Islamophobia, Islamic dress and precarious bodies

One of the most visible signifiers of Islam has been the veil – it covers the individual and preserves their privacy, while publicly declaring the identity of its wearer. How it means and what it means has been the realm of binarized debate. Islamic dress as referred to in the title of this special issue is a term whose meaning is contested and should be understood as constituted through difference rather than homogenizing experiences of wearers. The oft-witnessed conflation of forms of Islamic dress (Scott, 2005, p. 115) points to the fact that acts of censure and governance through Islamic dress are strategic and instrumental in pursuing wider political neo-colonial aims. One of the primary features that have united the papers contained here is the failure of discussions in the public domain to include the voices of Muslim women (both those who veil and those who do not). Here the nuances of its meaning, as debated by the private wearer, are put forward through a range of papers collected for this special issue which we hope will counter the more offensive posturings broadcast by some media. Authors here challenge the dual positioning of the ‘liberated’ woman, who the occidental has stated must be unveiled, against the ‘oppressed’ woman, who veils, either by choice or by mandate (and who must be liberated). This liberation takes the form solely of uncovering the face, since then liberation will be seen to be done. Beyond the arguments for liberation, the veil has also come to be a trigger for hostility towards the individual who wears it, as well as a stimulus of collective, carefully instilled, fears around what the extreme forces, who claim a particular religious identity, have done ‘in the West’. Among these arguments of liberation and fear, it is modest Muslim women who have found themselves in the cross-hairs of our ignorance. Mouths that have been previously physically masked have been uncovered recently, sometimes by force, but they have never-the-less remained smothered.

In a social, political and legal climate where Muslim women wearing Islamic dress in the UK have been described by political leaders as letter boxes and compared to bank robbers and Islamic dress has been likened to a muzzle and a coffin in France, the regulation, criminalization and policing of the bodies of Muslim women and Islamophobia have become common sense in contemporary European society. A number of contributions to this issue, including those of Fatima Khemilat and Niall Richardson, engage these geographical regions, whilst Nur Latifah Umi Satiti and Aisha Jadoon interrogate these geographies through plural epistemologies. Desy Ayu Pirmasari shows how this policing and Islamophobia extends and is enacted in Indonesia, whilst Fatemeh Fathzadeh interrogates the embodied practice of veiling in Iran. Amanda Keddie, Taghreed Jamal Al Deen, Shakira Hussein & Alexandra Miftah Russ explores the experiences of Muslim women and girls in Australia and Tamer Koburtay and Tala Abuhussein explores a reimagining of Islam through the lens of gender equality in Jordan. Whilst geographically disparate, these spaces are inextricably linked through the traumas of colonialism which live in colonial bodies and are passed down as ancestral trauma to make bodies precarious. This is global coloniality (Grosfoguel, 2011), as the legacy of colonialism lingers and structures the everyday experiences explored in this collection, while knowledge continues to be produced through the epistemological lens of the colonial condition (Posocco, 2016). Coloniality is woven into the fabric of Islamic dress, so much so that in the absence of legal and political measures a deeply embedded cultural politics of governance performs this policing through aesthetics, imagery, feminisms, (un)civil society and various forms of media such as magazines, television and the internet, which circulate the white woman of capitalism as normative and available as against the ‘oppressed’ sexually unavailable Muslim woman. Such policing is often justified on the basis of ‘saving’ Muslim women from gender oppression and debates around national security. But as Lila Abu Lughod asked ‘Do Muslim women need saving?’ (2013). This imposition of meaning forecloses putting Islamic dress as a question and embeds a normative Islamophobia that circulates through Islamic dress.

Muslim women wearing Islamic dress attract hostile attention on account of their visibility, which has resulted in increased Islamophobic violence and hate crime towards many women. We hope that this special issue reflects the broad academic community and divergent perspectives on this topic and provides a space for varied arguments and perspectives problematizing and interrogating these issues. The various contributions consider the precarious bodies of Muslim women in different institutional, geographical and ideological (public) spaces and explore how certain spaces are shaped through racism, whiteness, segregation and hygiene. Online spaces are a recurring theme and come up as a potential space of resistance in a number of contributions.

