Tag: Islam

Set, Set, Set, Set, Set, Set

Etienne RPLeave a comment

A review of Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal, Rosalind Fredericks, Duke University Press, 2018.

Garbage CitizenshipIn 1990, Youssou N’Dour, Senegal’s most famous musician, released an album titled Set. The main song had the following line: Set, set oy. Ni set, set ci sa xel lo, ni set ci sa jëff oy… I had no idea what it meant, but in her book Garbage Citizenship, Rosalind Fredericks provides translation and context: Cleanliness, oh cleanliness. Be clean, pure in your spirit, clean in your acts… The injunction to be clean and to make clean (set setal in wolof), repeated in the song’s chorus, echoes the rallying cry of a grassroot movement in which young men and women set out to clean the city of Dakar from its accumulating garbage, substituting a failing urban waste infrastructure and denouncing the corruption of a polluted political sphere. Labelled as an exemplary case of participatory citizenship and youth mobilization, the movement was captured by political clientelism and made to serve the neoliberal objectives of labor force flexibility and public sector cutbacks. At the height of the movement in 1989, Dakar’s mayor made a shrewd political calculus to recruit youth activists into a citywide participatory trash-collection system. Their incorporation into the trash sector was facilitated by a discourse of responsibility through active participation in the cleanliness of the city. They became the backbone of the municipal waste management system and remain included in the sector’s labor force to this day. The history of the Set/Setal movement is only one of the case studies that Rosalind Fredericks develops in her book. The author finds the same activists who spontaneously took to the streets to clean up Dakar in 1988-89 having moved into low-pay positions as trash workers in a reorganized infrastructure that used derelict garbage trucks and often delayed payment of salaries. Together with their labor union leaders, they staged another kind of public protest in 2005-07: the garbage strike, supported by Dakar inhabitants who brought their household dumpings to the main arteries of the capital and piled them for all politicians to see. Other cases studied by the author include a NGO-led, community-based trash collection project in a peripheral neighborhood mobilizing voluntary women’s labor and horse-drawn carts, and the functioning of a trash workers’ union movement affirming the dignity of labor through discourses of Islamic piety.

Governing through disposability

Garbage Citizenship is a book with high theoretical ambitions. It purports to make “theory from the South” by detailing the transformation of trash labor in contemporary Dakar. The book challenges the notion that African cities represent exceptions to urban theories, and reveals the complex mix of clientary politics, social mobilization, material things, and religious affects unleashed by neoliberal reform. It makes a novel contribution to urban studies by emphasizing the human component of infrastructure, the material aspects of municipal work, and the cultural embeddedness of human labor. Gender, ethnicity, age group, and religious affiliation come to the fore as particularly consequential shapers of sociopolitical community and citizenship practices. Inspired by new currents in critical theory loosely defined as “new materialisms,” Fredericks treats trash infrastructure as vibrant, political matter and emphasizes its material, social, and affective elements. She complements the political economy of neoliberal reforms and urban management in Dakar with a moral economy of filth and cleanliness through which social relations and political belongings are reordered. Although it is by definition dirty, trash work can be seen simultaneously as a process of cleaning and purification. The Islamic faith as it is practiced in Senegal offers an alternative discourse to the technocratic vision of good governance and efficient management that is imposed by development agencies upon Dakar’s municipal services. To sum up the book’s contribution, Garbage Citizenship develops a three-pronged critique of neoliberalism, of participatory development, and of the “materialist turn” in social science scholarship. Let me expand on these three points.

First, Garbage Citizenship offers a critique of neoliberalism grounded in social science theory and ethnographic observation. Such critique has become standard in the anthropology literature, where the logic of structural adjustment imposed by multilateral institutions and global capital is described as wreaking havoc on local livelihoods and state-supported social services. Privatization, the shrinking of public budgets, the retreat of the state, and flexibilization of labor have unleashed intense volatility in the management of urban public services and, more specifically, in the garbage collection sector in Dakar. As one of the first African countries to undergo structural adjustment, Senegal was a test case for experimenting with various formulas of public-private partnership, labor de-unionization, technological downscaling, and participatory development. The chronology of neoliberal reforms shows that structural adjustment is unmoored from political forces: the “neoliberal” president Abdoulaye Wade operated a renationalization of the waste management sector facing mounting debts and collection crises, while Dakar’s Socialist mayor Mamadou Diop orchestrated the retreat of municipal services through flexibilization of the formal labor force and the mobilization of community-based efforts for collection. What makes Garbage Citizenship’s critique different from other denunciations of neoliberalism is its empirical focus on the way that state power is materialized in everyday infrastructure, and on how life under neoliberalism is experienced daily by municipal workers and citizens alike. Garbage often stands in as the quintessential symbol of what’s wrong in African cities. The challenge of managing trash, in other words, acts as a potent metaphor for the African “crisis” writ large. Garbage Citizenship raises questions about the material and symbolic “trashing” of the continent by grounding them in the everyday politics of trash labor and governing-through-disposability. Through garbage strikes and illegal dumping of waste, Dakar’s residents mobilize the power of waste as both a symbol of state crisis and an important terrain on which to battle for control of the city.

Treating people as infrastructure

Another basic recommendation of neoliberalism, indeed of standard economics, is that labor be substituted to capital in countries with an abundant labor force and limited access to financial resources and technology. Fredericks describes how this substitution of labor to capital operates in concrete terms: through the devolution of the burdens of infrastructure onto precarious laboring bodies—those of ordinary neighborhood women and the formal trash workers themselves. The analysis illuminates how urban infrastructures are composed of human as much as technical elements and how these living elements can help make infrastructures into a vital means of political action and a tool for the formation of collective identities. The greatest burden of municipal trash systems was devolved onto labor: workers were furnished with little equipment for collection, if any at all, and existing materials were allowed to degrade. Municipal employees engaged in constant tinkering and bricolage work to keep the garbage collection trucks running. Some parts of Dakar, such as the posh central districts of Plateau and Médina, were well served by state-of-the-art French equipment operated by international companies selected through opaque bidding processes. The poorer and more populous parts of the city had to rely on second-hand garbage trucks that often broke down or were left completely off the collection grid, with ruinous effects for people’s health and the environment. Waste collection is hazardous work, and workers in the garbage sector bear the brunt of labor’s deleterious effects in the form of endangered lives and damaged health. Governing-through-disposability makes laboring bodies dispendable and orders urban space along a logic of making clean and letting dirty. By substituting labor to equipment and treating people as infrastructure, the neoliberal state treats people as trash.

