{"id":4158,"date":"2014-04-14T04:00:27","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T11:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/?p=4158"},"modified":"2014-04-13T18:12:09","modified_gmt":"2014-04-14T01:12:09","slug":"guest-book-review-islamic-fashion-and-anti-fashion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/2014\/04\/14\/guest-book-review-islamic-fashion-and-anti-fashion\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest Book Review: Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Emma Tarlo and Annelies Moors, eds.<\/p>\n

294 pp., illustrated, Bloomsbury, $29.95<\/p>\n

Guest book reviewer, Jennifer Heath<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are moments I think we\u2019re beating this horse to death. I worry that we are still far too fixated on the hijab<\/em> (veil) and on Muslim women\u2019s dress, though we should be turning our gaze toward other, more pressing issues that profoundly affect women: e.g., poverty, war, and environmental degradation. Will we ever be content to let women dress as they choose without judgment or comment?<\/p>\n

Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America<\/em><\/a> is an essential collection that fulfills a great deal of scholarship. It features sixteen essays covering history, anthropology, sociology, and fashion studies. \u00a0Editors Emma Tarlo and Annelies Moors have written an excellent introduction, particularly in its discussion of how dress affects religiosity and piety, how fashion relates to assimilation and creativity, and the politics of so-called Muslim dress or \u201cthe performative power of the headscarf to make identity claims and political demands,\u201d as Rustem Ertug Altinay puts it in his chapter \u201cSule Y\u00fcksel Senler: An Early Style Icon of Urban Islamic Fashion in Turkey.\u201d Tarlo and Moors remind us that Muslim women are habitually perceived as shrouded and silenced and that their coverings often seem to prove they are merely \u201cagents of barbarism,\u201d as Canadians A. Brenda Anderson and F. Volker Greifenhagen write in \u201cCovering up in the Prairies.\u201d Yet within the bounds of \u201cproper\u201d Muslim dress, there is vast, sophisticated sartorial ingenuity and, as Tarlo calls it, \u201cthe agency of the hijab.<\/em>\u201d (Unfortunately, too much sensational focus on the hijab also robs women of their agency.) The editors write that the \u201cbook grows out of awareness of the discrepancy between public discourses\u2026and actual developments\u2026pointing to the need for greater understanding and more nuanced interpretation.\u201d Indeed.<\/p>\n

Altinay\u2019s chapter about Turkey pushes the book\u2019s self-ascribed Europe boundaries, but Banu G\u00f6kanksel and Anna Secor bridge the gap with \u201cTransnational Networks of Veiling Fashion Between Turkey and Western Europe.\u201d Many Europeans are ethnic Turks, many whose families arrived generations ago as guest workers. Maria Curtis addresses Turks in the United States with \u201cCloset Tales from a Turkish Cultural Center in the \u2018Petro Metro\u2019, Houston Texas.\u201d Altinay offers essential historic ballast (with kudos to Audrey Hepburn), for one thing, helping to explain how the headscarf was enthusiastically re-inaugurated into a society that was mandated by its leadership to be secular.<\/p>\n

Most interesting are those essays about unfamiliar, rarely noticed practices and challenges, like \u00a0Daniela Stoica\u2019s \u201cThe Clothing Dilemmas of Transylvanian Muslim Converts\u201d or Katarzyna G\u00f3rak-Sosnowska and Michael Lyszcarz\u2019s \u201cPerspectives on Muslim Dress in Poland: A Tatar View,\u201d a study of the Tatars\u2019 distinctive, traditional uses of the headscarf as they encounter a new (and often insistent) interpretation of Islam.<\/p>\n

Annelies Moors\u2019 \u201cFashion and its Discontents: The Aesthetics of Covering in the Netherlands,\u201d Synn\u00f8ve Bendixsen\u2019s\u00a0 \u201c\u2018I Love My Prophet\u2019: Religious Taste, Consumption and Distinction in Berlin,\u201d and Connie Car\u00f8c Christiansen\u2019s \u201cMiss Headscarf: Islamic Fashion and the Danish Media\u201d look to the entanglements of belonging, social conflict, politics, gender, and sexuality (among other things).<\/p>\n

I once asked Reina Lewis \u2013 who, like Leila Karin \u00d6sterlind with \u201cMade in France: Islamic Fashion Companies on Display,\u201d examines merchandising in \u201cHijab on the Shop Floor: Muslims in Fashion Retail in Britain\u201d — whether the trend among Euro-American women combining trousers with dresses was related to the beautiful salwar<\/em> kameez, <\/em>a customary costume in South and Central Asia. She thought it more likely to be a retro-hippie craze. I\u2019m not so sure, because, as we see in various chapters of this book, and in Tarlo\u2019s previous work, contemporary Islamic fashions, increasingly distanced from indigenous clothing, are so modish, attractive, elegant, fun, and streetwise that even young non-Muslim women could find them irresistible. But would they also wear hijab? \u00a0Well, that might, at the very least \u2500 at last \u2500 render all this who-wears-what fuss moot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jennifer Heath<\/strong> is an independent scholar, award-winning cultural journalist, critic, curator, and activist, the author or editor of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction, including On the Edge of Dream: The Women of Celtic Myth and Legend<\/em><\/a> and The Echoing Green: The Garden in Myth and Memory<\/a><\/em> <\/a>(both from Penguin\/Plume, 1998, 2000), A House White With Sorrow: A Ballad for Afghanistan<\/em><\/a> (Roden Press, 1996),\u00a0 The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam<\/em><\/a> (Paulist Press, 2004), The Veil: Women Writers on its History, Lore, and Politics<\/em><\/a> (University of California Press, 2008), Land of the Unconquerable: The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women<\/a> <\/em>(University of California Press, 2011), co-edited with Ashraf Zahedi, and also with Zahedi, Children of Afghanistan: The Path to Peace<\/em> <\/a>(University of Texas Press, 2014), as well as The Jewel and the Ember: Love Stories of the Ancient Middle East<\/em> (Smashwords E-Book Publications). She came of age in Afghanistan, founded Seeds for Afghanistan in 2001 and in 2003, the Afghanistan Relief Organization Midwife Training and Infant Care Program, later International Midwife Assistance. Her many touring exhibitions include Water, Water Everywhere: Paean to a Vanishing Resource<\/em>, The Veil: Visible & Invisible Spaces<\/em>, Black Velvet: The Art We Love to Hate<\/em> and The Map is Not the Territory: Parallel Paths-Palestinians, Native Americans, Irish. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America Emma Tarlo and Annelies Moors, eds. 294 pp., illustrated, Bloomsbury, $29.95 Guest book reviewer, Jennifer Heath There are moments I think we\u2019re beating this horse to death. I worry that we are still far too fixated on the hijab (veil) and on Muslim women\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4158"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4158"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fashionhistorian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=4158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}