Arguments about the wearing of the hijab in legal proceedings have continued in the UK and the banning and criminalizing of Islamic dress through law has become the norm in many of the geographies covered in this special issue. The instrumentalization of blunt social and legal rules for political ends that variously determine how women should, or should not, appear, have never been so nakedly exposed than during a global pandemic, in which, across the globe, we are advised, mandated or choose to wear a mask in public in the interests of public health. Face coverings are widely encouraged, as long as they are not a hijab. In the pandemic context of covering the face for reasons of public health, forms of Islamic dress such as the al-amira, the bushiyya, the bukhnuq, the burqa, the batula, the chadari, the chador, the khimăr, the mukena, the niqaab, the paranja are nevertheless still subject to social or legal restrictions, approval, mandate or disapproval, regardless of the wearer’s motivations or wishes. And what of those who wish to cover their faces, but who are not Muslim women; the widespread use of the face-mask has been liberating for some women who have not previously covered their faces.

The papers in this special issue came into being during a pre-coronavirus time. In many ways, it is clear that the themes covered in the papers have been amplified and exacerbated by a pandemic that discriminates in exposing pre-existing exploitative and exclusionary structural fault lines. Political responses have prioritized some whose health and lives are worth more than others and the bodies of Muslim women have been made yet more precarious. Reflecting on the title of this special issue: Islamophobia, Islamic dress and precarious bodies in a pandemic, the logics picked up by authors here of Islamophobia, race, segregation, coloniality and racial hygiene are worsened because they have found a new narrative outlet in the language of a pandemic. Authors in this collection explore online spaces as a potential ‘third space’ that can be liberatory for Muslim women. However, in coronavirus times online spaces have provided Islamophobia with the space to mutate. A discourse of racial hygiene has manifested in ‘blaming’ Muslim communities for the spread of coronavirus and using imagery to construct and ‘convey subtle, indirect messages that link Muslimness and Muslim religiosity to panic around mass sickness, infection and deadly contagion’ (Tazamal & Garrity Şeckerci, 2020). This has manifested in the UK in gendered forms through targeting Muslim women in coronavirus related attacks (Awan & Khan-Williams, 2020). In France which posits both the legal criminalization of face coverings, whilst simultaneously mandating medical face masks as a new mode of fashion to defeat coronavirus, demonstrates not only the hypocrisy of the French approach to full-face coverings but lays bare a hierarchy of colonial differentiation at the heart of the French republic. The functional reasoning employed by the French state in relation to the different face coverings only works from a foundation of this colonial logic and a racialized hygiene binary. Ordinarily, this ideological fear of racial impurity and the norm of colonial differentiation are obfuscated by justifications relating to gender oppression and national security in the Islamic dress debate in France. In presenting an immediate threat to the life and the health of the French nation, the current coronavirus pandemic has unintentionally brought the stories of modern France and colonial exploitation together through the narrative of face coverings. One face covering, the medical face mask, is acceptable and mandated because it refers to a modern, scientific, hygienic French nation. The other face covering, Islamic dress, is unacceptable and criminalized because it refers to a colonial, backwards, racial un-hygiene. This exposes the normative hierarchy of racial and colonial differentiation as the logic of the French republic. This manifests as Islamophobia and racism and is emphasized through the current application of rules surrounding face coverings in France, which is not merely contradictory but deliberate in enacting the logic of colonial differentiation of the French republic. This racial differentiation through the logic of hygiene, an enduring colonial logic in a contemporary iteration of Islamophobia, is not limited to France and has found many national outlets during the pandemic including in the US and India, in the global press and in online spaces (Tazamal & Garrity Şeckerci, 2020).