Second, Garbage Citizenship provides a critique of developmentalism, a theory that is sometimes presented as a gentler substitute to neoliberalism. Developmentalism emphasizes the human aspects of development. It asserts that state bureaucrats become separated from politicians, which allows for the independent and successful redevelopments of leadership structures and administrative and bureaucratic procedures. It promotes community-driven development as a solution to the disconnect between the population and public service providers. Critics often point out that developmentalism is linked to depolitization: it treats development as an anti-politics machine, and rests on the assumption that technocratic fixes can alleviate austerity measures in the face of widespread unrest and social dislocation. For Fredericks, garbage is a highly political matter. Dakar’s garbage saga is inseparable from the evolution of national politics, with the decline of the Socialist Party under Abdou Diouf from 1988 to 2000, Abdoulaye Wade’s alternance and his failed dream of an African renaissance from 2000 to 2012, and the consolidation of state power under president Macky Sall. It is also emmeshed in municipal politics. Dakar’s Socialist mayor Mamadou Diop used the Set/Setal movement to reward and recruit new Party members from the ranks of the youth. Creating new jobs was explicitly based around a political calculus that traded patronage with enrolment into municipal work. The community-based trash system was touted as an important demonstration of the mayor’s commitment to youth and to an ideal of participatory citizenship. Participants remember the “Journées de Propreté” (Days of Cleanliness) as overt Socialist Party political rallies. Under President Wade, the trash management system became the locus of a power struggle between the municipal government and state authorities. The sector saw eight major institutional shake-ups, and equipments constantly changed hands while workers received only temporary-contract benefits and day-labor pay rates. Upon taking office, Macky Sall announced his intention to dissolve Abdoulaye Wade’s new national trash management agency and relocate Dakar’s garbage management back into the hands of local government. The municipality found an agreement with the labor union, and workers won formal contracts and higher salaries.

The perils of community

Community participation and women’s empowerment are a key tenet of developmentalism and have been adopted by aid agencies as a new mantra conditioning their support. For Fredericks, we need to unpack these notions of community, participation, and empowerment. Often imagined as unproblematic sites of tradition and consensus, communities are produced through systems that harness the labor of specific members as participants and mobilize the “glue” of communal solidarity. Empowering some people often means disenfranchising others, and interferes with existing relations of power based on gender, ethnicity, and local politics. In the case under study, ENDA, a well-established NGO, partnered with leaders from the Lebou community in the neighborhood of Tonghor, on the road to Dakar’s airport, to establish an off-the-grid garbage collection system based on horse-drawn carts and the work of “animatrices” charged with educating neighborhood women on how to properly store, separate, and dispose of their garbage. The project resonated with a vision of community-driven development using low-tech, environment-friendly solutions that even poor people can afford and can control, and that can be replicated from community to community. But the analysis finds that the ENDA project produced an elitist, ethnicized image of community and that women were subjected to dirty-labor burdens as the vehicule of these development agendas. The “empowered” animatrices, drawn from the Lebou ethnic group, were not remunerated for their services and had no choice but to participate out of a sense of obligation to their communities, as enforced by the power and authority of community leaders. The village elders explicitly chose the animatrices using “social criteria” from respected but poor Lebou households, and used the project to their own ends in order to reinforce their autonomy from the Dakar municipality. The neighborhood women whose garbage practices were being monitored often came from a disenfranchized ethnic group and were stigmatized for their “unclean” habits and filthy condition. They were often the least willing and able to pay the user fee for garbage collection, and had to resort to the old practice of burying their waste or dumping it on the beach by night. In the end, the project was terminated when garbage began to accumulate in the collection station near the airport, attracting hundreds of circling birds and the attention of national authorities.

As a third contribution, Garbage Citizenship makes an intervention in the field of critical theory. The author notes the recent resurgence of materialist thinking in several disciplines, and intents to provide her own interpretation of the role of inanimate matter and nonhuman agencies in shaping social outcomes and policy decisions. Garbage grounds the practice of politics in the pungent, gritty material of the city. It forces politicians to make or postpone decisions, as when trash strikes and collection crises choke the capital’s main arteries with piles of accumulating dump. A toxic materiality is a central feature of trash politics: garbage’s toxicity manifests itself by its stench and rot that make whole neighborhoods repellent and attracts parasitic forms of life such as germs and rodents. To borrow an expression from Jane Bennett, trash is “vibrant matter” in the sense that it becomes imbued with a life of its own, straddling the separation between life and matter and making discarded things part of the living environment. Garbage also participates in the “toxic animacies” identified by Mel Chen who writes from the same perspective of vital materialism.  This vitalist perspective emphasizes the relational nature of material and social worlds and the intersecting precarities they engender. Trash renders places and people impure through threats of contagion: as anthropologist Mary Douglas underscored in her book Purity and Danger, discourses about dirt as “matter out of place” produce social boundaries and thereby structure and spatialize social relations. According to Fredericks, governing-through-disposability is a particular modality of neoliberal governance, determining which spaces and people can be made toxic, degraded, and devalued. It makes visible, smelly and pungent the invisible part of society, the accursed share of human activity, the excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which must be discarded and cast away. The Mbeubeuss municipal landfill, where waste accumulates in open air, is the monstrous shadow of Dakar, a grotesque double that reveals the obscene underbelly of taken-for-granted urban life. But it should be pointed out that Garbage Citizenship is not a work of critical theory: Fredericks is not interested in building theory for its own sake, and she uses vital materialism, toxic animacies, and symbolic structuralism as tools to show how the power of waste is harnessed to different ends in specific conjunctures.

Islam is the solution

What’s new in Frederick’s new materialism is that it doesn’t treat religion as an ideological smokescreen or as the opium of the people. The author underscores the particular importance ascribed to purity and cleanliness as an indispensable element of the Islamic faith. The Set/Setal movement, with its call of making clean and being clean, drew from a religious repertoire and strove to cleanse the city in a literal sense, in terms of sanitation and hygiene, but also morally in a fight against corruption, prostitution, and general delinquency. No longer waiting for permission or direction from their elders, young men and women took ownership of their neighborhoods and bypassed the power of marabouts and the Muslim brotherhoods who had traditionally channeled support toward local and national political authorities. Youth activists, some of them educated, had never imagined of working in garbage as their profession But the stigma attached to being a trash worker and doing dirty labor was overruled by the spiritual value attached to cleanliness and purity, which saw the task of cleaning the city as an act of faith, a calling even akin to a priesthood. A materialist reading of religion emphasizes religious work as bricolage. Fredericks describes the art of maintaining dignity and pride in an environment of impurity and filth as a piety of refusal. This conception of “material spirituality” includes  religious faith in the social and affective components of infrastructure. The piety of refusal also offers a language through which management decisions can be contested and the value of decent work is reaffirmed. Waste workers in Dakar harness the power of discourses of purity and cleanliness as a primary weapon in the fight for better wages and respect. In Fredericks’s interpretation, Islam offers a potent language with which to critique Senegal’s neoliberal trajectory and assert rights for fair labor. This politics of piety emphasizes Islam as the solution, but not in the sense that the Muslim Brotherhood and proponents of political Islam understand it: the demands put forward by trash workers and their union leaders are articulated with a Muslim accent, but only to emphasize the dignity of life and the decency of labor. In the context of urban waste management and unionized mobilization, Islam may provide the language for constructively contesting neoliberal austerity.

