Transcript

Stefanie Sinclair

Would you mind telling us a little bit about your research and the different projects you’ve been involved in please?

Emma Tarlo

Well I got interested in Muslim women’s dress in around 2004 which was just about the time when the French government had said that they were going to ban the wearing of religious symbols in schools.

And so I began to get interested in seeing how people in Britain were responding to that proposition. And at that time I began to realise the extraordinary diversity of different types of Muslim dress that there were in Britain. And the different types of emotional investment that people had in it.

And so I began to start doing research, really, about why people wear what they wear. And I was also interested in the fact that so often that debate is viewed in terms of: is it a question of force or is it a question of choice? And is it right or is it wrong? It’s viewed in these very sort of moral terms.

And I was actually interested in the fact that Muslim women like any other women in Britain are trying to work out how to present themselves in the public space. And there’s all sorts of different issues that come in to play.It may be religion. It may be politics. But it may be family background. It may be cultural heritage but it may also be fashion. It may be your relationship with your peers.

So it can’t just be boiled down to religion or politics. So, in a sense, I just got interested in exploring as an anthropologist. So, exploring, sort of, enthographically through people’s own dress practices and how they understand their own dress practices, looking at what they were trying to do, what sort of new fashions were emerging in this context. So I did research with people, sometimes working in areas with a strong sort of particular ethnic and religious population, like parts of East London where there are a lot of Muslims. But also working with Muslims who are not living in these sort of pockets of concentration like that. And also with university students, with entrepreneurs who were interested in sort of developing new types of Muslim fashion. And also with people who were trading things both in markets and shops. But also online. So I was just sort of interested in immersing myself in that whole sort of area, really, attending Islamic events, looking at those debates online, interviewing people and getting a sense of what was going on in relation to dress.

Stefanie Sinclair

So why do Muslim women actually adopt the hijab?

Emma Tarlo

I think it’s difficult to say there would be any one reason why people would adopt hijab because people may be attracted to it from a variety of different reasons.

But one is trying to practise Islam as part of everyday life and not just as something that you do at the moment of prayer. So it’s part of a kind of incorporating a set of values into everyday life. But it’s also about having an assertive presence and being proud to be Muslim and a kind of badge of identity, if you like, and that’s very important to people. Because there’s a very powerful sense of recognition that people have when they see other people in hijab. They feel a sense of bond towards them.

And so this sense of a kind of bond that extends beyond your immediate family, networking kin, and has this sort of global potential, is really important. And you see it in how people interact. You see it within universities that the hijabi girls recognise each other and they get together quite early on. They feel a sense of affinity with each other. You see it when people travel abroad. And they feel that they can recognise and react to each other: total strangers on the basis of hijab. And you also come across it very strongly on the internet, through the sort of exchange of stories, and all of that.

So that sense of a building of a kind of community I think is really important through this visible self. And I think since 9/11, when there’s been such a focus on Muslims, and a kind of suspicion around Muslims in relation to appearances, that has actually motivated a lot more people to invest in being Muslim in the public sphere in a more assertive way. Sometimes as a gesture of solidarity. They’ll look at sort of a larger scale sort of global political situation. And they’ll feel that Muslims have been treated or stigmatised in a particular way. And they’ll want to identify with that. So that can also be a quite important element of it.

And then, of course, now that the fashion possibilities that it offers is also something, you know, that can be very attractive to people. The great thing about a headscarf is that it doesn’t fit any particular body. It can be given, it can be shared, it’s very cheap to buy. Unlike a lot of other type fashion things. And you can combine it in all sorts of different ways. You can accessorise it with jewellery. You can layer it and you can make all sorts of ensembles with it. So it can become a very glamorous and kind of appealing kind of item to sort of play with, if you like.

And in a sense, I think, in my book, I refer to it as a sort of form of body art in many ways for some women. Because, for a lot of young Muslim women, it’s the most elaborate and most worked part of their appearance. And I’ve interviewed some women who say, well, you know when I get up in the morning, I begin by thinking what I’m going to wear on my head. And what colour combinations I’m going to do. And then I work my way downwards.

So this thing which, in some ways, is about, sort of, modesty and the idea that you don’t want to be, kind of, at least sexually attractive and assertive at the same time, is also being used as a kind of key item of adornment by a lot of young women.

And then in contrast you have others. Other Muslims who would have a much more sober interpretation of what the hijab should be. And who feel that all this fashion work and this sort of aestheticisation of hijab goes against the essence of what hijab is meant to be. So you’ve got very different attitudes amongst Muslims in Britain and elsewhere in Europe as to what that should be. Those kind of internal debates. And in the world.

And I think those internal debates very often are just not recognised beyond the Muslim community because there’s always this tendency to sort of look at this whole thing in relation to Islam versus the West. That kind of absurd, kind of dichotomisation through which everything’s boiled into. And therefore very often all these kind of nuances of what’s going on and the subtleties of debates that are taking place amongst the Muslims gets completely sort of effaced within the presentation in the media very often.

Stefanie Sinclair

Is the association of Muslim women’s styles of dress with fashion something entirely new or have Muslim women always thought about dress styles and how it would fit into fashion but possibly in different cultural contexts?

