Bark!

Dogs are tolerated but not encouraged here in Dhahran. Outside of camp, they are rare creatures indeed. Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims, usually trot out the same handful of hadiths that state that dogs are unclean, particularly their saliva, and that the only reason to own a dog is for hunting or to guard one's property or livestock. (The issue of unclean saliva and hunting with dogs brings up its own set of paradoxes that are usually ignored.) Hadiths are not statements in the Quran but reports of things said or done by Mohammed recorded after his death by various Islamic scholars. As one Muslim poster said, if you have hadiths that are contradictory, look to the Quran for the true meaning. And hadiths on dogs are all over the spectrum.

You can find many Islamic sites that state that a dog's mouth is unclean. You can find just as many anti-Islamic sites and/or sites by Islamic dog-lovers that state the opposite, a dog's mouth is cleaner than a human's. Of course, neither are asking the right question. It has nothing to do with "clean" or "dirty." The pH of a dog's mouth is rather acidic, around 9, compared to 6.5 or 7.5 for a human mouth. The bacteria in a dog's mouth are different than the ones in a human mouth. Indeed, the mouth of a dog performs functions that our mouths do not. Really, the dog saliva issue is a straw man, an argument without weight or merit.

The supposed inherent uncleanliness of dogs is also full of contradictions. The hadiths proscribe keeping dogs in the house because dogs are unclean and therefore your house is unclean. The meaning of "unclean" is taken both metaphorically (religiously impure) and literally.

With respect to the literal meaning of unclean, all of you dog people know that a house is only as clean as you keep it. In my opinion, children are far dirtier than dogs, leaving sticky fingerprints and food trailing in their wake on every surface. Heck, the average adult human sheds hundreds of hairs and thousands of skin cells a day. Mammals are just dirty creatures in general.

With respect to the metaphorical meaning of unclean, many Arab Muslims believe that if they touch a dog, they become impure and can't pray that day; if they touch a dog, they have to wash themselves seven times; if a dog licks them, they have to wash that place seven times; on and on. It has been pointed out by quite a few dog-loving Muslims that many of the negative hadiths about dogs strongly resemble Arab folk tales and like the transmogrification of pagan holidays by the Christian church (though that is not an analogy either the Christians or the Muslims would use), these tales may have been co-opted by early Islamic scholars (those guys who wrote down the hadiths) for a similar purpose.

An interesting blogger called American Bedu put up a post in 2009 about the issue of Islam and dogs. I've added a link to her blog on my blog page. She lives in Riyadh and is an American married to a Saudi. She links to an article by an Arab Muslim vet that states what is and is not haraam (forbidden) with respect to dogs. The site she links to is suspect, as the domain name is owned by PETA. Still, there is some common sense there.

All of this is quite ironic in light of the latest news that a bunch of researchers linked most dogs (exceptions being some very region-specific breeds) to Middle Eastern wolves, finding more Middle Eastern wolf genetic markers in most dogs than markers from other wolf populations. This suggests that people in the Middle East (people who lived many tens of thousands of years before Mohammed and Islam) first domesticated dogs. Of course, on the site I linked to, one nut commented that this research proves that dogs descended from a single animal that came off Noah's Ark--truly, scientific illiteracy and basic stupidity are not limited to any one religion.

But the point is, dogs are an integral part of the development of human culture. Cultural attitudes that promote the opposite view are simply that, cultural, i.e., man made.