Nationalists, Feminists, and Neoliberals Converging Against Islam

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A review of In the Name of Women′s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism, Sara R. Farris, Duke University Press, 2017.

Farris.jpgWhat happens in the name of women’s right is, according to Italian scholar Sara Farris, the denial of the rights of certain women and men to live a life with dignity in Western European countries where they have migrated. More specifically, an anti-Islam and anti-migrant rhetoric is increasingly articulated in terms of gender equality and women’s emancipation. The misuse of liberal discourse for illiberal ends is not new: the invasion of Afghanistan that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11 was presented to the international community as a mission to liberate Afghan women from their oppression under Taliban rule just as much as an act of defense and retaliation against the perpetrators of the attacks. The French fixation with the “Islamic” veil finds its origins in the Algerian war and the effort to present the fight against the FLN as a crusade for modernity on behalf of “Arab” women against their male oppressors. Closer to us, Marine Le Pen is known for courting France’s female voters and for endorsing women’s rights within the framework of her anti-migrant platform. What is distinctive about Sara Farris’s book are three things. First, she anchors her discussion on what she calls “femonationalism” (read: feminism+nationalism) within the context of ideological debates taking place in France, Italy, and the Netherlands during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Second, she shows that the instrumentalization of women’s rights for anti-migrant and anti-Islam purposes is not limited to political parties from the far right: rather, it is the result of a convergence between right-wing nationalists, some feminists and femocrats (by which she means bureaucrats and social workers promoting gender equality policies in state agencies), and neoliberal economic policies targeting participation in the labor market. Third, Farris claims that only a political economy analysis inspired by the critique of neoliberalism can explain why, at this particular juncture, “Muslim” men are being targeted as surplus workers “stealing jobs” and “oppressing women”, while “Muslim” and non-European migrant women are construed as redeemable agents to be rescued by integrating them into low-skilled, low-paid activities of the “social reproduction sector.”

The femonationalist ideological formation

The first argument on the ideology of right-wing parties is well-known. Politicians such as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, or Matteo Salvini in Italy have expressed support for the cause of gender equality (with occasional mentions to gay rights) within a xenophobic and anti-migrant framework. As the book title reflects, they are advancing their anti-Islam agenda in the name of women’s rights. Their attacks on migrant men, especially Muslims, are more strident than their position on non-Western migrant women. They consider the first ones as a direct threat to Western Europe society due, above all, to their oppressive treatment of women at home and their unrestrained, violent sexuality toward women outside the home. The second ones are considered as redeemable: provided certain conditions are met, women can “assimilate” into the host society (through work and often through marriage) and raise their children the “right” way, but they are to be protected from the pervasive influence of “their” men. As the title “in the name of women’s rights” suggests, this appropriation of a feminist agenda is only an excuse, a deception or a fraud by nationalist parties who are otherwise described as misogynist in essence and masculinist in style. Hence the message to European feminists: the accession of the nationalist right to power, as is the case in several European countries, would constitute a regression for women’s rights and would end in a backlash against women. This assumption, however, should be put to empirical testing: it might be the case that illiberal policies would, in the end, benefit the situation of (certain) women at the national level, although migrant women would certainly be the first victims of a tightening of immigration policies. Likewise, as we mentioned, liberal means can serve illiberal ends. We have no reason to assume that the defense of (certain) women’s rights in nationalist platforms is not sincere and that there is only instrumentalization at play. It is true that nationalist parties have shown concern about gender inequality mostly in the case of Muslim and ethnic minority communities. But the history of political ideas provides us with many cases in which ideologies have shifted from the left to the right and sometimes to the far right. Behind the declarations of populist leaders in favor of women’s empowerment and gender equality, there may be a kind of “alt-feminism” in the making. The relation between this alternative feminism and more traditional forms of feminism will have to be defined. But these fine points are not discussed by Sara Farris, who obviously has no sympathy at all for nationalist points of view: for her, femonationalism is no feminism at all.

The second thesis on “femonationalism” as convergence between different agendas and positions is less familiar to the general public and itself needs to be unpacked. The most evident manifestation of this convergence between nationalism and feminism is the fact that some well-known and outspoken feminists such as Elisabeth Badinter in France have joined the ranks of those who see Islam as a threat to European societies. Accordingly, they have endorsed legal proposals such as veil bans while portraying “Muslim” women as passive victims who needed to be rescued and emancipated. They have also described men originating from non-western, economically underdeveloped countries are misogynist and prone to sexual violence, as in the cases of rape and sexual aggressions committed by North Africans and Middle East migrants in Germany. Again, Islam is singled out by these intellectuals as a religion associated with unequal gender relations and violence (with an emphasis on honor killings, domestic violence, forced veiling, and arranged marriages). They see the veil as a form of symbolic violence exerted by Muslim men forcing women to wear it and by Muslim women singling themselves out from the rest of society. Many have turned against multiculturalism as promoting a kind of value relativism and failing to defend “western” values of emancipation, individual rights, and secularism. These arguments define what Farris call the “femonationalist ideological formation,” bringing together public figures who otherwise disagree on many issues. Sara Farris claims that feminists can only lose by espousing the anti-Islam agenda. They are diverting attention away from the many forms of inequality that still affect Western European women. They transform women’s rights into a “civilizational”, ideological issue, as opposed to a social and economic one grounded on material interests. They also contribute to the diffusion of an ethnicized vision of society. Their endorsement of the agenda promoted by the nationalist right is a “divine surprise” for the latter: right-wing politicians can claim the support of high-visibility intellectuals, who have a strong legitimacy on issues of gender inequality and women’s rights. Some self-declared feminists, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands, have lend themselves to political collaboration with right-wing forces. Most feminists however, have insisted on their distance with the nationalist right, claiming instead that their new fight against Islam’s oppression of women stands in continuity with their progressive engagement.

