Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion is the first comparative study of this highly topical issue and brings together cutting-edge contributions from leading scholars.

The interpretation of the main Islamic rules for women's dress vary from country to country and are subject to cultural circumstances and individual styles. For example, Muslim women in Northern Africa and the Middle East dress very differently from those in Pakistan and Southeast Asia. The basic tenet in Islam that tells people to dress modestly, particularly in public, does not mean that Muslim women are not stylish. There has always been an great interest in beautiful fabrics and well-made clothes in the Islamic World and decorative crafts such as embroidery, passementerie, silk weaving and the like are very regarded. Nowadays, Muslimahs the world over shop for the latest fashions and are highly creative in dressing trendy, elegantly and hijab at the same time. Islamic Fashion contains an extensive overview of dress from several Muslim regions and many pictures of modern Islamic fashion. Also included are photographs and drawings of embroidered, printed and woven decorative elements. A wide selection of these images is saved on the enclosed CD.

Who says you can’t be pious and fashionable? Throughout the Muslim world, women have found creative ways of expressing their personality through the way they dress. Headscarves can be modest or bold, while brand-name clothing and accessories are part of a multimillion-dollar ready-to-wear industry that caters to pious fashion from head to toe. In this lively snapshot, Liz Bucar takes us to Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia and finds a dynamic world of fashion, faith, and style. “Brings out both the sensuality and pleasure of sartorial experimentation.” —Times Literary Supplement “I defy anyone not to be beguiled by [Bucar’s] generous-hearted yet penetrating observation of pious fashion in Indonesia, Turkey and Iran... Bucar uses interviews with consumers, designers, retailers and journalists...to examine the presumptions that modest dressing can’t be fashionable, and fashion can’t be faithful.” —Times Higher Education “Bucar disabuses readers of any preconceived ideas that women who adhere to an aesthetic of modesty are unfashionable or frumpy.” —Robin Givhan, Washington Post “A smart, eye-opening guide to the creative sartorial practices of young Muslim women... Bucar’s lively narrative illuminates fashion choices, moral aspirations, and social struggles that will unsettle those who prefer to stereotype than inform themselves about women’s everyday lives in the fast-changing, diverse societies that constitute the Muslim world.” —Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

In the course of the 20th century, hardly a region in the world has escaped the triumph of global consumerism. Muslim societies are no exception. Globalized brands are pervasive, and the landscapes of consumption are changing at a breathtaking pace. Yet Muslim consumers are not passive victims of the homogenizing forces of globalization. They actively appropriate and adapt the new commodities and spaces of consumption to their own needs and integrate them into their culture. Simultaneously, this culture is reshaped and reinvented to comply with the mechanisms of conspicuous consumption. It is these processes that this volume seeks to address from an interdisciplinary perspective. The papers in this anthology present innovative approaches to a wide range of issues that have, so far, barely received scholarly attention. The topics range from the changing spaces of consumption to Islamic branding, from the marketing of religious music to the consumption patterns of Muslim minority groups. This anthology uses consumption as a prism through which to view, and better understand, the enormous transformations that Muslim societies—Middle Eastern, South-East Asian, as well as diasporic ones—have undergone in the past few decades.

The subject of religion and dress in Turkey has been debated at great length both in academia and the media. Through in-depth ethnographic research into the Turkish fashion market and the work of a category of new comers, namely headscarf-wearing fashion professionals, Islam, Faith, and Fashion examines entrepreneurship in this market and the aesthetic desirability, religious suitability, and ethical credibility of fashionable Islamic dress. What makes a fashionable outfit Islamically appropriate? What makes an Islamically appropriate outfit fashionable? What are the conditions, challenges and constraints an entrepreneur faces in this market, and how do they market their products? Is the presumed oxymoronic nature of Islamic fashion a challenge or a burden? Through case studies and ethnographic portraits, Craciun questions the commercialization of Islamic dress and tackles the delicate and often incompatible relationship between clothing worn in recognition of religious belief and clothing worn purely because it is fashionable. This timely analysis of fashion, religion, ethics, and aesthetics presents dress as a disputed and a contested locus of modernity. Islam, Faith, and Fashion will be essential reading for students of fashion, anthropology, and material and visual culture.

