How Muslim Women Use Fashion To Exert Political Influence

#TIA – Our own interest in Muslim women was piqued when they went behind those veils, but we didn’t realize they had a political motive in mind. 

I have been researching Muslim women’s fashion since 2004. My comparative investigation has taken me to three locations: Tehran, Iran; Yogyakarta, Indonesia; and Istanbul, Turkey. While there have been studies of Muslim women’s clothing in many individual countries, there are few cross-cultural and transnational comparisons. As I undertook such a comparison over the next dozen years, I found surprise, pleasure, and delight in pious fashion. My conversations about modest clothing with women around the world also challenged those neat intellectual boxes to which I had grown overly accustomed in the United States.

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