Migrant men and migrant women

Closely related to these Islam-bashing feminists, Farris also points to the role of “femocrats.” This term, slightly dismissive, refers to the (not necessarily female) bureaucrats who are institutionalizing feminism through state programs of gender equality and civic integration. Without giving any figures, Sara Farris claims that state funds are increasingly withdrawn from policies tackling gender inequality as a general problem and are redirected instead toward programs aimed at addressing gender inequality among “Muslim” and ethnic minority communities. These civic integration programs purport to teach migrant men what it means to respect women and gender diversity, and to instruct migrant women how to emancipate from their supposedly backward culture. Unwittingly, they are reproducing the prevalent image of migrant men as a sexual threat and migrant women as victims to be rescued. They are also positing the host country as a society where gender rights are respected and guaranteed by the state, as opposed to a domain of social gains and entitlements that need to be conquered and expanded. Of course, there is nothing wrong in telling people that men and women are equal and that women’s rights should be respected. But here again we may have the case of a liberal objective being pursued through illiberal and even repressive means. Civic integration policies have an obligatory character, and their nonobservance can be punished by either financial penalties or denial of a legal residence permit. Furthermore, the requirement that migrants possess the knowledge considered crucial to integration in the receiving country turns integration into an a priori condition rather than a process that occurs over time. From Sara Farris, the problem comes from the undiscussed assumption that these migrants need to be taught what gender equality is about as if they were ignorant of any notions about women’s rights. Besides, gender equality is mentioned mainly in reference to the private sphere, with an emphasis on traditional gender roles for women who need to develop good mothering skills. For Farris, emancipation cannot be taught, and certainly not in a condescending mode by Western feminists or state apparatuses. Nurturing freedom means first and foremost creating the material conditions for freedom and equality. That’s where the rubber hits the road: while social programs aimed at the integration of female migrants put forward values of emancipation and autonomy, they channel these women toward activities that are far from emancipating and that do not allow for their autonomization or empowerment. What they do is the opposite of what they preach.

Through civic integration programs and other policies, migrant women are directed toward what Sara Farris, in good Marxist fashion, calls the “social reproduction sector”: this refers to the care and domestic activities which are mostly located in the private sphere, such as babysitting, child rearing, housekeeping, apartment cleaning, and caregiving of the elderly. Farris sees a contradiction “when feminists and femocrats urge emancipation for Muslim and non-western migrant women while channeling them toward the very sphere (domestic, low-paying, and precarious jobs) from which the feminist movement had historically tried to liberate women.” While advocating women’s participation in the public sphere, they contribute to the confinement of migrant women in household services, the reinforcement of traditional gender roles and the perpetuation of the gender injustice they claim to be combating. Farris considers the jobs proposed to migrant women as lacking in dignity and not conducive to emancipation. Changing diapers, wiping floors, cleaning kitchens, attending sick bodies: these are occupations which are now overwhelmingly held by women of foreign origins and that European women do not want to take as a profession. Of course, one could argue that there is nothing demeaning in the work of care, in attending to children and the elderly, or in making hotel rooms and office space fit for productive use. These jobs can be held with dignity, the feeling that comes from working hard for a socially useful function. But this is not how society sees these jobs and occupations in western Europe. They are organized under conditions of precariousness, with minimal wages, job flexibility, part-time or casual contracts, and little access to welfare provisions. The inclusion of social reproduction into the market sphere of wage labor has not led to a rehabilitation of care and domestic work; on the contrary, it continues to be perceived as unskilled, low-status, isolated, servile, and dirty. And for Sara Farris, western feminists are largely to blame for this lack of consideration. They have deserted the issue of social reproduction as a matter for critical engagement, leaving the sector to the naturalizing forces of neoliberalism.

The regular army of domestic labor

Right-wing nationalists, intellectuals who identify themselves as feminists, state experts working on migrant women issues, and neoliberals favoring workfare programs: how can these very different and sometimes opposing parties come up with similar ideas when the migrant question is at stake? As Sara Farris insists, these opponents to Islam in the name of women’s rights should not be seen as partners in crime or ideological bedfellows. The fact that they sometimes converge on an anti-Islam platform doesn’t mean they are colluding, cooperating, or associating with each other in any way. Each party has specific reasons to frame Islam as posing a threat to gender equality in the west. Talking about instrumentalization to describe their relations would be patronizing, especially for the feminists who are very conscious of the political difference that separate them from the nationalist right. In true Marxist fashion, Sara Farris believes convergence at the ideological level comes from similar interests dictated by the material conditions of late capitalism. Neoliberalism isn’t simply the contextual ground on which the femonationalist convergence takes place: it is the constitutive plane of such a convergence. Neoliberal globalization is grounded on a sexual division of labor in which, to use Karl Marx’s categories, migrant women provide the “regular army of labor” and migrant men the “reserve army of labor” or relative surplus population. Unlike migrant men who work in the productive sector, migrant women who work in the domestic sector allow the social reproduction of labor to take place. They are spared from accusations of “stealing jobs” or “posing a threat to society” because they allow western families to form double income couples and to balance work with domestic life. Their employers maintain ownership and control over the social means of production and reproduction. Their labor cannot be substituted by machines and capital, as care and domestic work imply certain qualities that can only be provided by “live labor” and that are often associated with traditional feminine roles. The difference between the industrial sector afflicted with an oversupply of labor in western European countries and the social reproductive sector (cleaning, care domestic, and health care work) explains the double standard applied to male and female migrant workers, especially when religious values come into play.

Commenting the division of the working class in England between English proletarians and Irish proletarians, Karl Marx claimed he had found the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist class, as well as the secret of the English working class’s lack of revolutionary spirit. Similarly, Sara Farris believes she has solved the mystery of the unholy convergence between nationalists and feminist promoters of women’s rights: the femonationalist ideological formation takes places under the aegis of neoliberal exploitation of the Global South. “Just as the exploitation of non-western countries’ natural resources permits the West to keep its pattern of production and consumption, it is also migrant women’s socially reproductive work that permits western European women and men not only to have the ‘cheap’ care that enables them to be active in the labor market, but also to retain the illusion that gender inequality has been achieved—at least for ‘them’.” Migrant women are “needed” as workers, “tolerated” as migrants, and “encouraged” as women to conform to western values. Meanwhile, migrant men are needed only insofar as they form a “reserve army of labor,” pushing industrial wages down and antagonizing western workers who then tend to align with the nationalist agenda of the ruling class. Feminists who claim to act in the name of women’s rights are only idiot savants, contributing to the social reproduction of capital while protecting the interests of some women against others’. It is in this sense that they converge with the agenda of the nationalist right: both are complementary ways by which neoliberal globalization extends its conditions of uneven development and exploitation. This process is fraught with contradictions: historically, migrant women came to Western Europe only as the wives and relatives of male guest laborers who formed a first wave of labor migration. It is only when male workers became redundant that the demand for female migrant labor in social reproductive activities began to rise, leading to a mechanism of exclusion of male migrants and inclusion of female migrants. It is this dual process of inclusion and exclusion that femonationalism performs at the level of ideology.

