6 - Modernism and the Politics of Dress

Summary

Using comparative and global perspectives, this chapter places in an historical context the bitter controversies which have erupted across Europe and the Middle East in recent years over women's veiling, and especially their wearing of the face-veil or niqab. It shows how the deeper issues contained within these controversies – secularism versus religious belief, modernism versus tradition, individual freedom versus social or family coercion, identity versus integration – are not new but are strikingly prefigured by earlier conflicts. The chapter focuses particularly on the state-sponsored anti-veiling campaigns which swept across wide swathes of the Muslim world in the interwar period of high modernism, especially in Turkey and the Balkans, Iran, Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, narratives of these campaigns revealing much about the ambitions of modernism, the triumphs of nationalism and state-building, and the struggles of class and gender.. In contrast to the accepted view, which sees female dress reform and other modernist gender policies as largely imposed by male-dominated authoritarian regimes and deeply unpopular among both men and women, the chapter emphasizes the agency of women themselves as they intervened forcefully in contributions to debates and by adopting different forms of clothing on their own initiative. Again in contrast to existing scholarship, the chapter observes that governments saw their repressive policies as primarily aimed at recalcitrant men and at defending women as they unveiled against a possibly violent male backlash. The chapter concludes by showung how, in the late twentieth-early twentieth century, veiling was reimagined, reinvented and widely readopted, becoming sometimes a hallmark of the modern Muslim woman, sometimes of the radical Islamist, once again demonstrating its profound liminality.