Hijab and The Problem of Anti-fashion

The past three decades have seen the growth and spread of debates about the visible presence of Islamic dress in the streets of Europe and North America. These debates, which have accelerated and intensified after 9/11, focus on the apparent rights and wrongs of headscarves and face veils, on whether their wearing is forced or chosen, and to what extent they might indicate the spread of Islamic fundamentalism or pose security concerns. Such dress practices are also perceived as a threat to multiculturalism and to Euro-American norms and values which are often spoken of as if they are fixed and shared.

Such arguments have been used to support bans and restrictions on Islamic dress practices in the name of modernity, secularism or women’s emancipation. What is curious about these debates is not only the way in which they have become so entrenched but also how out of tune they are with actual developments in Muslim dress practices which have, over the past decade, been undergoing rapid transformation. They ignore, for example, the development and proliferation of what has become known, both in Muslim circles and beyond, as Islamic fashion and how the emergence of such a phenomenon does not so much signal Muslim alienation from European and American cultural norms as complex forms of critical and creative engagement with them.

Taking critical distance from the popular assumption that fashion is an exclusively Western or secular phenomenon, this article points to the complex convergence of ethical and aesthetic concerns expressed through new forms of Islamic fashion whilst simultaneously highlighting the ambivalence some Muslims feel towards such developments. It also suggests that just as Islamic fashion engages with and contributes towards mainstream fashion in various ways, so Muslim critiques of fashion often share much in common with critiques from secular and feminist sources.

By the 1990s, more fashionable styles of Islamic dress began to appear in Muslim majority countries such as Turkey, giving rise to what has become known as Islamic fashion. In many cases,these fashionable styles of dress replaced the simple, austere and purposely non-fashionable forms of Islamic attire initially favoured in the revival movement. In part, this reflected a shift within the Islamic revival movement from a radical and anti-consumerist position towards a more individualized reformist stance with identities increasingly produced through consumption (NavaroYashin 2002).

It spawned the emergence of Islamic consumer culture and engendered a greater heterogeneity of Islamic styles of dress which were attractive and appealing for younger, more affluent Islamic women (Kiliçbay and Binark 2002; Sandikçi and Ger 2005, 2007; Abaza 2007). Processes of aesthetization and personalization led to the emergence of highly fashionable Islamic outfits and companies specialized in producing such clothes for religious consumers (Sandikçi and Ger 2010).

In some locations, such as southern Beirut, the coming of age of a new generation that had grown up in an Islamic environment further stimulated the emergence of fashionable styles of Islamic dress as part of the development of Islamically licit forms of entertainment (Deeb and Harb 2008). In Iran, where the establishment of the Islamic republic in 1979 transformed voluntary veiling into a state-imposed dress code, the turn to fashionable styles took on different meanings. At one level, Islamic fashion in this context could be perceived as a form of everyday resistance through consumption. At another level, it might be understood as a product of the state’s response to the demands of women who had expressed their loyalty to the regime (Moruzzi 2008).

The move towards trendy, fashionable, yet recognizably Islamic dress was also discernible in settings where all-covering outerwear had always remained the norm, such as Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. In such locations, the increased commoditization of dress and the turn to consumer culture stimulated more rapid changes in styles of outerwear (Moors 2007; Al-Qasimi 2010; Lindholm 2010). These were often purchased by migrants, students and visitors from other parts of the world who integrated them into their wardrobes in their home countries. In this way, abayas from the Gulf states became popular amongst Muslims in India, functioning also as status symbols in these new settings (Osella and Osella 2007).

The assumption that fashion is a uniquely Western phenomenon that has only recently spread to the rest of the world through globalized networks of capitalist production and distribution has in recent years come under heavy criticism from economic historians, historians of fashion and anthropologists concerned to recognize fashion’s global relevance and its complex history in different parts of the world (Jones and Leshkowich 2003; Niessen 2003; Lemire 2010; Riello and McNeil 2010).