Importing identity politics into Europe

In the Name of Women’s Rights offers a curious mix of European social critique and American multicultural advocacy. It was written while the author was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, with feminist author Joan W. Scott providing advice on how to frame intellectual debates about Islam and feminism in Western Europe. Through scholarly networks and academic contacts, the United States smuggles into Europe a vision of identity politics and multiculturalism that was developed in the context of the culture wars on university campuses and that reflects a very specific conception of social groups and ethnicities. Each individual is automatically affiliated to an ethnic or religious community, an exclusive group that is conceived as separated from mainstream culture and that is defined in opposition to other collectives: migrant vs. natives, foreigners vs. citizens, men vs. women, Muslims vs. secular individuals. Like the right-wing promoters of the fantasy notion of Eurabia, these leftist intellectuals see Islam and the integration of non-western Muslim communities as the main challenge facing European societies, overcoming all other forms of division and solidarity. Debates on citizenship, on gender parity, on secularism and on inequality are all overdetermined by this ethnic and religious context. As a European, Sara Farris should know better than to apply such simplistic notion to a situation that requires other tools of analysis and interpretation. But she finds it convenient to sugarcoat her hardcore Marxism with a layer of identity politics that provides catchy titles and attractive soundbites. Like the convergence between European nationalists and universalist feminists—a fringe phenomenon, that doesn’t reflect the history of both the nationalist right and of the feminist movement in Europe—, this alliance between radical economics and cultural warfare mixes elements that don’t fit together and that provide little explanatory power. This is a shallow and off-the-shelf book that attempts to ride the wave of sexual nationalisms by providing its own entry in the form of a catchy word—femonationalism is designed after the notion of homonationalism advanced by Jasbir Puar. But its cultural lenses are heavily biased, and its political economy antiquated. As a piece of transnational scholarship designed between Europe and the United States, it provides the worst of both worlds.

Queer Theory in Dark Times

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A review of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Jasbir K. Puar, Duke University Press, Tenth Anniversary edition, 2017.

terrorist assemblageTerrorist Assemblages offers, as the foreword to the 2017 edition puts it, “queer theory in dark times.” The times that form the backdrop of queer theory are very dark indeed. The book was written at a time when, in the wake of revelations about torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, New York Times editorialist Thomas Friedman could write: “I have never known a time in my life when America and its president were more hated around the world than today” (yes, the year was 2004, and the president was George W. Bush). It was, and it still is, a time of death and mourning, of war and aggression, of terrorist attacks and nationalist hype. This historical conjuncture has been described as “the age of the world target”: what is being targeted are not simply terrorist networks and rogue states, but the world as an object to be destroyed. In this context, Terrorist Assemblages exposes the United States not only as a targeting war machine, but also as a targeted nation, as the target of terrorist assaults and radical critique. There is a political urgency that is to be felt at every page, no less in the 2017 postscript titled “Homonationalism in Trump times”. This book is not the work of an ivory tower academic or a closet intellectual, pondering over the course of world’s events from the safety of an academic perch. It is a text steeped in violence and accusations, a disruptive and unruly intervention that leaves no field of inquiry unscathed. The starting point of the acceleration of time that Terrorist Assemblages manifests is September 11, 2001, which forms the degree zero of writing and thinking about our present situation. 9/11 is conceptualized as a “snapshot” and a “flashpoint”, an explosion and a lightning, allowing different temporalities to emerge and, with them, a range of issues hitherto suppressed. These weird and unhinged times offer a space for the untimely, the unexpected, the forever deferred. The politics of time that the epoch brings to the fore, with its tactics, strategies, and logistics, is a politics of the open end, of allowing unknowable political futures to come our way, of taking risks rather than guarding against them.

Advancing a nationalist agenda in the name of sexual freedom

The times are queer, and so is theory. Queer times is a historical juncture when new normativities are emerging, new subjectivities are being hailed, and new bodies are being assembled. More specifically, Jasbir Puar argues that the production of terrorist bodies is inseparable from the affirmation of queer subjects in a context where homosexuality and LGBT rights are being tied to a nationalist agenda. This book was not the first to use the expression “homonationalism”: the topic was a matter of discussion in Europe long before American academics began to notice, and the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 was a watershed in this respect. The striking feature that distinguishes contemporary European nationals parties from their older counterparts is the invocation of gender equality and LGBT rights with an otherwise xenophobic rhetoric. Indeed, despite their masculinist political style and occasional homophobic slurs, those parties have increasingly advanced their anti-Islam agendas in the name of sexual freedom and gender rights. Sexual diversity has thus been instrumentalized in the service of sexual nationalism, whereby migrants’ and Muslims’ integration and loyalty to their hosting western nations are tested by means of their commitment to the sexual values of these nations. This sexualization of citizenship posits that Muslims and other non-western migrants are intrinsically homophobic and that Islam is, in essence, “anti-gay”. Some western progressives even use this argument to call for a slower pace of social reforms in Europe, advancing that our open and increasingly multicultural societies are “not yet ready” for the recognition of sexual minorities’ rights. Puar brings these European debates to the post-9/11 American context. Centering her attention on the intersection between gay politics and US exceptionalism, she emphasizes the exclusionary state as the master signifier of the contemporary focus on male radicalized Others as misogynistic and xenophobic enemies of western civilization. More specifically, Puar discusses the encounter between US nationalism and queer sexual politics in terms of “collisions”, which she sees as productive of a “homonationalist” formation. Puar’s “homonationalism” thus both describes the mobilization of gay rights against Muslims and racialized Others within the American nationalist framework, but also refers to the integration of “homonormativity”—that is, domesticated homosexual politics—within the US agenda of the war on terror. As Puar puts it, homonationalism is a “discursive tactic that disaggregates US national gays and queers from racial and sexual others, foregrounding a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves.”

