How Muslim Women Use Fashion To Exert Political Influence

I have been researching Muslim women’s fashion since 2004. My comparative investigation has taken me to three locations: Tehran, Iran; Yogyakarta, Indonesia; and Istanbul, Turkey. While there have been studies of Muslim women’s clothing in many individual countries, there are few cross-cultural and transnational comparisons. As I undertook such a comparison over the next dozen years, I found surprise, pleasure, and delight in pious fashion. My conversations about modest clothing with women around the world also challenged those neat intellectual boxes to which I had grown overly accustomed in the United States.

Each of the three Muslim-majority, non-Arab countries where I conducted my ethnographic research has its own history of regulating women’s clothing through official dress codes. These 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 100 years, battles over these signs have been instigated by male elites to further political agendas that 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 and their dress are given prominent roles in constructing what modern citizenship means. So, even if modest dress resulted from attempts to politically control women, it has become a practice in which women can exercise political influence.  

Iran

Pious fashion in Iran is highly regulated., or clothing that conforms with sharia. But because there is no clear definition of in the penal code, women have some flexibility in deciding what to wear. The many styles of pious fashion—from the full-body covering of traditional to tailored short overcoats and headscarves—show 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. Some styles are read as expressing allegiance to the current regime, whereas others are viewed as politically subversive. At protests, women wear white headscarves and publicly demonstrate against the dress code. This week, a few women went further, their headscarves altogether and waving them around on sticks for passersby to see.