the humility of a woman’s heart, then surely we must hold up Islamic women, who dress so modestly they cover their faces, as the gold standard, but we can’t because the Islamic women of Mark Twain’s time, by their behaviour, showed, that despite their clothing, they did not have modest hearts. Even today, Islamic women don’t dress the way they do because they have a godly prudency. Instead, Islamic women dress in burqas and hijabs because their hearts have chosen idolatry over worshipping the one true God, and we can’t hold them up as examples of chastity either because Islamic wives sometimes share their husbands with multiple women. That’s adultery, but they vehemently defend this sin, labelling it as kind and moral.

During Purity Culture’s heyday, no matter what I wore at church or even out in my community, my clothing was deemed immodest. In exasperation, I finally asked the men, who angrily reprimanded me, if they could provide me with pictures of women they believed had modest outfits on, but they refused. So, I asked if they could identify women in the street we stood in who they believed had on modest outfits but, again, they refused. “You know what we’re talking about they would say” or “Don’t wear anything that draws attention away from your face,” but all clothing draws attention away from people’s faces. When I meet people, I automatically look at what they have on. I can’t help it. Where else can you look? It's right there in front of you.

Later, I played on a sports team that had a few women in it who practiced lesbianism and some women who probably use male or genderless pronouns now. They advised me that if I wanted less male attention, I should wear longer, higher-necked and less tight clothing, like they did. I found that revelatory. These women didn’t dress “modestly” because they had pure hearts, these women dressed “modestly” because they had hearts that enjoyed practicing lesbianism, spurnin men. Here lies another example of Purity Culture’s false allegation that what you wear always reflects what’s going on inside your heart.

Once, after a church service, I heard an old woman compliment a young woman on the strappy summer dress she wore. “You look beautiful,” she gushed. I wish I could wear clothes like that, but I’m old and ugly now. My skin would look terrible.” Fascinating, I thought. Yet another instance that sometimes clothing reflects diddly-squat about the purity of your heart, and as the evidence grows ever higher, I hope churches will start teaching that.

Different Teaching

In my own circumstances, the “inappropriate” clothing I wore reflected that, financially, I had bombed and would have loved assistance in obtaining the clothing I so desperately needed back then. It also reflected that I’d never had sex, had a date, kissed a boy, watched dirty movies and that I’d tried hard at blocking out dirty jokes I heard in the school yard and staff room, the best I could, just like churches teach. It also showed that I was copying older, possibly more experienced, women I saw in my community and even at church, and in these circumstances, we can show young girls more kindness than we have in the past by relabelling dressing modestly to dressing educatedly. Because young girls don’t know anything about men and sex. Their problem is not a lack of modesty, it’s a lack of knowledge.

We should also instruct boys about the many reasons why girls wear what they wear because when you teach boys that vanity is the only reason a girl might not have “appropriate” clothing on, some of them behave sexually towards those girls because they believe “inappropriately” dressed women are "asking for it." That’s not enjoyable for the girls involved, and it must stop.

References:

The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

Mark Twain: A Christian Response to His Battle with God by Ray Comfort

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