Islam: when fashionistas reinvente the veil ·Global Voices<

The Gap brand is relaunching the controversy over the wearing of the veil: in its latest campaign for GapKids, two children are featured, one is wearing a blue veil. In France, elected officials and Internet users are calling for a boycott. The brand defends itself by explaining that these are children from a New York public school and that the advertising is intended for the international market.

How could the veil, a simple piece of fabric with various variations, become a globalized garment, causing significant controversy?

In June 2017, it was the mayor of the municipality of Lorette who drafted an anti-burkini decree, prohibiting the wearing of the burkini and the veil on a municipal body of water. The controversy aroused by his act prompted him to withdraw it after a week.

Read also The burkini, bare breasts, the Republic and democracy

The same month, on the other side of the Atlantic, the American fashion magazine Allure illustrated its cover with a photo of the Somali model Hamali Aden, wearing a hijab.

Ten years of field work in Afghanistan and numerous trips to the Middle East have led me to carry out anthropological and historical work on women's costumes.

However, it has been difficult for me to ignore the European societal transformations of the last ten years. The clothing of young Muslim women has indeed generated virulent debates.

The "veil", one word, variants

In France, where I live, the term "veil" is particularly confusing, since it covers variants that are often mutually exclusive: the scarf, burqa, niqab, hijab, jilbab. These terms describe different forms of veil, more or less enveloping. The blue Afghani-Pakistani burqa and the black Saudi Arabian niqab cover the face as well as the body. It is a version of the niqab worn by young Muslims and converts who have turned to a purist Islam, based on a fundamentalist reading of the texts.

Read also Islam: why they wear the veil

The hijab is the term used for a colorful Islamic headdress, covering the head, neck and shoulders. This headdress is particularly worn in the world from the English colonies, in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh.

In Indonesia, the term jilbab means pretty much the same thing. Elsewhere, for example on online sales catalogs – the most modest of which blur the faces of models – it designates the one-piece outfit that covers the head and body.

Wearing a simple headscarf is the antithesis of the niqab (full veil), since the headscarf allows the wearer to participate in the public space, while the niqab definitively excludes it. Individuality on the one hand, anonymity on the other, in the name of religious precepts which would like to be shared but which offer determining oscillations, sometimes chosen, sometimes constrained.

Read also Phébé - The thousand and one variations of the Islamic veil

From the hated veil to the acclaimed veil?

A median version, which only reveals the face, is imposed by law in Shiite Iran and Iraq: the black chador, political as well as religious clothing, was meant to represent the ideal Muslim woman produced by the 1979 Khomeini revolution. But her imaginative diversion in Tehran has become a national sport.

Read also These Iranian women who dare to remove their veil

The face is then invested as a field of expression, even contestation, through makeup, eyebrows, and even cosmetic surgery.

The full veil is compulsory in some countries such as Saudi Arabia (niqab/abaya), or in mainly rural southern Afghanistan (burqa), where the female literacy rate of 16% is one of the lowest on earth, according to Unicef.

In many other countries, including those with a large practicing Muslim community, the laws may not explicitly mandate the wearing of such a dedicated garment, but a requirement of "modesty" does apply, according to the canons in force. It is unthinkable, for example, to walk around in shorts or tight jeans in Pakistan, even if no constitutional law prohibits it.

On the other hand, in countries with explicitly repressive laws such as Iran, Malaysia, regions dominated by Daesh and Boko Haram in the Sahel and the Middle East, religious morality police watch and call to order the offenders, often by violent means. It is generally attached to a committee for the promotion of virtue and the repression of vice.

My Iranian and Afghan feminist friends are thus dismayed when organizations like Amnesty International or the League for Human Rights protest, in the name of personal freedoms, against the ban on wearing the full veil, decreed by the European Union in 2014.

At the time when the Americans and their allies intervened in Afghanistan (from 2002), these same organizations considered that the burqa (local version of the niqab) was emblematic of the extreme restrictions imposed on women by the Taliban and represented a denial of their human rights.

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— JefePüda Fri Jun 26 16:14:19 +0000 2020

How, in the space of fifteen years, did this absolute upheaval take place?

Religion, a reassuring certainty

According to an INED report, one of the most important factors is the rise of religion among young people, particularly among immigrants who declare themselves to be Muslim of the second generation. They believe they live in a “strong religiosity”, often different from that practiced by their own parents. According to this same report, secularization, even atheism, takes root more among migrants or natives of Christian origin.

Read also Islam, the ordeal of apostates

Regardless of their religion, millennials are experiencing what has been called “the end of ideologies”, or “the disenchantment of the world”, as it is known, with, for example, the rise of neo-liberalism in all guts and its share of disappointments. Among these, the normalization of disbelief and lack of trust in democratic processes and political figures has played a major role.

