Remaking women

Nowhere have the cultural and political ambiguities of the resurgence been more vividly expressed than with regard to women. Nowhere, too, have the uncertainties of women’s status been more visible than in two foci of con servative Islamist concern, women’s dress and employment. Although the veiling of women was common in many parts of the early twentieth century Muslim world, it was far from universal.61 Head scarves and htijab were common enough around the Arab world, particularly among women of higher standing. But Muslim women in much of Africa, Central Asia and South East Asia regarded a simple, loose fitting head scarf as more than sufficient for the purposes of personal modesty. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, secular nationalists in many countries encouraged the adoption of an even less obtrusive head scarf. As in Kemalist Turkey and Sukarnoist Indonesia, a few even recommended no head covering at all. With the urbanisation and mass education of the 1960s and 1970s, growing numbers of women were also invited out of the home and into the labour force. In West Africa, Central Asia and South East Asia, most women had never been subject to purdah or any other drastic form of seclusion; local village markets were mostly women’s afiairs. With the new education, however, some women began to dream of mobility into high status professions.

The Islamic resurgence had an ambiguous answer to these gender shifts. Many pious women began to wear more encompassing veils, covering, not only the hair and the neck below the chin, but the shoulders and chest as well. The veil became a key symbol ofthe new piety, and was embraced by women even in countries like Indonesia and Turkey where, prior to the resurgence, only a minority had veiled. Almost everywhere, however, the forms and

60  See Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, Mobilizing Islam: Religion, activism, and political change in Egypt (New York, 2002); Quintan Wiktorowicz (ed.), Islamic activism: A social movement theory approach (Bloomington, 2004); Jenny B. White, Islamist mobilization in Turkey:

A study in vernacular politics (Seattle and London, 2002).

61  On the history of debates over women’s roles and female modesty, see Leila Ahmed, Women and gender in Islam: Historical roots of a modern dehate (New Haven, 1992), esp. pp. 144 68.