The most common error about ihram is grammatical, and it leads directly to a substantive one. Ihram is not a garment. It is a condition of consecration that a pilgrim enters, and the cloth is what that condition requires. A pilgrim is in ihram; the two white sheets are not themselves ihram.
Entering it has a procedure and a place. At fixed boundary points around Mecca, the miqat, the pilgrim washes, puts on the prescribed dress, and declares the intention, reciting the talbiyah. From that moment a set of prohibitions applies and remains in force until the rites are complete and the pilgrim leaves the state.
The prohibitions are the substance of it, and they have very little to do with clothing:
- No cutting of hair or nails
- No perfume or scented products
- No sexual relations, and no proposal or contract of marriage
- No arguing, quarrelling or obscene speech
- No hunting, and no killing of any living creature
- For men, no stitched clothing and no covering of the head; for women, no covering of the face and hands
Women wear ordinary modest clothing. There is no special garment for them at all, which is worth stating because the two white sheets are so strongly associated with the hajj in photographs that the impression is otherwise.
The unstitched cloth does something specific. Two million people at Arafat are dressed identically, and rank, wealth and nationality are invisible in the crowd. Pilgrims say so constantly in their own accounts, and it is clearly part of the design rather than a side effect. The cloth is also, unmistakably, a shroud, a Muslim is buried in much the same wrapping, and the pilgrimage is understood in part as a rehearsal of standing before God with nothing.
A pilgrim who violates a prohibition does not simply lose face; there are prescribed expiations, graded by the offence, and the fact that a schedule of penalties exists is the clearest evidence that ihram is a legal state rather than a form of dress.