In the Middle East, young people were brought up in the context of violent or low-intensity warfare, terrorism, the collapse of the relatively secular option of the postcolonial governments of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt, as well as the failure of popular revolts like the Arab Spring.

The debates around the occupation of the West Bank for half a century have crystallized the debates in France all the more, bringing together young people often from Muslim immigration around the same fight. Gradually, politicized religion was erected into a new ideal, as demonstrated by political scientist Gilles Kepel, notably in his book La Fracture.

Also read Gilles Kepel: “France between the Kalash and Charles Martel”

A partially comparable process has taken place in Western countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, as well as in Scandinavia. In these territories, the communitarian principle dominates: that is to say a plural society where the visible belonging to religious and ethnic communities is recognized, even in the public space, sometimes to the detriment of a unifying idea of ​​national belonging.

According to French critics, this tendency would encourage the dissolution of identity in total assimilation. In 1997, the sociologist Michel Wieviorka had already identified the pitfalls of too much rigidity.

Clothing conveys identity

Clothing is today one of the most obvious signs of this thirst for identity recognition. An educated, vibrant, modern and religious middle class emerged in Britain and North America. She affirms her Muslim affiliation and claims the right to make the hijab a fashion item.

Also read TRIBUNE. Islamic fashion against religious fundamentalism?

In 2016, the Huffington Post listed the 17 American Muslim women who had contributed to the good image of the United States that year. You can admire there, in headscarves and often heavily made up, lawyers, businesswomen and activists.

This representation is unimaginable in France, where social success means conformity to the republican model, including in lifestyle. This is how websites selling more orthodox clothes in France, such as niqabs and jilbabs, are rather reserved for a popular market, generally without jobs.

In the United States, on the contrary, it was a bourgeois class of consumers who, clearly displaying their attachment to Islam, enabled the development of “modest wear”. Initially, in the 1980s, this fashion was intended for Orthodox and Mormon Jewish women, and is now found on websites.

The flourishing business of "Islamic" fashion

Thus, while 40 international fashion designers presented the first Modest Fashion Week in London in February 2017, the launch, in 2016, of “modest wear” ready-to-wear collections by Uniqlo, D&G, Tommy Hilfiger and Oscar de la Renta sparked controversy in France.

Read also Dolce and Gabbana launches its first collection of hijabs

We cannot accuse these companies of proselytizing in favor of Islam: above all, they capitalize on the announced growth of an increasingly large market. According to Thomson Reuters and its report “State of Global Islamic Economy 2014-2015”, this market was 266 billion dollars in 2013 and should reach 484 billion dollars by 2019. This growth coincides with the demographic boom of the world's Muslim population, rising from 1.6 billion to almost 3 billion by 2050.

Read also “Marks & Spencer” are controversial

Trendy hijabista

Today, the hijabista is on the rise: it is a young woman, living in the West, who has decided to live her Muslim faith on her body in a modern and trendy, according to the ever-changing references of fashion; this phenomenon is found, in a more limited way, in the Middle East, Pakistan and South-East Asia.

The difference is that the figure of the hijabista is a particularity of today's youth in Europe and on the American continent, who continue to claim religious neutrality, whereas in Muslim countries it is the norm, as explains the pioneer sociologist of modest fashion Reina Lewis.

Fashion makes it possible to integrate those who wear it, to live in the present time, and not to immure them in a supposedly religious state, frozen in the inert temporality of the texts and according to the interpretation of the Islamists.

The latter, veiled from head to toe, refuse the very principle of fashion. However, they "represented" in France only 687 verbalizations in 2016, and 1,500 in five years. In France, the police ban as the only strategy struggles to achieve the expected goal, ie making the Muslim fact invisible, or at least reducing it, in the public space. Conversely, it exacerbates tensions and sends these women and their families back to the rigorous Islamist self-segregation, which manifests itself in the specialized fairs organized for the Muslims of France, formerly the Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF ), historically close to the Muslim Brotherhood. Hundreds of niqabs and jilbabs are paraded there, also on sale on site.

Read also Pontoise: the Muslim Women's Fair under fire from critics

On the contrary, the fashion of young Muslim women, joyful, colorful, liberated, ultimately enjoyable, is a positive phenomenon, since it is immediately opposed to the deadly niqab and its defenders. It allows clothing fluidity and, above all, the possibility of changing your mind at any time.

* Carol Mann is an associate researcher at the Paris-8 LEGS specialist in gender and armed conflict, Paris-8-Vincennes Saint-Denis University. She published "From the Afghan burqa to the globalized hijabista", published by L'Harmattan.