Violence of theory, violence of the state, violence of the self

Terrorist Assemblages is a violent book that both condones and denounces violence. As the author writes, “it is easy, albeit painful, to point to the conservative elements of any political formation; it is less easy, and perhaps much more painful, to point to ourselves as accomplices of certain normativizing violences.” The first form of violence that the author exposes is the violence of theory. It is the chasm “between those who theorize and those who are theorized about.” It is telling that, in the context of the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib and the outrage that pictures of maimed bodies elicited, no one took the pain to inquire who these tortured Iraqi individuals were, what experience they felt, and how their lives and those of their relatives were affected. Or that trauma analysis portrays war veterans and victims of terrorist attacks as worthy of compassion and care, whereas people who have lost loved ones as a consequence of US foreign policy elsewhere are not depicted as sufferers of trauma or injustice. Why is there a double standard when dead bodies are counted in the aftermath of military campaigns, with the Iraq war claiming 773 US fatalities but more than 10,000 Iraqis killed? Or, to return to the Abu Ghraib case, why are these photos any more revolting than pictures of body parts blown apart by shards of missiles and explosives as a consequence of targeted attacks launched by unmanned drones? For Jasbir Puar, theory is intrinsically violent. She turns this violence against queer theorists and progressives of a radical bent, and ultimately against herself. The author draws attention to the manifold ways in which the US state of exceptionalism and exception has co-opted important sections of the gay movement. Rather than a mere instrumentalization, or tactical exploitation of the theme of gay rights by nationalism, Puar thus highlights the active involvement—and responsibilities—of the queer movements themselves that have supported (wittingly or unwittingly) this new racist configuration. Queer theory itself, with its insistence on LGBT exceptionalism and impossible standards of radicalism, partakes in this contemporary violence. A typical discursive move of Puar is to bring forth a progressive or radical argument proposed by a fellow theorist, then highlight its blind spots, its undeclared essentialism and hidden normativity. On that count, few arguments survive her critique, and even her own argumentation is not immune from self-criticism. As a result, the author paints herself into an inhospitable corner: normativity, homo or hetero, is not something that we can escape.

The second form of violence that Terrorist Assemblages addresses is the violence of the state. For Puar, this violence has reached a new intensity with the war on terror and the isolation of the homeland that followed September 11, 2011. The state has morphed into a war machine which, like the desiring machines of Deleuze and Guattari, is animated with a will of its own and produces in its wake a multiplicity of infectious affects and afflictions: patriotism, racism, security, death, torture, terror, terrorism, detention, deportation, surveillance, and control. The bodies of foreign terrorists are constituted as bodies without organs: they are eviscerated, stripped bare of any subjectivity and left to survive as living dead in zones of non-law such as Guantanamo and black sites of detention. In the neo-Orientalist vision of geopolitics in the Middle East, terrorists are perceived as queer: “failed and perverse, these emasculated bodies always have femininity as their reference point of malfunction, and are metonymically tied to all sorts of pathologies of the mind and body—homosexuality, incest, pedophilia, madness, and disease.” The biopolitical state turns foreign subjects into figures of death at the same time as it associates gay couples and queer individuals with positive ideas of life and productivity: hence gay marriage, the exaltation of difference, and the market segmentation of LGBT communities into profitable ventures. For Puar, “this benevolence toward sexual others is contingent upon ever-narrowing parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship normatively, and bodily integrity.” The affirmation of sexual difference is concomitant with the ascendency of whiteness: in popular representation, the homosexual other is always white, while the racial other is straight. By extension, the invocation of the terrorist as queer, nonnational, perversely racialized other has become part of the normative script of the US war on terror. Of course, there is no way to tell where this process of scapegoating and excluding unworthy subjects from the national body will stop.There is always the risk that you may be next in line and that, after having targeted terrorists, illegal aliens, immigrants, law trespassers and deviants, the state may come after you.

Thirdly, Puar underscores the violence of identity. Assigning a person to a fixed and defined identity is a violent act of normativity. It elides and forecloses other affiliations and belongings, and creates a sense of loss and mourning for the other futures and possibilities that never will be. Our belonging to a certain community, group or category is a purely arbitrary fact, a given without meaning. To be born in a certain country, within a certain ethnic group or with a predetermined sexual orientation is not the result of a conscious decision or a choice: to have one’s identity defined by these contingent parameters is a form of violence that nothing compels us to take as granted. Norms exclude certain people and deny their rights as much as they include other people and grant them privileges. Queer theory has been designed to bring such norms at risk and to return against the bearer the violence that they apply to nonconformist bodies. Queer means trouble: it breaks down the established and stable categories of identity, it refuses to accept that genres and genders can be clearly defined, and instead focuses on the expansive production of sexualized selves through performance and affects. But the proliferation of shifting identities and the compulsive invocation of difference is no less violent and normative than the compulsory orders of residence that puts us under house arrest.  Although queer theory emphasizes difference, mismatch, and nonnormativity, queer as a category creates its own normative power, its ability to mold subjects and discipline their conduct. As Puar shows, all queer bodies have not been included in the category of queer. Despite its claims of intersectionality, queer politics have prioritized only one factor, sexuality, as the primary sense through which they structure their action. In particular, queer theory is underpinned by a powerful conviction that religious and racial communities are more homophobic than white mainstream queer communities are racist. By implication, for queers of colors a critique of homophobia within their home community is deemed more pressing and should take precedence over a criticism of racism within mainstream queer communities.

The West as an arbiter of civilizational standards

Jasbir Puar reverses that order of priority. She revels in exposing the bigotry of queer organizations such as InterPride or OutRage! who send politically correct messages with an exclusionary subtext. Complicity with white ascendency and heteronormativity can take many forms. As with the construction of model minorities by elites from certain ethnic groups, wealthy white gay males create an ideal of the homosexual family (gay marriage, adopted children, bourgeois lifestyle) that is no less normative and exclusionary than its heterosexual version. Nationalism is on the rise in every segment of society, and progressive sexuality is heralded as a hallmark of western modernity as opposed to the backwardness and obscurantism of the Middle East where the war on terror is waged. Islam and homosexuality are constituted as mutually exclusive; and queer people of color, or gay Muslims, becomes the significant others to be rescued from their culture or communities. The West regards itself as the arbiter of civilizational standards. Just as exotic women are waiting to be liberated by white males, gay Arabs need to be saved by white gay men, and they are granted asylum status accordingly. In the progressive narrative, gays and lesbians are the last recipients of civil rights that have already been bestowed on racial minorities. This rosy vision not only falsely assumes that discrimination and prejudices against ethnic minorities are a thing of the past; it also relieves mainstream gays and lesbians from any accountability to an antiracist agenda. The two issues are treated as substitutes, not complementary: Puar reminds us that the legalization of interracial marriage in 1967 coincided with increased criminalization of homosexuality in US laws. Likewise, the growing visibility and inclusion of gays and lesbians into the national fold comes at the expense of racialized subjects and foreign others who are targeted by discriminatory laws justified by the war on terror. Against affirmations of sexual exceptionalism that depicts the United States as a haven for the poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe sexual freedom, Puar shows that America lags far behind in the recognition of sexual minorities’ rights. And she notes that visa restrictions and deportation policies have created a new diaspora of former US residents cast away from the homeland or seeking refuge in neighboring Canada.