Niessen, for example, accuses dress scholarship of following a similar model to that of art history, which until recently assumed that only artistic developments in the West were worthy of recognition as art whilst developments in the rest of the world were either ignored or explained by reference to timeless tradition (Niessen 2003).

A similar dichotomy has, she argues, been expressed and perpetuated by a long line of fashion scholars who have classified the diverse range of clothing that did not conform to Western fashion as tradition-bound and timeless (Flugel 1930; Sapir 1937; Simmel 1957; Blumer 1968; Polhemus and Proctor 1978). Whereas recognition of non-Western art has led to a radical redefinition of the concept of art in recent years, the same has not occurred in fashion studies.

Instead, Niessen argues, fashion scholars have colluded with the hierarchies perpetuated by the fashion world and fashion media by failing to unpack the power relations inherent in popular understandings of fashion and by refusing to redefine the concept of fashion.

Whilst some scholars persist in understanding fashion in terms of the distinctive mode of producing, marketing, representing and wearing clothes that emerged in the modern West and that has since spread worldwide, others have taken up the challenge of broadening the definition and provenance of fashion by showing how processes of comparison, emulation and differentiation have occurred in a variety of different historical periods and locations and how these have been conducive to investment in changing tastes and ideas of self-enhancement through dress in different times and places (Cannon 1998; Lemire 2010; Riello and McNeil 2010).

Viewed in this light, fashion was not born in the modern West although developments in production, marketing and distributing in the modern West offer an accelerated and extreme example of the dynamics of fashion. Moreover, if one of the key features of fashion is rapid and continual change of styles then the spread of capitalist modes of production and consumption around the world would seem to suggest that what Wilson once said of modern Western societies is applicable worldwide: ‘No clothes are outside of fashion’ (1985: 3).

The existence and growth of Islamic fashion, then, contributes to the breaking down of systems of classification by which the world is divided into the fashionable West and unfashionable rest whose only access to fashion is by emulation or insertion within a pre-existing frame. Not only does it highlight alternative geographies of fashion (Moors and Tarlo 2007), but it also suggests alternative values by challenging normative assumptions about the assumed secularity of fashion.

Whilst some might be tempted to explain away the recent shift to increasingly fashionable styles of Islamic dress as a mere case of the commodification of religion or an example of a more general societal shift away from communities of conviction to communities of style (Maffesoli 1996). As Sandikçi and Ger (2005) have pointed out in the Turkish context, appearing well-groomed and neat and presenting a pleasant and harmonious look can be considered an act which pleases God.

Such an interpretation gives Islamic fashion ethical credibility which is further heightened by the idea that wearing aesthetically pleasing forms of Islamic dress can act as a form of dawa, encouraging others towards the faith (Moll 2010), persuading others of the beauty of modesty and producing a positive image of Islam in an environment that is hostile towards Islam (Jouili 2009; Tarlo 2010b).

Here, Islamic virtue is seen not as external to fashion but potentially integral to it, thereby making the creation and wearing of fashionable styles a form and extension of religious action. Yet, if aesthetics and conviction go hand in hand in some Muslim women’s understandings of Islamic fashion, they coexist in a state of tension for others who see fashion as a means by which Islamic values and priorities become diluted, distorted or lost.

Antifashion discourses therefore coexist in conjunction with the expansion of Islamic fashion. Just as Islamic fashion is useful for rethinking ideas of fashion, so Islamic anti-fashion discourses are useful for untangling different ideas of anti-fashion. The termanti-fashion has served a number of purposes in scholarly writings on dress.

It has sometimes been used as a catch-all phrase to describe all types of dress assumed to be outside the Western fashion system. This included both non-Western and religious clothing traditions which were often deemed unfashionable or simply outside of fashion.

By such criteria all forms of Islamic dress would be classified as anti-fashion, but such a designation is clearly of little use for thinking about Islamic fashion. What we do find, however, is that alongside a strong attraction to and engagement with Islamic fashion in terms of rapidly changing tastes, enhanced concerns with aesthetics and experimentation with style, we simultaneously find Islamic critiques of fashion.

