It wasn’t until I moved to a hot, dusty country that I understood the significance of footwashing in ancient civilizations. Unlike the symbolic ceremonies sometimes observed today, this was no delicate ritual; it was a yucky, gritty, never-ending necessity.
I know this because occasionally my soft, Western feet leave the smooth asphalt of my campus paradise and venture to the little hanout in the village on the other side of the wall. Within ten steps, my feet are filthy – so filthy that I now own special dirt shoes (fake crocs, to be precise), which I reserve solely for dirty walks in dirty places. When I get home, I head straight to the bathtub and hose my feet down, shoes and all. That is why there is pretty much always a set of plastic footwear drying in my washroom.
Oh, but I wish someone had advised me to buy dirt shoes before my first trip to the Hay Hassani souk, which was such a smorgasbord for the eyes that it never once occurred to me to direct my gaze downward – until I found that I had stepped in a puddle of – something – and that the contents of said puddle (“puddle” being a generous descriptor of the many animal and vegetable liquids potentially decomposing on the premises) would squish and squirt out of my sticky sandals for the next six hours.
Yes. I went home and washed my feet. Thrice. And I felt terribly, terribly sorry for anyone who might possibly have the morbid task of washing the feet of others in similar conditions. No wonder it was a servant’s job.
Now, we as Westerners pride ourselves on our fetish for personal hygiene. We live ultra-purified lives and equate uncleanliness with poverty, misfortune, and destitution. We sidestep anyone and anything that we consider soiled, and wonder how they can stand to live in their own filth. But today I had an experience that takes our sanitized self-image and turns it on its head. I went to a hammam.
