Mashru
woven cloth, mix of silk and cotton
Mashru (also historically spelled mashroo, misru, mushroo or mushru) is a woven cloth that was historically a blend of silk and cotton. It was historically a hand-woven satin silk fabric variety found in the Indian subcontinent, and its proper use is described in the 16th-century Ain-i-Akbari.
History
Mashru is explicitly mentioned in the administrative document, the Ain-i-Akbari, of the 16th-century Mughal Empire, under silken kinds of stuff: "... the ordinary orthodox Muslim was only anxious to wear clothes of simple material like linen and to avoid silk, velvet, brocade, or fur and coloured ... Mashru." Mixed silk-and-cotton textiles were worn, because, by canon, a Muslim must not wear a dress of pure silk. Varieties containing silk and cotton admixtures gained greater currency in the empire, more particularly after the issuance of the Ain-i-Akbari. During the Mughal period, Mashru was used for the costumes of courtiers and nobles. Mashru is presumed to be an Indian innovation.
Etymology
The word mashru means 'permitted', derived from mashry in Arabic, and misry (or misru) refers to a mixture in Sanskrit. These names generally mean 'permitted', but it is also related to the Sanskrit word misru, meaning 'mixed'.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mashru” as woven cloth, mix of silk and cotton. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 8, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q105686774. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mashru” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.