Islamic anti-fashion discourses take a number of forms: some focus on how ideas of modesty, piety and restraint are undermined by fashion; others focus on a wider set of ideas about fashion being wasteful, frivolous, over-sexualized or demeaning to women. These counter-fashion discourses intersect with secular anti-fashion discourses in a variety of ways, highlighting how Islamic anti-fashion discourses bear much in common with Marxist, feminist and ecologist critiques of fashion.

We do not draw up a distinct dichotomy between fashion and anti-fashion discourses and practices but rather highlight their mutual entanglement, recognizing how any form of anti-fashion necessarily relates to fashion even if this is predominantly by negation. As Wilson pointed out in relation to fashion more generally, even the determinedly unfashionable wear clothes that manifestly represent a reaction against what is in fashion (1985: 3–4).

Similarly, we do not see garments as being either in or out of fashion in any obvious way but rather demonstrate how people consider particular garments and styles to be more or less fashionable and accept change within their dress to different degrees and at different rates. While Islamic fashion is often not recognized as fashion owing partly to the historic hierarchies of fashion mentioned earlier, where it is recognized as fashion it tends to be greeted in one of two ways.

Either it is perceived as yet another demonstration of the Islamization of public space—an insidious example of the invasion of an alien religion and the erosion of secularism—or it is welcomed in celebratory tones as proof of the freedom and creativity of Muslim women in spite of what is often assumed. However, as a number of writers on fashion have shown, fashion is as much about emulation as it is about freedom. It involves a combination of individualising and conformist impulses (Simmel 1971).

Finkelstein even goes so far as to suggest that fashion is better understood in terms of subjectivation than in terms of individual autonomy or freedom of expression. In Finkelstein’s words: The historical success of being fashionable has been to provide a sense of individualism within a shared code, since individuals can look acceptably distinctive only within a restricted aesthetic.

When they purchase fashionable goods that will distinguish them, they do so only from a range of goods already understood to be valuable. (1997: 6) Fashion, then, can work as a disciplining and homogenizing force. This is an interesting perspective from which to view the relationship between religion and fashion. If both Islam and fashion can be understood in terms of subjectivation, what happens in the case of Islamic fashion when two different forces of subjectivization intersect?

Mediating against this interpretation of fashion as the selection from a predefined restricted range of goods already valued as fashion is an understanding of how street styles emerge and how goods which may once have been considered unfashionable are transformed into fashion through their juxtaposition, manipulation and use. The improvisational aesthetic visible in many of the Islamic fashion outfits emerging in the streets of Europe and America would seem to suggest that Islamic fashion involves not only conformity to pre-existing possibilities but also, in some cases, high levels of experimentation and invention.

Yet, just as happens in other cases of countercultural street style, new creative forms of Islamic fashion soon become conventionalized through the force of fashion and fashion media. How far Muslim women experiment with fashion depends not only on how ideas of religion, ethnicity, class, generation and taste intersect in processes of self-fashioning but also on how different histories and experiences of secularism have shaped clothing possibilities, priorities and preferences in different locations.

Much of the literature on Muslims in Europe privileges north-western Europe and traces the presence of Muslims to post–Second World War labour migration (Larsson and Račius 2010). There is, however, a far more long-standing and diverse presence of Muslims in Europe and America. In Southern Europe (Al-Andalus, comprising parts ofSpain, Portugal and France), Muslim rule lasted for over seven centuries, only coming to an end with the fall of Grenada in 1492.

In contemporary Spain, some refer to this past to define Moroccan migrants as invaders, while others, including converts, build on this historical presence in an attempt to reinvigorate Islam in Spain (Arighita 2006; Taha 2010). On the Baltic coast and in some Eastern European countries, there is a long-standing presence of Muslim Tatars, in some cases dating back to the tenth century. In the Balkans, the Muslim presence is strongly connected to Ottoman rule, when, on one hand, some Slavic Christians converted to Islam (such as the Pomaks in Bulgaria), and, on the other, some Turkish groups settled in Balkan countries.