Collective interdisciplinary conversations

This collection of essays brings together scholars at various career stages from PhD researchers to established scholars working on the premise that not deciding in advance on the meaning and value of Islamic dress permits Islamic dress to be shared as a question. The authors, therefore, participate in this special issue in different ways. The authors all have different relationships to the words that are shared here and the words become ‘lines of connection’ between the different voices (Ahmed, 2012, p. 81)

This special issue is interdisciplinary in approach. Interdisciplinarity here should not be understood as ‘an institutional speech act’ (Ahmed, 2012, p. 54), the process by which an institution declares its interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity in this incarnation becomes nothing more than a funding, REF or promotion criterion. This is interdisciplinarity as orthodoxy, interdisciplinarity as the property of the institution, a claim substantiated through the perceived need for metrics to measure interdisciplinarity in the neoliberal university (RCUK, 2016; Ross, 2018). This special issue instead proceeds in the tradition of interdisciplinarity as the creation of spaces for those falling in the ‘interstitial gaps’ of the traditional approach of distinct academic disciplines (Campbell, 1969). This is the origins of interdisciplinarity as a normative gap filler between disciplines and the idea of transcending disciplinary boundaries beyond the scope of individual disciplinary knowledge production (Chettiparamb, 2007, p. 13–14). As Rosamund argues ‘interdisciplinarity will only make a difference if epistemological radical speaks to epistemological radical across the disciplinary divide’ (2006, p. 530). Such a framing of interdisciplinarity emerges from intersectional realities that do not have an audible voice in orthodox disciplines. These voices emerge as critical race studies, cultural studies, decolonial studies, intersectionality and gender studies. It is our hope that the papers in this collection speak in such a self-reflexive way in comprising papers grounded in both theoretical and empirical inquiry as well as those that combine methodological and inter-disciplinary approaches. We have all been forced to write at a physical distance from our fellow colleagues, collaborators and friends and the process has inevitably taken more time. We would like to thank the contributors not only for their scholarship but also for their patience and for their willingness to contribute to ‘slow scholarship’ (Naqvi & Russell, 2020) in neoliberal times of metrics and ‘countability’ (Brown, 2015).

This special issue emerged from the Sussex Centre for Gender Studies, University of Sussex annual event 2017 of the same title. In 2017, the world looked very different from the reality of ‘Global pandemic’ that orients our actions today. The geography of the pandemic is global, however the effects of the pandemic are differentiated across the globe to expose a pandemic that structurally discriminates, where some lives are valued and protected from the pandemic more than others. Much like the universal language of rights, where universality is critiqued as the privilege of the partial perspective and universality is shaped by those who cohere to define universal rights, the ‘Global’ nature of the pandemic, which suggests that ‘we are all in this together’ belies the way in which the effects of the pandemic are distributed unequally along racialized, gendered, socio-economic and ableist intersectional fault lines to create precarious, disposable bodies. The ‘global’ pandemic has not created these conditions but has exposed and exacerbated, laid bare the economy of exclusions and exploitations that global capitalist democracy relies upon. Moreover, institutional responses to the pandemic are embedded in and reiterate these structural violences and exploitations.

