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FIGURE 21.4

Concluding remarks

Our analysis shows that the Islamic discourses on veiling as a religious practice
are not as coherent as they claim to be, and that the practice of veiling does
not have a singular meaning. Turkey’s experience of modernization, which
has lasted since the early 19th century, has considerably affected the Islamic
movement and its conceptualization in daily life. We think that the meanings
and the context of the practice of veiling are subject to constant change. We argue
that Turkish Muslim women use the veil in multiple ways according to their
relation to the practice of veiling either as a purely religious or a traditional prac-
tice, as a political symbol, as a symbol of status, as a marker of difference or as a
new form of consumption. A woman who wears the veil refuses to be included
in the dominant definition of modernity and civilization. On the one hand, she
experiences a feeling of being ‘privileged’ and of being different from the others;
on the other hand, she reproduces the new meaning of veiling, which in this arti-
cle is defined as the consumption context of the practice of veiling.