Page 139 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

(Hirschkind 2001b), and the Internet (Mandaville 2001; Wheeler 2001) has been critical
to this development.
16. Using the term “Islamic dress” is in line with the ways in which many of those
involved describe covered dress. This is not unproblematic, however, as many Muslims
who do not wear covered dress consider themselves observant Muslims as well. Describ-
ing covered dress as “Islamic dress” may then be seen as accepting one particular inter-
pretation about how Muslim women ought to dress.
17. If women wearing the “new veil” may be seen as both in®uenced by and partici-
pating in the Islamization of the public sphere, some women have also become involved
in the Muslim public sphere in another way. The rapid increase of female literacy has
stimulated women’s involvement in the ¤eld of Islamic learning and the production of
Islamic knowledge. Such forms of knowledge may vary from claiming a space within
mainstream Islam to attempts to develop new perspectives that are both grounded in
Islamic traditions and in the discourse about women’s rights (see, for example, Webb
2000).
18. For similarities in the projects of secularist and Islamist modernity, see Abu-
Lughod 1998 and Hatem 1998.
19. Whereas before the Islamic revolution women of very different walks of life and
political persuasions had started to wear the chador in protest against the dominance of
the United States, after Ayatollah Khomeini came to power both secularist and (some)
Islamist women took to the streets to protest the proscription of Islamic dress (Paidar
1995). After the 1997 victory of Mohammed Khatami in the presidential elections and
the opening up of political space, the issue of the imposition of hijab, suppressed since
the revolution, surfaced again, with those opposing forced hijab arguing that it is not a
divine rule but rather the imposition of the lifestyle and values of a speci¤c group (Mir-
Hosseini 2002).
20. Such shifting patterns of authority are, for instance, evident in the ways in which
women’s involvement with popular su¤sm in Algeria has changed from the late nine-
teenth century on. Whereas in those days a substantial number of women were involved
in sisterhoods, in the course of the twentieth century these sisterhoods lost consider-
able prestige and power, and, by the 1980s, the small number of women still active in
these sisterhoods had become increasingly marginalized. Not only men but also better-
educated women had distanced themselves from these more “popular” forms of Islam
(Jansen 1987, 79ff.).

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1998. The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selective
Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics. In Remaking Women:
Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod, 243–270. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Afshar, Haleh. 1982. Khomeini’s Teachings and Their Implications for Iranian Women.
In In the Shadow of Islam, ed. Azar Tabari and Nahid Yeganeh, 75–90. London: Zed.
1. 1998. Islam and Feminism: An Iranian Case-Study. London: Macmillan.
Ahmed, Leila. 1982. Western Ethnocentrism and Perceptions of the Harem. Feminist
Studies 8 (3): 521–542.

128 Annelies Moors