Emma Tarlo

Yes, I mean, I think there’s always been a diversity of cloth and textiles and ways of wearing them. And so, in that sense, people have always been interested in fashion. But, I think, what’s happened is a lot of things that were classified as local cultural, regional practices have now become classified as Islamic.

So, you can almost think of it in sort of three parts. You’ve got people wearing local forms of dress, which may have had different fashions in different countries. Then you’ve got a kind of a moving away from that that have emerged very often with the migration process and people wanting to assimilate within European contexts.

And then, in that context, if people started to wear something like hijab or niqab then it was very much associated initially as a religious statement. People perceived it as almost as the opposite of fashion, that you were kind of asserting a kind of pious religious self.

And what has happened more recently is this kind of coming together of this idea of a sort of pious religious self. And a kind of active visible assertion in the public sphere and fashion all coming together.bAnd they want to be modern. And they want to be able to wear jeans. And they want to be able to follow local fashion. But at the same time they want to be able to assert their Muslim-ness. And quite often the older generation are very ambivalent about that. And they’ll say to their daughters, well, do you really have to wear hijab?bThat marks you out in a particular way. Why do you have to make such a fuss about it? Can’t you just sort of blend in more?

So the sort of classic tension you might get, for example, in say a Bengali family would be the mother looking to the daughter and saying, you’re jeans are too tight. And why do you have to wear that hijab, you know. She’s kind of objecting to both those things. And the daughter will be looking to the mother and saying, well, that sari’s cultural dress, it’s un-Islamic, and what I’m doing conforms more to what is appropriate in the Koran.

So you’ve also got this kind of intergenerational conflict. And for the younger generation it can often be a kind of platform of assertion. I can go out. I can be in the public sphere. I can have a job. I can go to university and I can be covered and Muslim. And all of that’s all right. Whereas you, mum, you’re stuck at home, doing what dad says, cooking the chapattis, or something like that. I mean these are these kind of cultural things that are being played out in a sense through dress.

Stefanie Sinclair

The association of the hijab with fashion could be seen as a form of self-expression of women being creative, making the hijab their own?

But doesn’t it also mean that hijab wearing women are increasingly exposed to the pressures of a fashion retail industry that likes to tell women what to wear?

Emma Tarlo

All women are living in a world where they’re kind of encountering that combination of, sort of, commercialisation and pressure. So I don’t think it’s, in an individual women’s life, I don’t think it’s that they sort of started off just doing it as religious and now they’re sort of pressurised into becoming fashionable. I think it’s more that a young woman born today and brought up in a particular sort of multi-cultural context, say in Britain, encounters a whole range of discourses which are fashion, individualism, discourses from their peers, from their family. And they are trying to find something that makes sense of that whole composite mixture.

Now, I think it’s right to say that there are tensions there. And the tension that I think most people live, if they express a tension is that, is, on the one hand, they see being Muslim and wearing hijab in part as a sort of critique of the sexualisation of women of consumerism. And the emphasis on consumerism. But at the same time they are attracted to buying more and more hijabs. And many girls, when they look in their wardrobes, they’re quite shocked if you ask them, oh, can you count how many hijabs you’ve got? And they suddenly find that they’ve got 120, or something. And they’re sort of shocked.

So you get quite interesting debates on the web. I remember one particular debate where someone had, precisely, sort of, found that she’d got over 100 hijabs. And someone else was saying to her, well you know, sister, this isn’t good. You should take some of them to the Oxfam shop immediately. So that sense of being drawn into kind of excess commercialisation, yes, they can feel a tension in that. But I think a lot of people do. I don’t think that’s so different from tensions that somebody might feel as a feminist. But, on the one hand, I don’t feel that I have to look a certain way. But, on the other hand, I don’t want to have hairy legs. You know, that sort of tension.

Stefanie Sinclair

Where does the Muslim modest fashion retail differ from other fashion retail industries?

Emma Tarlo

In many ways, the modest fashion and Islamic fashion on the Internet is not dissimilar from other types of fashion industries. And, quite interestingly, quite a few of the people who are involved in it may have started out in the mainstream fashion industry or been trained through the mainstream fashion industry. And, in many ways, they’re using very similar kind of tropes and metaphors and modes of display and advertising as the mainstream industry. But, they do face this dilemma, which is how you display the objects. Where, on the one hand, making garments sexually appealing, if you like, is very much a mainstream strategy within the fashion industry. And because within these companies they are trying to say that we are not involved in sexualising women, then they, therefore, very often have a quite complicated relationship to how to display the goods.

Now, obviously, they can just display them without bodies in them, which also happens to some extent with mainstream fashion retail. But where bodies are displayed, there is this problem of how to display the bodies. So, some companies, for example, will display the items with bodies inside them, but they’ll be cut off at the head so you don’t see the face. Others will incorporate the face, but they’ll try to be not too made up or this and that and the other. Others will, in fact, use a very mainstream, sort of, sexualised styles of body presentation. So, companies situate themselves very different along the spectrum of in a sense how seriously they want to be taken in terms of religion. Or whether it’s closer to the kind of fashion side, if you like. There is a tension there.