The hunt to discover a sustainable prayer rug

When I’m overwhelmed by the realities of the world, I usually go to hope. I relaxation my head on my mat as I kneel down in prayer. As a Muslim American lady, I’m usually making an attempt to reconcile jarring contradictions, requiring that I ask myself a collection of questions: How do I consciously or unconsciously take part in an exploitative system? How can I be certain that I align to the values programs that information my religion? How can I discover methods to do higher, be higher, in pursuit of care? In prayer, I come head to head with these ideas — and it’s onerous to keep away from the obtrusive contradictions of all of it. Contradictions that start with the mat.

Prayer rugs, like many shopper merchandise, function inside a worldwide manufacturing chain riddled with exploitative labor practices. This isn’t a brand new revelation, and I acknowledge that for many people, the chance to repair the worldwide provide chain shouldn’t be inside attain. We will, nonetheless, start to ponder our decisions and educate ourselves and each other to make extra sustainable and kinder purchases.

Iman Masmoudi, the founder and president of the clothes model Tuniq, needed to create a carbon-negative, shared-profit manufacturing cooperative. This need pressured her to pose a elementary query: Do holistically moral corporations even exist? “By which I imply, is it doable to create an ethical enterprise use?” asks Masmoudi. “Is it doable, from finish to finish, to not create any extra hurt on the earth?”

As a Muslim American manufacturing merchandise for Muslims across the globe, Masmoudi navigates two opposing worlds: one outlined by spiritual moral requirements, and one outlined by a consumerist financial system. How do moral companies meet demand with out compromising on their integrity?

These two warring beliefs come to a head within the commodification of non secular merchandise. Take, for instance, Muslim prayer rugs. On daily basis, hundreds of thousands of Muslims internationally unfurl mats of varied sizes, shapes, and origins to suggest the beginning of prayer. In an essay for the Yale Heart for the Examine of Materials and Visible Cultures of Faith, Minoo Moallem explains, “The prayer rug territorializes prayer by creating a fabric boundary between the sacred and the profane.” In different phrases, they’re extremely regarded non secular objects.

With elevated demand and world industrialization, nonetheless, prayer rugs have turn out to be mass-produced commodities. Typically, the best way they’re manufactured — by staff making poverty wages, with supplies that hurt the setting — goes in opposition to the spiritual rules they goal to embody. There’s a prevalent oxymoron consecrated within the motion of prayer being completed on a mat that deviates from a perception system’s rules.

This, after all, shouldn’t be restricted to Muslim-specific merchandise. This battle spans disciplines. I can go on Amazon proper now and purchase Catholic prayer playing cards or Tibetan prayer beads or Jewish Havdalah candles in bulk, with just some clicks and little care paid to the employees who created them.

“If there’s trauma within the provide chain,” says Timo Rissanen, an affiliate professor at Australia’s College of Expertise Sydney and the creator of Zero Waste Trend Design, “and if there’s trauma and abuse within the manufacturing facility, that [trauma] will get transferred into the product.”

AFP through Getty Photographs

The trauma-laced provide chain is a well-documented actuality. A survey performed by the Staff Rights Consortium involving staff from 158 factories together with Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Haiti, and Myanmar discovered that 20 % of staff “reported experiencing starvation each day because the begin of the pandemic”; 34 % had gone hungry at the very least as soon as every week. Trendy consumerism depends on mass manufacturing fashions that enable gadgets to be produced cheaply and rapidly. A much less standardized provide chain requires valued labor, materials, and product, which indefinitely drive up costs.

Tara Cetinkaya is the co-founder of Modefa, america’ largest on-line Islamic attire retailer. Because the chief of a rising Islamic enterprise, she usually finds herself on the intersection of moral rules and trade requirements. “We’ve had some individuals come into the shop and ask us why we are able to’t promote issues for 4 or 5 {dollars}, and it’s as a result of we’re not shopping for from China,” she stated. “We’re not shopping for with slave labor. We’d slightly use these moral requirements that help Muslim-owned corporations and suppliers in Turkey.”

Cetinkaya is referring to latest stories popping out of China concerning the Uyghur area, a majority-Muslim space of China. The Coalition to Finish Compelled Labour within the Uyghur Area reported that 20 % of cotton clothes within the world attire market contain labor from the Uyghur area. “The attire trade is on the highest threat of utilizing pressured labor,” stated Jewher Ilham, a Chinese language Uyghur activist and member of the coalition. In different phrases, there’s a chance {that a} prayer rug made from cotton is produced by Muslim pressured labor.

Muslims from China’s Uyghur province have been focused by the Chinese language authorities. “Based on researchers, NGOs, and specialists, it’s estimated that 1 to 1.8 million Uyghurs have been topic to pressured labor,” stated Ilham. This quantity might embody Ilham’s father, Ilham Tohti, who was detained by the Chinese language authorities in 2014. Jewhar has not been in a position to contact her father since his detainment.

On this manner, it’s onerous to separate the realities of the textile trade from the gadgets. “The circumstances during which one thing is made issues,” stated Rissanen. “A part of the issue is that more often than not, we’re not daring to think about something past the best way issues are at present completed.”

For enterprise homeowners like Masmoudi, the reply is present in not reimagining however revaluing the programs which have all the time been there. “It’s about placing energy again within the fingers of the individuals.” Tuniq companions straight with native shepherds and conventional craftsmen all through Tunisia in an effort to domesticate a symbiotic relationship between nature, group, and textile.

Wool is collected from native flocks of sheep in the course of the spring and cleaned by a bunch of ladies in a village within the south of Tunisia, the place it’s then brushed, carded, and weaved by hand.

“From the start, we have been guided by making an attempt to create one thing stunning out of what’s usually very ugly, which is the broader textile trade,” Masmoudi says. Staff set their wages and hours, she says, letting Masmoudi know straight how lengthy a mission will take and the labor’s supposed worth. Collectively, she hopes the group can create a product out of craft, intention, and care.

Manufacturers like Tuniq mirror the next normal of care, and care doesn’t come low cost. A prayer rug on Tuniq’s web site will price round $93, whereas a prayer rug on Amazon can run for $10 with specific delivery. However what Masmoudi is offering encourages shoppers to start grappling with the tales behind their merchandise.

“We’ve turned all of humanity into commodities, and that’s how we’re handled and that’s how we deal with ourselves” — however sufficient is sufficient, says Masmoudi. Different prospects exist. The worldwide manufacturing chain is damaged. Recognizing this actuality may be overwhelming, however the goals of entrepreneurs like Masmoudi are good-faith reminders of a special manner of organizing, buying and selling, and consuming. As shoppers, it’s essential to demand and implore new fashions of commerce that prioritize care within the provide chain, the laborers behind a product, the setting it’s created from. So maybe the following time you exit to buy a prayer rug, or a candle or beads, take a second to consider the story behind the product.

Omnia Saed is a contract journalist and present MA scholar on the Columbia College of Journalism. She is a member of the Class of 2021 Vox Media Writers Workshop.