Aesthetics, ethics and fashionable veiling: a debate in contemporary Turkey

Abstract

Observant Muslim women all over the world experiment with materials and styles, find inspiration in past and present, Eastern and Western fashions, and create new types of covered dress. This fashionable veiling has also become the topic of heated debates. This article builds on an ethnographic study that highlights the debate over fashionable veiling within Turkey. According to the conceptualisation of the revivalist movement, veiling is an ethical practice of self-cultivation. The dress hypostatises a particular religiously sanctioned aesthetics (an aesthetics of the proper form); and the practitioner commits herself to a religiously defined conduct (an aesthetics of the correct posture). Fashionable veiling is (also) a sartorial practice of self-enhancement. It demonstrates experimentation within a religiously sanctioned aesthetics; and the practitioner’s public behaviour evidences both conformity with and transgression of religiously defined conduct. The article approaches fashion as a realm of the aesthetic and finds guidance in anthropological discussions of ‘Islamic art’, ‘ordinary ethics’ and ‘everyday Islam’. I argue that the debate over fashionable veiling among religious conservatives provides insight into what kind of relationship there can be between ethics and aesthetics, and who is qualified to define it. Religious conservatives emphasise that in veiling the only possible and permissible relationship between ethics and aesthetics is one of subordination of aesthetics to ethics. In contrast, headscarf-wearing fashion professionals, the most visible practitioners of this type of veiling, claim that in fashionable veiling the relationship between ethics and aesthetics is one of identity, namely, aesthetics as ethics.

Keywords:

• aesthetics
• ethics
• veiling
• fashionable veiling
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

An early version of this paper was presented at the workshop ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: An Enquiry into their Relationship’, University College, London on 6 May 2015. I would like to thank all those who engaged critically with it. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their time and expertise, and the editors, especially George Lau, for their continuous support.

Notes on contributor

Magdalena Crăciun is Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at University College London, Associate Lecturer in Anthropology in the Department of Sociology at University of Bucharest, and principal investigator on a two-year research project on middle-classness in Romania, funded by the Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation, and hosted by the National School of Political and Administrative Sciences in Bucharest. She earned her PhD in Anthropology at University College London in 2010 and worked in the same department as Marie Curie Fellow between 2013 and 2015. Her most recent publications include Islam, Faith and Fashion: The Islamic Fashion Industry in Turkey (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), ‘Bobbles and values: an ethnography of de-bobbling garments in post-socialist urban Romania’ [Journal of Material Culture 20: 3–20 (2015)], Material Culture and Authenticity: Fake Branded Fashion in Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014) and ‘Rethinking fakes, authenticating selves’ [Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18: 846–63 (2012)].

Notes

1. Recent developments in fashionable veiling in Turkey are featured on popular platforms such as Yeşil Topuklar (Green Heels) (http://www.yesiltopuklar.com/; https://www.instagram.com/yesiltopuklar/) and Tesettür Giyim (Islamically appropriate clothing) (https://www.instagram.com/tesetturgiyimcom/; http://www.tesetturgiyim.com/), as well as on popular Instagram accounts such as https://www.instagram.com/studionishh/ and https://www.instagram.com/hulyaslan/).

2. I conducted field research on the Islamic fashion industry in Istanbul between April 2012 and July 2014, and both interviewed and casually conversed with headscarf-wearing fashion professionals about their work and how others thought about their work and their own sartorial choices. Although these headscarf-wearing fashion professionals are public figures, in this article I prefer not to use their names. I also archived arguments for and against fashionable veiling from mass media and social media.

3. The word tesettür derives from the Arabic root s-t-r and translates as ‘covering’.

4. For this reason Göle’s book, The Forbidden Modern (1996) – a book that showed how observant Muslim women’s encounter with and embrace of modernity takes place in practice in Turkey even though Islamism ‘forbids’ it – has been widely read outside academia.

5. This call (tekbir) precedes the call to prayer (ezan) and the performance of the ritual prayer (namaz) and asks believers to acknowledge the greatness of God.

6. The Turkish word moda translates as ‘fashion’.

7. This Turkish word translates as ‘splendid’, ‘the most beautiful’ or ‘best of the best’.

8. Between 2012 and 2014, when I did my ethnographic fieldwork, the core group was small – some 20 to 30 headscarf-wearing fashion professionals, most of them living in Istanbul. My estimate is based on social media popularity and regular attendance at events organised by Islamic fashion magazines, major retailers, established clothing companies and e-commerce companies specialising in fashionable covered garments. Headscarf-wearing fashion professionals are very popular on social media, some having tens of thousands of followers, mostly Turks from Turkey and abroad.

9. Imam Hatip schools are secondary public vocational schools that offer religious education.

10. A. Dilipak, 2013. ‘Tesettür mü?’, Vuslat magazine. October 2013. Issue 146. [http://www.vuslatdergisi.com/yaziDetay.php?id=3727&sID=146&year=2013&month=10], accessed 26 September 2016. See also T. Eraslankılıç. September 2014. ‘Ölçülü Giyim Nedir?’, [http://www.yesiltopuklar.com/olculu-giyim-nedir.html], accessed 8 April 2017); A. Böhürler, October 2015. ‘Muhafazakâr cemiyet hayatı dergisi Nun'a hayırlı olsun diyemeyeceğim’, [http://t24.com.tr/haber/ayse-bohurler-muhazakarcemiyet-hayati-dergisi-nuna-hayirli-olsun-diyemeyecegim,311709], accessed 8 April 2017; F. Barbarosoğlu. April 2015. ‘“Yaza merhaba” diyen muhafazakar kadınlar sözüm size değer mi?’, [http://www.yenisafak.com/yazarlar/fatmabarbarosoglu/yazamerhaba-diyen-muhafazakar-kad%C4%B1nlar-sozum-size-deger-mi-2010403], accessed 8 April 2017.

11. The Turkish word caiz translates as ‘legitimate’, ‘acceptable’ and ‘religiously permissible’.

12. The Turkish word korsan literally means ‘pirate’; it is translated here as ‘inauthentic’ and ‘illegitimate’ to better emphasise the intended contrast between the two forms of veiling.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Executive Agency (REA) of the European Union under the Grant Agreement number 327169.