We Had A Look At The Origin Of The Term ‘Mufti Day’ And Turns Out, It’s Kind Of Problematic

There are a lot of strange and alien words you encounter growing up that seem completely tailored to primary school life but which never, ever pop up in your subsequent years of adulthood. Recess, tote tray and Eisteddfod come to mind. Among the weirdest and most pervasive of all these words is that fabled day of fashion liberation: mufti day.

It’s that annual event where everyone wanted to dress like Avril Lavigne, Justin Timberlake, or whoever won Australian Idol that year. And then there was always that one person who rocked up in their freshest crocs.

The word’s used all over NSW and parts of Victoria, and apparently also in New Zealand and the UK as well. Perhaps Americans never say it because they don’t even have damn school uniforms. Maybe they’re just uncultured swine with tiny vocabularies. Maybe both are true. Maybe they do say it but I just need any excuse to shit on them.

Anyway.

Turns out the “mufti” in “mufti day” is the very same “mufti” used to describe an Islamic legal scholar. Sure, the word’s not necessarily everyday parlance for many Australians, but it’s hardly an obscure, foreign word either. It just seems that few of us have bothered to join the dots.

Now, having done so, the word feels a teeny, tiny bit problematic. Maybe that’s not for me to decide, so here’s the evidence for your own consideration.

In Arabic, “mufti” has been used to define an Islamic legal scholar for centuries. It’s been borrowed by English since at least 1816 to describe casual or civilian clothes – in other words, the absence of a uniform.

Apparently, back in the 1800s when British soldiers were off duty, they’d wear dressing gowns and night caps and stuff. Then some dickhead apparently took at look at this comfy getup and through it looked ~vaguely exotic~ or something, and in doing so, called this kind of casual wear “mufti”, after the formal wear worn by actual muftis.

A 1721 deception of a mufti giving advice to an Ottoman family. For many Europeans at the time, the Ottoman Empire represented everything exotic. (Khayr Allāh Khayrī Jāwush Zādah / The Walters Art Museum / CC-BY)

There’s an old book listing a bunch of new words that cropped up during the British invasion and colonisation of the Indian subcontinent: Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. That’s the whole name. A goddamn mouthful if you ask me.

Anyway, the 1863 edition of the book had this to say on the matter:

“…perhaps originally applied to the attire of dressing-gown, smoking-cap, and slippers, which was like the Oriental dress of the Mufti.”

So from this it’s safe to assume British soldiers in South Asia casually referred to their clothes in the manner of a problematic cosplay. In fact, they were quite literally mocking the fashion of the same people they were subjugating with their guns.

But Aussie primary school students aren’t the same as fully-grown British soldiers. At least, not yet.

In the decades that followed, the term began to be used for any kind of casual wear, however it wasn’t until a fair bit later that the term “mufti day” was actually being used in Aussie schools.

I found one local reference dating back to 1966 in Arena magazine:

“The last day of the term was mufti day, if you paid ten cents into the school funds — almost everybody did.”

According to Google Books, the term “mufti day” as an actual phrase popped into use around the 1960s and has been increasingly used every since. It’s now more used than ever, in fact.

Like many things from the 1960s, the term isn’t really something that holds up nowadays. It hardly needs to be said that we’ve moved on (or at least attempted to) from many of the awful things which were said and done many decades ago.

Just think, it would be totally weird if people in another culture called their uniform-free-days “barrister days” or something. Add to that a long history of power imbalance and cultural appropriation (not to mention straight-up violence and plunder) and, well, that’s what we’ve ended up with now.

So that’s it. We call our fun, frivolous and philanthropic no-uniform-days something which started out as a problematic in-joke by a bunch of gun-toting army dudes two centuries ago.

Don’t forget your gold coin donation!

More Stuff From PEDESTRIAN.TV