The publication of Terrorist Assemblages was part of the 9/11 industry machine: a kind of scholarly porn, where each critic would try to outsmart the competition by providing even more radical perspectives on what was construed as a landmark event ushering a new geopolitical era. By focusing on the production of the figure of the Muslim terrorist as queer, Puar offers a radical critique of liberal agendas that take the emancipatory nature of feminism and queer movements as granted. She shows that many segments in society continue to produce the sexual other as white and the racial other as straight. Bodies that don’t fit into this equation are construed as either racialized queer terrorists, whose political grievances are explained away by pathologizing their motives, or as exotic fairies who need to be saved from their oppressive environment. The famous critic Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak coined the phrase “white men are saving brown women from brown men” to underscore that the voice of the subaltern woman is always silenced by patriarchy and imperialism. For Jasbir Puar, queer and lesbian racialized others are being saved by gay-friendly white men: the progressive stance of liberal positioning becomes a normative agenda, whereby how well countries treat their homosexuals becomes the litmus test of acceptable governance. Israel uses pinkwashing to market itself as a gay-friendly destination and to silence the critiques of its human rights record, and the European Union spends political energy on LGBT rights to cover its absence of strategic vision on governance issues. Meanwhile, at the national level, attitudes toward gays and lesbians become a barometer of whether immigrant minorities are acceptable to the national polity. The fixation on the certainty of greater homophobia in Muslim communities or immigrant cultures gives credence to a nationalist camp that extends its constituency to white homosexuals while comforting its hold on racist and anti-immigrant voters.  For Puar, the discourse on rights and liberalization must always be complemented by the two questions: rights for whom, and at whose expense? LGBT liberation is a legitimate goal, but it also works to distract attention from intense forms of regulation that seeks to control and exclude the activities of bodies not deemed suitable for the national body politic. The very idea of sexual identity and of gender is part of the way imperialism works and operates as a form of silent colonization of our lifeworlds.

Jasbir Puar claims that her analyses “draw upon more than five years of research conducted in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut involving community-based organizations, activist events, meetings, protests, teach-ins, and panels, as well as pamphlets, educational materials, propaganda, and press releases from both alternative and mainstream media.” Her status as a participant observer is attested by her involvement in activist groups representing gay and lesbian South Asians, or by her familiarity with gurdwara communities where Sikh Americans had to distanciate themselves from suspicions of terrorism by claiming that “the turban is not a hat.” Many observations made by the author, as well as her analyses of feminist and queer responses to various events, show her deep involvement in the issues she is addressing. But Terrorist Assemblages is not a work of ethnography. Empirical facts and data are limited to a few casual observations, and works of art or media performances often take centerstage, as in the book’s illustrations. Puar thinks her background in community advocacy and activism gives her enough credentials to take a stand as a scholar and to engage in social critique. She is also theoretically literate: her references to the scholarly literature are cutting-edge, she is not afraid to engage with feminists and queer theorists on their own turf so as to expose some of their limitations and shortcomings. She gives flesh and substance to abstract notions and constructs such as affect theory, analyses of nonvisual perceptions, differences between foucaldian disciplines and deleuzian control, and emphases of embodied modes of existence. Her reading of the Sikh turban as an assemblage that folds together cloth, skin, hair, odors, and tactile sensations, is a model of the genre. But theory does not a philosopher make, and a philosopher she is not. She uses an elaborate style—and some sentences or paragraphs require repeated readings—to state ideas or expose facts that are quite simple and straightforward. She throws concepts like a boxer would throw blows: she doesn’t hit every time, but what matters is to stay in the fight and aim for the prize. The publication of a tenth anniversary edition of Terrorist Assemblages shows that, for some readers at least, Jasbir Puar hit the mark and came out alive and kicking.

Letter to a Young Muslim Fashionista

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A review of Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, Reina Lewis, Duke University Press, 2015.

muslim-fashionSo you’ve picked up this book because you think Muslim fashion is the next new thing. You’ve made a good choice: this book is totally made for you. It is a book that will teach you things, give you ideas, and make you think. Don’t expect tips on what to wear and how to wear it, though: this you will have to decide for yourself. If who you are is what you wear, then you cannot delegate this task to a third party. But reading Muslim Fashion will help you make your own choices and dress on your own terms. Maybe you won’t feel the same after reading it. Maybe your image will look different into the mirror. This is what they call a transformative book: it will make you see things differently. This is the good thing about reading books in general: you can turn them to your own use. So if this book helps you dress smarter, so be it. But it may also help you think about what you wear and why you wear it. If your style of dress makes a statement, be sure it includes the word fashion in it.

If your style of dress makes a statement, be sure it includes the word fashion in it.

To be frank with you, you may find Muslim Fashion a bit hard to read. But relax: this book review is here to help you through the reading. It will give you tips that will make understand things a lot easier. So don’t freak out if you see long sentences and difficult words. This is how people working as university professors make a living. Sentences are like skirts: you can wear them long or short according to your likes and dislikes. Trust me: I will use short sentences to describe long hijabs and ample robes. Or at least I’ll try. As a full disclosure, I don’t work in the fashion industry, and I am not involved in any way with Muslim fashion. I just like to read difficult books and try to make them simpler to read by writing book reviews. I wrote this one especially for you. If you find it helpful, you may provide feedback by clicking on the ‘helpful’ button or by writing a comment. But please understand: I am not a specialist in Muslim or modest fashion, or in any women’s fashion for that respect. So take my writing with a pinch of salt: if you disagree with what you read, blame the author of the book, not me.

