Designing Citizens
by Elizabeth Bucar
For many Westerners, the Islamic veil is the ultimate sign of women’s oppression. But Elizabeth Bucar’s take on clothing worn by Muslim women is a far cry from this older feminist attitude toward veiling. She argues that modest clothing represents much more than social control or religious orthodoxy. Today, headscarves are styled to frame the head and face in interesting ways, while colors and textures express individual tastes and challenge aesthetic preconceptions. Brand-name clothing and accessories serve as conveyances of social distinction and are part of a multimillion-dollar ready-to-wear industry. Even mainstream international chains are offering lines especially for hijabis. More than just a veil, this is pious fashion from head to toe, which engages with a range of aesthetic values related to moral authority, consumption, and selfhood.
In Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress, Bucar invites readers to join her in three Muslim-majority nations as she surveys how women approach the question “What to wear?” By looking at fashion trends in the bustling cities of Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul — and at the many ways clerics, designers, politicians, and bloggers try to influence Muslim women’s choices — she concludes that pious fashion depends to a large extent on local aesthetic and moral values, rather than the dictates of religious doctrine. Here is a brief excerpt.
Each location has its own history of regulating Muslim women’s clothing through official dress codes. Such regulations reflect the idea that women’s modest clothing is a sign of something else — whether a “bad” sign that Muslim women need saving or a “good” sign of the honor and moral health of an entire nation. For much of the last one hundred years, battles over these signs have been instigated by male elites to further political agendas related to colonialism, nationalism, and reform; they have had little to do with improving the lives of actual women. But there is an unintended consequence of making Muslim women and their clothing important symbols of the nation: women are given a prominent role as citizens and their dress a prominent role in constructing what modern citizenship means. Thus, even if modest dress resulted from attempts to politically control women, it has become a practice in which women can exercise political influence.
Styles of pious fashion in Tehran show us that the modern Iranian woman might be willing to live by rules not of her own making but she also demands the right to interpret those rules. As a consequence, hijab turns out to be not a single form of dress: rather, it includes a range of styles from the full-body covering of traditional chador to tailored short overcoats and headscarves. In some sense, any woman wearing pious fashion participates in the physical and visual segregation of men and women in public, thus reinforcing a gender ideology that supports patriarchy. Some styles are interpreted as expressing allegiance to the current regime, whereas others are viewed as politically subversive, pushing back against state attempts to regulate public morality and presentation through a dress code. Over three decades after the Iranian revolution, hijab still needs to be enforced, evidence that attempts to refashion the female citizen from above have not been entirely successful. In fact if anything, pious fashion has served to display diversity among Iranian women — whether that diversity is based on identity, class, or political aspirations.
In Indonesia, the government’s vision of the modern woman has always involved ideas about her presentation and comportment in public. But for most of the last hundred years, sarong-style skirts and blouses were the clothes officially promoted by the government. That changed dramatically three decades ago when the popularity of jilbab skyrocketed after Suharto resigned. As young, college-educated women increasingly adopted pious fashion, it became a sign of a cosmopolitan woman. In addition, since a headscarf and modest outfit were not historically part of Islamic practice in this country, women were free to wear these items to express a thoroughly modern identity that is entirely compatible with national development and progress.
Muslim women’s clothing in Turkey has been connected with the complex conversation about national identity. The ideal modern Turkish woman does not aspire to strict secularism anymore, even if she does understand herself to be European. She can have a strong Muslim identity, reflected in a specific style of dress: tesettür. The prominence of pious fashion in Istanbul is a sign of the waning of the European forms of secularism that dominated much of Turkish politics in the twentieth century. In many ways, wearing pious fashion is a more politically radical act here than in the other two locations, because it involves a turning away from Turkey’s Kemalist legacy.
In all three locations, secularism has been championed not only for the purpose of preventing the influence of religion on politics but also for exerting state control over religion. However, efforts to repress political Islam in the name of promoting secularism often backfired. Even if traditional Islamic parties and institutions were undermined for a time, cultural and social expressions of Muslim identity and values thrived, which in turn led to the creation of new mechanisms for gaining political power. In addition, this process meant that secular authorities became involved in shaping practices that were both religious and political, while at the same time they were negotiating the boundary between them.
If pious fashion reflects the state of Islamic politics in these three locations, does it also indicate the existence of a political movement, whether local or global? The answer depends on what we mean by a political movement. If solidarity, coordination, and collective action are essential elements, then probably not. But the existence of similar clothing trends gives the appearance of collective action, even if they are not intentionally coordinated. For instance, in all three locations, traditional forms of patterned cloth have become incorporated into local pious fashion. Wearing these “ethnic” styles is not just a way to reclaim local aesthetic traditions — it can also be a way to express social or political critique by valorizing alternative sources of national pride.