But it is not only these earlier Muslim empires that have left an imprint on the shape and presence of Islam in Europe. Equally significant was the role of European colonial powers, which incorporated large populations of Muslims as colonial subjects in North Africa and South Asia, resulting in postcolonial labour migration to countries such as France and Britain respectively.

Elsewhere in Northern and Western Europe, labour shortages in the 1960s led to the recruitment of ‘guest workers’, such as, for instance, Moroccans in Belgium and Turks in Germany, while in more recent years political unrest and warlike conditions in countries such as Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Somalia have resulted in Muslim refugees settling in different European locations.

In Eastern Europe, the numbers of recent Muslim migrants are numerically small and contain a high proportion of students, partly in continuation of the relation of former Soviet bloc states with Muslim majority countries. Moreover, in the wake of the war in former Yugoslavia, Islamic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have become active in the region. There is often considerable social distance between these recent migrants and longer-standing local Muslims, some of whom have been included in leading circles and whose presence has been recognized by the state.

Whereas the latter’s way of being Muslim has often been influenced by Christianity or Turkish Sufi traditions, the new immigrants, especially those from the Middle East, often bring with them a very different, more literal and strict set of interpretations of Islam, including ideas of appropriate dress (GórakSosnowska 2012). Acknowledgement of these different strands of Muslim presence in Europe highlights not only the diversity of Islamic presence and practice in Europe but also how such histories are often ignored in contemporary narratives in which Islam is portrayed as a new alien force which threatens what used to be cohesive European national identities and values.

Similarly, in the United States there is a long-standing Muslim presence, dating back to the slave trade (Aidi 2011). In the 1930s the Nation of Islam emerged with a strong black segregationalist outlook. Today, Islam continues to attract a significant proportion of African American converts. In addition, Turkish and other Muslims that were part of the Ottoman Empire came to settle in the United States and Canada from the late nineteenth century onwards.

More recently, when immigration policies relaxed after the 1960s, Asian and Arab Muslims settled in the United States and Canada. In contrast to Europe, where labour migration was mainly working class, in the US case, there is a substantial presence of well-educated Muslims who have become part of the middle and professional classes. Also in the United States, there were clashes in interpretations of Islam with recent migrants from Muslim majority countries often criticising African American ways of living Islam.

While the modern secular state claims the separation of state and religion, it simultaneously defines how state and religion should relate to each other, resulting in variations in the ways Islam and Muslims are governed.  Differences occur not only between nation-states but also between particular fields of governance whether dress, education, the built environment or commerce. Regulation also varies according to the particular actors involved such as students or teachers or according to particular locations such as schools or public space.

Historically, both Muslim empires and the colonial state expressed concerns about how Muslims should appear in public (Ahmed 1992; Scott 2007; Moors 2011). More recently, controversies about Muslim headscarves, and later face veils, emerged when larger numbers of Muslim girls began to enter public schools in the 1980s and the labour market a decade later. In north-western Europe, this coincided with processes of de-confessionalization, while at the same time, Muslim majority countries were experiencing Islamic revivalism, including the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the so-called Rushdie affair the same year, it was no longer the red (communist) danger that was seen as threatening but the green (Islamic) one. Migrants once welcomed as guest workers became reconceptualized first as ethnic minorities and then as Muslims, which became the new problem category. National identities were increasingly defined in opposition to Islam, whether in terms of strong secularism, an apparently shared JudaeoChristian heritage or a mixture of both.