The 2017 event brought together sociologists, criminologists, legal academics and activists from the US, France and the UK to engage in knowledge exchange on the phenomenon of Islamophobia, its specific intersection with the issue of Islamic dress and the precarity of those bodies wearing Islamic dress. The theme of the event and the divergent perspectives that the participants drew upon through their papers pursued a feminist, post-colonial and decolonial investigation through interdisciplinary methodologies. The participants brought to the event a variety of approaches and addressed the issue of Islamic dress from novel perspectives, drawing on the relationship of western states with the non-western world and interrogated the dominance of epistemologies of the global north over epistemologies of the global south. Thank you to the participants of that event and to colleagues at the Sussex Centre for Gender Studies, Alison Phipps and Hannah Mason-Bish for supporting the event and for stepping in to chair the event at the very last minute. The special issue builds on the scholarship and contributions that were shared and evolved at that event to open the discussion up in a reflexive manner beyond Eurocentric epistemologies to decolonial, feminist epistemological variance. The response to the call for the special issue has enabled it to enact an epistemology of largesse by presenting contributions from colleagues embedded in epistemologies of the global south and a number of methodological and theoretical approaches that were not explored at the event, such as literary studies, media studies and ethnographic lenses. The contributions to this special issue challenge current normative trends in relation to Islamic dress and make visible fundamental narratives that are absent from the mainstream socio-political public discourse. The contributions offer conceptual tools for thinking about the precarity of those bodies wearing Islamic dress and offer routes of resistance, reflection and reimagining. The collection interrogates established emancipatory discourses that are employed in non-emancipatory ways to achieve strategic political goals in the debate around Islamic dress and the institutionalization of Islamophobia to understand how we are implicated in the creation of a world where Islamophobia is common sense. This special issue is the result of collaboration, perseverance and the desire to think and speak differently about Islamic dress. It has been supported by the enthusiasm of many friends and colleagues along the way. Thank you to Carolyn Jackson for supporting this project from the outset, from the first proposal through to production. Thank you to Blu Tirohl for working closely on this issue and contributing time, guidance and words to the drafting of this editorial piece and to the papers in the special issue. We hope that this special issue will provide a jumping-off point for future scholarship and collaboration to challenge dominant, derogatory and violent stereotypes that circulate (much in the same way as a global pandemic) Islamophobia and the precarity of those bodies wearing Islamic dress as a taken-for-granted unchallenged norm.

In To veil or not to veil? Islamic dress and control over women’s public appearance, Desy Pirmasari, through field-work in the province of Aceh, Indonesia evaluates how shari’a doctrine has been implemented to regulate the appearance of people and the resulting disproportionate curtailment of the activities of women. She reminds us how historically women have been forced to cover their body, or to uncover it, due to incompatibility, or compatibility, with local, cultural or religious values. The author finds a legal system and government which have arbitrarily homogenized the interpretation of religious texts leading to a unitary standard of women and model of femininity. Pirmasari argues that the practice of the Aceh socio-legal system has disseminated a narrative of Western hegemony arising from its colonial legacies in a culture that has been dominated by men and in which women have been subjugated. In this setting, the veil is almost a side-show to the wider restrictions on the movement and actions of women.

In The Veil: an Embodied Ethical Practice in Iran, Fatemeh Fathzadeh looks at the ways in which embodied subjectivities have been (re)constructed and contested during socio-cultural and political developments in Iran. She traces the politics of the veil during three recent historical periods and reveals the meanings that have been ascribed to the veil through imperatives enforced by the Iranian state. She further explores the diverse ways in which Iranian women (re)appropriate and subvert veiling practices and goes on to describe the relations of power that redefine women’s subjectivity as to their capacity to act.

In Young Muslim women: the ambivalences of speaking out, Amanda, Taghreed Jamal Al Deen, Shakira Hussein and Alexandra Miftah Russ Keddie explores how a small group of young Australian Muslim women engages with the discourses of gender, religion and culture in their lives. Keddie highlights these young women’s experiences of the double bind of racism and patriarchy around familial, community and public ideas about what it means to be a good Muslim woman. In light of this burden of representation placed on Muslim women, the paper draws attention to the ambivalences of responsibility and the risk the young women express about speaking about the issues that concern them.

In Normative Islam, prejudice and women leaders: why do Arab women leaders suffer?, Tamer Koburtay and Tala Abuhussein compares prejudicial practices against women leaders who possess egalitarian Islamic ideas and who aspire to gender equality. Readings of Quranic guidelines that may reform gender prejudice against Muslim/Arab women leaders are outlined alongside the results of interviews with Arab women leaders. While efforts towards gender equality are often in conflict with specific negative gendered practices, it is argued that Islam, as drawn from its central texts, supports gender equality; incorporating Muslim women leaders’ insights into readings of these texts.

