Page 209 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-10.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 198

••• Ann Brooks •••

Transnationalism and transculturalism in transforming contemporary
Islamic publics and representations

Globalization and the formation of different classes, ethnicities and genders have not
only impacted on diasporic Chinese, they have also had a significant impact on the
Islamic world, with the growth of Islamism and of Islamization. The migration of
Muslim groups, the emergence of a Muslim middle class, and the significance of gen-
der in the emergence of such publics have led to Islamic cultural formations becom-
ing popular subjects of cultural criticism. As Gole observes:

In the ‘second wave’ of Islamism, actors of Islam blend into modern urban
spaces, use global communication networks, engage in public debates, fol-
low consumption patterns, learn market rules, enter into secular time, get
acquainted with values of individuation, professionalism and consumerism,
and reflect upon new practices. But a more cultural orientation [e.g. the end
of Islamism] does not mean a less political one … Islam penetrates even
more into the social fiber and imaginary, thereby raising new political
questions.
(2002: 174)

Gole (1996), previously writing about contemporary ‘veiling practices’ of Muslim
women, highlights the significance of gender in the public visibility of Islam, and
shows how women become important religious and political agents through the
emergence of the veil as a symbol of politicized Islam. Gole shows that:
The Islamic headscarf is deliberately appropriated, not passively carried and
handed down from generation to generation. It is claimed by a new generation
of women who have had access to higher education … Instead of assimilating
to the secular regime of women’s emancipation, they press for their embodied
difference (e.g. Islamic dress) and their public visibility (e.g. in schools, in
Parliament) and create disturbances in modern social imaginaries. Islamic
women hurt the feelings of modern women and upset the status quo; they are
playing with ambivalence, being both Muslim and modern without wanting to
give up one for the other. They are outside a regime of imitation, critical of both
subservient traditions and assimilative modernity.

(2002: 181)
Thus, as Gole points out, Muslim women find themselves a visible representation of
‘difference’, from both a sometimes hostile West, and a confused and divided Islam.
Gole maintains that the practice of veiling reflects not a subjugation of Muslim
women to traditional religious practices:

On the contrary, it bears a new form, the outcome of a selective and reflexive
attitude that amplifies and dramatizes the performative signs of ‘difference’ …
the new covering suggests a more rather than less potent Islam, which accounts

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