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since the early 1990s, the rise of what could be called a ‘fashion for veiling’ is
a result of this articulation process. We argue that the practice of veiling is insep-
arable from consumption, commodity, even pleasure patterns, and is stimulated
by global and local trends of the market economy. Following these trends, some
of the clothing companies in Turkey offer various veiling models and styles to
women belonging to urban middle and upper classes who are compelled to or
who willingly chose to dress according to Islamic principles.
While political Islam empowers and promotes the return of Muslim actors,
ethics and aesthetics to the public sphere, the lifestyles of Muslim actors are cor-
respondingly changing due to their encounter with modernized lifestyles. New
social divisions are occurring among Islamic communities. Therefore, as Göle
points out, the representation of the Islamic other in the public sphere is very
complex, and there is a compound relationship between the identity politics of
Islamic communities and the global forces of consumerism and of market eco-
2
nomics (Göle, 1997: 74–7). Since the 1990s, with the aim of presenting alternative
consumption strategies to the westernized and dominant ones, new consump-
tion practices are being developed by the newly formed Islamic middle classes
(Göle, 2000: 94), such as Islamic fashion and the Islamization of urban ways of
life like patronizing restaurants, supermarkets and hotels. For instance, there is
a luxury hotel, the Caprice, which is very is popular among these new middle
classes. Its name is in French and the word itself is not in line with Islamic ethics
3
and aesthetics. It is located on the western coast of Turkey and offers summer
holidays that conform with Islamic principles, such as separate beaches for men
and women and respect for the praying hours. Leisure is ‘Islamicized’ but in line
with the market system, and as a consequence, the lifestyles of Muslim subjects
are transformed. In other words, the subjects of the periphery are assimilated
into the centre. Muslim women are at the core of all these alterations, because of
the shifting meaning of the practice of veiling. Fashion shows and new designs
for veiling targeting urban middle-class Muslim women are indicators of this
new meaning, a consumption context to the practice of veiling, which promotes
the habit of purchasing.

Islamic women’s magazines

In the early 1980s, Turkey saw an increase in the number of Islamic newspapers
and periodicals being published, and following the abolition of the state mono-
poly on broadcasting in the early 1990s, a whole range of Islamist audiovisual
media came on air, adding a new dimension to this scene throughout the 1990s.
When one focuses on Islamist media in Turkey, it is common to neglect the pres-
ence of Islamic women’s magazines, which show the more intimate face and the
everyday life perspective of the 1980s phenomenon, political Islam. Few
researchers have analysed Islamic women’s magazines in Turkey specifically
(see Arat, 1995; Acar, 1995; Alankus¸-Kural, 1995; Demir, 1998; Sallan Gül and
Gül, 2000). They have generally focused on the discourse of these magazines in
the context of the representation of female sexuality, the social visibility of
Muslim women, the participation of women in the public sphere, women’s