In the Balkans and Eastern Europe, relations between religion and ethnicity were influenced by the legacies of both the Ottoman and the Soviet presence. Soviet rule had discouraged religious practices such as wearing recognizably Muslim dress, which was at times restricted to private or folkloric occasions. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, religion became increasingly important in people’s everyday lives in these parts of Eastern Europe. This made the position of those whose religious and ethnic belongings did not overlap more tenuous, as happened, for instance, in former Yugoslavia and in the case of the Pomaks (Slavic Muslims) in Bulgaria (Ghodsee 2007).

In Western Europe, but also elsewhere, the growth of neo-nationalism in the 1990s, further accentuated by the events of 9/11, engendered a broad shift towards assimilationist policies, with Muslims pressured to prove their loyalty to European nation-states and their central values, not simply by adhering to the law but through their everyday behaviour and appearances (Gingrich 2006; Geschiere 2009).

In Eastern Europe and the Balkans, distancing oneself from the visible forms of Islam propagated by new immigrants from Arab countries became a means of highlighting one’s belonging to Europe. In the United States and Canada (with the exception of francophoneQuebec), it was discourses on national security rather than integration that became emphasized, especially after 9/11 and the involvement of the United States in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Fassin 2010).

The effect of these changing discourses on integration and security are evident in the ways many states have tried to regulate Muslim women’s headcoverings. In France, for instance, the meaning of laicity has been transformed in the course of the last two decades (Scott 2005, 2007; Asad 2006; Bowen 2007). In its 1990 ruling, the Conseil d‘État (Council of State) stated that wearing a headscarf need not necessarily be in conflict with French laicity. Nor was it necessarily a sign of proselytizing.

In 2004, however, a new law was passed prohibiting the wearing of conspicuous signs of religious affiliation in public schools. By contrast, in the United Kingdom, policies of multiculturalism have left space for visible signs of ethnic and religious diversity to find expression in the public domain. Yet here, too, there have been controversies over the regulation of Muslim dress as seen in the ‘jilbab case’ in 2002 in which a young Muslim girl pursued a legal case against her secondary school for not allowing her to attend school in a jilbab, a loose full-length coat.

The school took the position that the uniform option of salwar kameez conformed to Islamic requirements and that it was necessary to protect pupils from Muslim extremists and from the development of a hierarchy of piety in the school (Tarlo 2005). In Germany, the main focus of headscarf debates has been on teachers in state schools, with the argument that they, as representatives of the state, need to be neutral. However, when in 2003 the federal court in BadenWürttemberg decided to ban the headscarf for teachers in public schools, it used the argument that it was protecting students against exposure to the influence of an ‘alien religion’ (Vom Bruck 2008: 56).

It is not only headscarves that have been the focus of the politics of secularism. In the past decade, face veils have become a major issue of contestation in Europe and America. In the Netherlands in 2005, a parliamentary majority voted to prohibit the wearing of face veils in all public spaces. Whenthis turned out to be unconstitutional, specific prohibitions were implemented for civil servants and in schools (Moors 2009b). In 2010 and 2011, France and Belgium prohibited wearing face coverings in public space, while a number of other countries have either implemented partial prohibitions or are considering doing so (Grillo and Shah 2012).

Whereas there are differences in how specific nation-states regulate the wearing of Islamic styles of dress, two often-interconnected sets of argumentation stand out. Covered dress has been considered both a sign or instrument of women’s oppression and part of the spread of undesirable forms of Islam. Both in colonies such as Egypt (Ahmed 1992) and in the newly formed authoritarian nation-states such as Turkey (Göle 2002), Islamic head coverings were often considered a sign or instrument of women’s oppression at the hands of fathers, husbands or the wider ethnic-religious community.

The same arguments have been used in contemporary headscarf debates in France (Bowen 2007: 208ff; Scott 2007: 151ff) and Germany (Amir-Moazami 2005: 273) and to support the prohibition of face-veiling (Moors 2009b: 401). References to gender inequality in Islam are used to construct or prove the apparent incompatibility of Islam with the egalitarian values of European secularism. Showing how such secularism often amounts to a form of ‘sexularism’, Scott points to how the exposure of women’s bodies is valorized in Europe and the unveiling of women presented as a generous and liberating act (2009).