In ‘I’m not a Muslim. In fact, my name is Katie’: Muslim-Drag in the C4 documentary ‘My Week As a Muslim’, Niall Richardson challenges the success of the UK Channel 4 documentary which sought to offer a counterview of dominant stereotypes around Muslim women in Western media. Although its objectives were laudable, Richardson finds problems in the narrative which echoed the conventions of cross-dressing comedy film. For the documentary, an English, white woman (Katie) used a prosthetic nose and brown foundation, while wearing a hijab, to disguise herself as a Pakistani Muslim in order to experience Muslim culture and to acknowledge her position of white privilege. The documentary concluded with a final ‘reveal’ sequence where Katie removed her disguise to her new Muslim friends. This approach reinforced misconceptions that there are significant differences between British people and Islam. Additionally, the cross-dressing narrative suggested the superiority of the Muslim-drag performer over the people who were deceived by her performance of Muslim-ness.

In Can a Veiled Muslim Woman Speak? A Feminist Analysis of Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s ‘Love in a Headscarf’, Aisha Jadoon scrutinizes the gaze that women in public spaces attract through what they wear. Although the practice of veiling has been held, in the past, to preserve feminine modesty (in Christianity, Judaism and Islam); in modern times it is distinctively identified as an Islamic practice through which Muslim women are stereotyped as bodies deprived of sexuality and femininity. The study, using the framework of Islamophobia theorized by Allen (2010), explores the causes and effects of the victimization of a veiled Muslim female in Love in a Headscarf (2010); a memoir written by Shelina Janmohamed. The wide gap between the perception of the veil, as a symbol of oppression, and the experience of veiling, as an empowering activity, is assessed through recognition of both the feminine aspects, and the feminist sensibilities, of Muslim women who choose to veil their bodies.

In Excluding veiled women from French public space: the emergence of a ‘respectable’ segregation, Fatima Khemilat is unflinching in her assessment of public policies in France which specifically restrict Muslim women, while concurrently claiming neutrality. Recent measures have led to an expansion of what is referred to as ‘public space’ in France and a generalization of the principle of ‘neutrality’ which was previously only required of public officials. Limitations on the visibility of Muslim religious practice are intrinsically gendered since the controversies that led to political decisions were aimed at Muslim women who wear the hijab. This article draws on the sociology of public policy to analyse concepts such as ‘laïcité’, ‘dignity’ and ‘fundamental values’ which have been used to legitimize the exclusion of veiled women from public space; paradoxically in the name of their emancipation.

In When ‘Silence is Complicity’: voicing Muslim women’s resistance through reiteration of the veil, Nur Latifah Umi Satiti highlights discourses taking place in the Global North through the debate between the activist group, Femen, and Muslim women’s groups. International Topless Jihad Day (ITJD), hosted by Femen, ignited conflict through the insistence that women remove their veil. Femen’s view of the veil was that it symbolized the oppression and exploitation perpetuated by Muslim males. Femen’s message maintained the illusions of ‘white’ superiority in public space through its assumption that Muslim women were helpless and voiceless. Responding to the protest, a group of Muslim women formed the online movement; Muslim Women Against Femen (MWAF). This paper focuses on how MWAF reiterated the veil as a form of agency, transforming Muslim women’s online resistance.

In Swimming Pools, Islamic Dress and Colonial Differentiation: the Cleansing Role of Law in ‘the Republic [that] lives through an uncovered face’, Kimberley Brayson interrogates the overregulation of Muslim women in France through the legislation prohibiting full-face coverings in public. The law embeds an institutional Islamophobia perpetuated through a logic of hygiene that refers not merely to the cleanliness of swimming pools in France but to the racial purity of the French republic. The law performs a dual function; cleansing public space of the presence of colonial markers to immunize against the fear of racial impurity and displacing colonial memory. Despite the attempt through law to erase and confuse colonial collective memory, bodies remember the physical and epistemological violence of historical geographical colonialism as coloniality in the present. The article traces the emergence of pro-ban feminist arguments to a particular historical humiliation characterized by the post-WWII shaving of the hair of dissident French women. The article interrogates the forced uncovering of the hair of Muslim women in historical colonialism and the contemporary iteration of this, in which Muslim women’s bodies are made precarious through law, as well as the site of racial and gender differentiation that is necessary for the functioning of the French republic.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.