Introducing innovative new research from international scholars working on Islamic fashion and its critics, Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion provides a global perspective on muslim dress practices. The book takes a broad geographic sweep, bringing together the sartorial experiences of Muslims in locations as diverse as Paris, the Canadian Prairie, Swedish and Italian bath houses and former socialist countries of Eastern Europe. What new Islamic dress practices and anxieties are emerging in these different locations? How far are they shaped by local circumstances, migration histories, particular religious traditions, multicultural interfaces and transnational links? To what extent do developments in and debates about Islamic dress cut across such local specificities, encouraging new channels of communication and exchange? With original contributions from the fields of anthropology, fashion studies, media studies, religious studies, history, geography and cultural studies, Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion will be of interest to students and scholars working in these fields as well as to general readers interested in the public presence of Islam in Europe and America.

This book uses evolutionary psychology as a lens to explain religious violence and oppression. The author, a clinical psychologist, examines religious scriptures, rituals, and canon law, highlighting the many ways in which our evolutionary legacy has shaped the development of religion and continues to profoundly influence its expression. The book focuses on the image of God as the dominant male in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This traditional God concept is seen as a reflection of the “dominant ape” paradigm so evident in the hierarchical social structures of primates, with whom we have a strong genetic connection. The author describes the main features of male-dominated primate social hierarchies— specifically, the role of the alpha male as the protector of the group; his sexual dominance and use of violence and oppression to attain food, females, and territory; in-group altruism vs. out-group hostility (us vs. them); and displays of dominance and submission to establish roles within the social hierarchy. The parallels between these features of primate society and human religious rituals and concepts make it clear that religion, especially its oppressive and violent tendencies, is rooted in the deep evolutionary past. This incisive analysis goes a long way toward explaining the historic and ongoing violence committed in the name of religion.

In this holistic approach to the study of textiles and their makers, Colleen Kriger charts the role cotton has played in commercial, community, and labor settings in West Africa. By paying close attention to the details of how people made, exchanged, and wore cotton cloth from before industrialization in Europe to the twentieth century, she is able to demonstrate some of the cultural effects of Africa's long involvement in trading contacts with Muslim societies and with Europe. Cloth in West African History thus offers a fresh perspective on the history of the region and on the local, regional, and global processes that shaped it. A variety of readers will find its account and insights into the African past and culture valuable, and will appreciate the connections made between the local concerns of small-scale weavers in African villages, the emergence of an indigenous textile industry, and its integration into international networks.

Educated for Change?: Muslim Women in the West inserts Muslim women’s voice and action into the bifurcated, and otherwise male dominated, relations between the West and the Islamic East. A multilayered, multisite, educational ethnography, Buck and Silver’s study takes a novel approach to its feminist charge. Drawing upon thick description of refugee women’s school experiences in two seemingly distinct locations, Educated for Change? engages the dual nature of schooling as at once a disciplinary apparatus of local, national, and international governance, and paradoxically, a space and process through which school community members wield the power to observe, deliberate, and act as agents in the creative and willful endeavor of living. In doing so, the text locates formal schooling as a key location at which one can witness the politics of cultural change that emerge when Western and Islamic communities converge. Following an initial introduction to the ethno-historical formation and dissolution of the Somali postcolonial state resulting in a prolonged exodus of Somali citizens, the text is divided into two parts. Part One features an examination of young women’s approaches to schooling in the Dadaab refugee camps of northeastern Kenya; Part Two looks at schooling among Somali women resettled in a northern region of the United States. Each part includes a description of the unique, if interconnected, local factors and policies that give rise to particular forms and ends of schooling as designed for refugee women. Several chapters depict women’s strategic use of schooling to respond to structural forces, build intercultural social networks, and negotiate new ways of being Somali women. Educated for Change? concludes with an analysis of the implications of Somali refugee women’s schooling experiences for working definitions of global social justice that undergird feminist political scholarship and gender-sensitive, humanitarian aid policy and practice.

This book discusses Egyptian Muslim women’s dress as the social, political and ideological signifier of the changing attitudes towards Western modernity. It employs women’s clothing styles as a feminist act that provides rich insights into the power and limits of legal regulations and hegemonic discourses in constructing gendered and cultural borders in the modern Egyptian public sphere. Furthermore, through highlighting marginalized but significant models and historical moments of cultural exchange between Muslim and Western cultures through female dress, the book tells a third story beyond the binary model of an assumed modest oppressed traditional Muslim woman vis-à-vis consumer emancipated modern Western woman in mainstream Western discourse and literary representation.