Islamic headcovers and face veils are also considered a sign of adherence to undesirable forms of Islam. They are perceived as signs of a political, fundamentalist, orthodox or segregating form of Islam, constructed in opposition to a positively valued liberal, secular or moderate Islam (Bowen 2007: 182ff; Fernando 2009). In France, bringing one’s religious conviction into the public is thought to strengthen communalism and is considered a threat to the republic (Bowen 2007: 155), while in Germany some consider the Islamic headscarf to be a political and missionary statement and a sign of cultural segregation that contributes to the development of parallel societies (Amir-Moazami 2005: 272).

Concerns about the potentially segregating effects of face-veiling have also been raised in Britain both by politicians and by members of the public, including Muslims (Tarlo 2010b: 131–60). How then has this regulation of women’s appearances affected the way Muslim women dress in public? What sort of intervention do young Muslim women make through their engagement with Islamic fashion? Islam is increasingly seen and represented as incommensurable with European values and culture, many young Muslim women adopt fashionable styles and combinations of Islamic dress as a means of presenting themselves as contemporary or modern, taking distance from habitual cultural forms of dress favored by older generations and making clear their engagement both with Islam and with contemporary style trends.

The firmly entrenched perception of hijab as a symbol of women’s subordination regardless of what hijab-wearers may feel about the subject often makes it difficult for covered Muslim women to be heard in public debate. It is through their corporeal presence that many young Muslim women find ways of presenting an alternative position to the public. As a medium of communication and expression, dress is open to all, offering opportunities to large numbers to engage in public debate through their visible and material presence.

As wearers of fashionable styles of Islamic dress, young Muslim women in Europe and America create a presence which has the potential to destabilize some of the entrenched perceptions of Muslim women. Wearing fashionable styles, blogging about fashion, creating outfits from unexpected combinations and introducing new colours, patterns and silhouettes to the urban landscape works well against the image of Muslim women as dull, downtrodden, oppressed and out of sync with modernity.

Precisely because the corporeal aesthetics of fashion have historically been so strongly linked to modernity,they become an ideal means by which women are able to distance themselves from the common stereotypical images of Muslim women. Covered Muslim women themselves often highlight how they are involved in ‘telling through showing’ (Mitchel 2002).

They are hyperconscious of the fact that as a marked category, they can never escape the burden of representation. Because they are easily recognizable as Muslims, they feel a strong responsibility and urge to counter negative stereotypes about Islam with what they perceive as positive images. This may be especially true of those with a strong public presence through their employment or other public activities including blogging. But it is also true of women whose lives are less visible in the public domain. Even women who wear full-body coverings sometimes choose to adopt lighter colours in an attempt to minimize negative perceptions or perceived barriers to communication.

Islamic fashion in Europe and America is a cosmopolitan phenomenon. This cosmopolitanism has many aspects. Not only is the social composition of Muslim populations in these settings highly diverse in terms of history, cultural background and religious tradition, but it also displays high levels of interaction between people of different backgrounds who exchange ideas, including understandings of how to dress and what is fashionable or appropriate.

In addition to the cosmopolitan street fashions visible in a variety of European and American cities, we find Islamic fashion designers emerging, often designing full-length garments to cater for women who wish to wear fuller, more distinctively Islamic forms of dress. Here, too, we find strong cosmopolitanizing tendencies and ambitions as shown in the way some Islamic fashion designers in Britain draw on and make reference to different clothing traditions from around the world through their use of patterns, shapes, textiles and decorative elements and through the names they give to some of the garments they create (Tarlo).

The fact that Islamic fashion practices in Europe and America have emerged through transcultural interaction does not mean that ethnic or national styles and associations have been eliminated or become irrelevant in contemporary Islamic fashion even if, in some cases, they are muted or downplayed in favour of associations with Islam and fashion.

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