I am starting from the premise that you are already familiar with basic vocabulary. So you can tell a niqab from an abaya, a jilbab from a hijab, or a shayla from a turban. You may also be familiar with ethnic clothing: burqa cover from Afghanistan, kebaya dress from South-East Asia, chador cloak from Iran, tesettür veil from Turkey, salwar kameez outfit from South Asia. I am also assuming that you know what pious fashion, or modest fashion, is about. So you may be interested to learn where it came from, or how it varies in time and place. The important point to make is that modest fashion is not only about To Veil or Not To Veil. And even if you do, there are many different styles to veiling. Indeed, you may wish to design your own style, based on examples and references glimpsed in magazines or on the street. There are also a lot of tutorials available on Youtube. This is not pure exhibition: people choose what to show and what to hide. All people do.

You can be both pious and fashionable at the same time

Some islamic clothing are clearly outside the purview of fashion. This is clearly the case with burqa, niqab, or abaya—although you may be interested to learn that some embroidered abaya sell for thousands of dollars in Gulf states. Indeed, some people challenge the idea that you can be both pious and fashionable at the same time. For them, a modest outlook is the antithesis of fashion: modesty is to break free from the tyranny of appearance, to contest the idolatry of the body. And indeed, the fashion world has accustomed us with habits that are far from restrained or modest. Exposed nudity, promiscuity between models and their admirers, rumors of drug consumption and tales of anorexia make the catwalk sound like a freak show. No wonder some customers and clothes designers want to break free from this model. But that’s the thing about fashion: no fashion is still fashion, especially when it becomes fashionable. This is what is happening with Muslim fashion; and this is the story that the author Reina Lewis recollects in her book.

On a first look, no industry could be farther from fashion than the tesettür producers in Turkey, This is a country that brands itself secular and where the wearing of headscarves is frowned upon by the state, with an outright ban in schools and colleges or in the national parliament. Women wearing the local headscarf or tesettür have other concerns than fashion. Since Atatürk promoted western clothing and western mores, wearing the veil has always been coded as old-fashioned, rural or excessively religious in secular Turkey. But think again: tesettür companies have gained market share at home and abroad, and are now competing on brand image and seasonal collections. Today’s veiling-fashion producers market colorful and constantly changing styles, from bold and close-fitting to more conservative ones. Istanbul is now developing itself as a fashion city with a critical mass of consumers and fashion specialists, and Muslim fashion is definitely part of the show. For many young Islamic women, wearing a headscarf marks them off as different from their mothers who are going out bareheaded. This is precisely the point: who would like to look exactly like her mother? And as fashion catalogues and lifestyle magazines will show you, there are many ways to wear the tesettür.

People have the right to wear the hijab if they choose to do so.

Doing research for her book, Reina Lewis interviewed several shop workers wearing the hijab in fashion stores or malls located in several British cities. The interviews were conducted between 2005 and 2010, and I am sure many things have changed since then. But maybe some things haven’t. UK law promotes employment equality regardless of religion or belief, and so sales persons have the right to wear the hijab if they choose to do so. Shop rules may define how workers dress and present themselves, but only up to a point. Discrimination on grounds of religion can bring an employer to court. Of course, how sales assistants dress is important for their boss and for their clients. They are the brand’s ambassadors, and their style and advice will help match the product and the consumer. In this context, familiarity with modest or pious style can be an asset, especially in neighborhoods populated by Muslim families. Take the case of Y.S. for instance. She didn’t have to apply for a job: she was recruited while shopping in a branch of Dorothy Perkins because the store manager thought she looked cool. She wore her hijab with style and personality, and being modest and trendy was exactly the image the store wanted to project.

Here I may introduce a few concepts proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist. For Bourdieu, style is a form of symbolic capital: it is something that you can cultivate and that can be converted into forms of economic capital, like finding a job in a lifestyle magazine or a fashion store. Style is also a component of habitus, a social property of individuals that orients human behavior without strictly determining it. In a book called La Distinction, Bourdieu described the rise of a new class of cultural intermediaries working in service activities: sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration, and so on. Upwardly mobile, these middle class individuals used their symbolic capital and were driven by their habitus to give legitimacy to new forms of cultural activities: minor arts such as photography or jazz music, self-presentation through fashion and lifestyle, and mass consumption of goods and appliances designed to make life easier. The young fashionistas described in Muslim Fashion are the heirs of these trendsetters. They do not act in isolation, but in a field (another important concept from Bourdieu) composed of many players and sources of authority. Only this field is not much cultural as it is religious. As surprising as it may seem, women participating in Muslim fashion are also religious intermediaries.

Fashion is usually regarded outside of the mainstream of religious concerns. Except for Islam: in this case many people—Muslim and non-Muslim—have an opinion on what Islamic women should and shouldn’t wear. As Reina Lewis describes it in another chapter, Muslim lifestyle magazines and fashion catalogues are faced with a conundrum. How to represent women’s bodies? Some magazines such as Azizah have a policy of always putting a model with a headscarf on their cover. Others, such as the American quarterly Muslim Girl, do exactly the opposite: their idea is to represent as many different girls as possible and all their different approaches to faith. Still others avoid photographs of the human form, or take pictures of women viewed from behind so as not to show their face. Emel, another lifestyle magazine, takes straight-up photos of real people wearing street fashion but avoids professional models. The representation of female bodies raises even more controversies online, where readers and commentators are prompt to express their views in reaction to blog posts or social media pictures. Reina Lewis describes how the rise of online brands selling modest apparel was accompanied by the development of a lively blogosphere and social media devoted to modest style.

Modest fashion is coming to a store near you

A new category of “modest fashion” has therefore emerged and become legitimized on the Internet. Women can now find products designed with modesty in mind, consult style guides and join in fashion discussions about how to style modesty. These discussions are not necessarily faith-based and inspired by Islam: they can be inter-faith—as some Christian groups or Jewish believers have similar modesty needs—or based on no faith at all. They are increasingly cosmopolitan: see for example the new fashion line designed by Hana Tajima, an English woman based in Malaysia, which was launched in Singapore by Uniqlo, a Japanese apparel company. I have to confess I learned more from browsing the web using the “modest fashion” keyword than from reading long articles about secularity and attitudes considered as ostentatiously religious in my own country—which is France. Speaking of France, if I have a minor quibble with Reina Lewis’ book, it is when she alludes to a supposedly outright ban of Islamic dress in France, whereas the limitations introduced by French law are only limited to certain types of dress—the face-veil—or to certain locations, such as schools. And even these laws may evolve, along with the changing attitudes among the French public. Paris has long been the capital of fashion: my personal wish is that it will also become a magnet for the creation and expression of Muslim fashion.