Revealing reveiling

Increased use of Islamic dress among the women of the Middle East the more visible signs of increased religiosity and often of allegiance to Islamist organizations. In Revealing Reveiling Sherifa Zuhur examines aspects of this phenomenon and proposed explanations for its popularity in Egypt in the early 1990s. In prominent Muslim countries such as Turkey, Iran and Morocco political leaders escorted unveiled female family members in public in order to influence women to abandon traditional dress. In Egypt, political leaders never linked women's dress to nationalist sentiment or political ideology, but dress patterns nevertheless acquired political or ideological connotations. Dress, especially women's dress, has been continually utilized as an outward manifestation of ideological leanings. As Zuhur shows, dress patterns tap into a deeply held sense of self-identity, but are also responsive to outside factors such as occupation, education, residence, income, group identification and religiosity. In this book, Zuhur sets herself the task of examining the presentation and reception of the multiple avenues women now possess to express their identities by focusing upon the Islamist expectations for women in the 1980s and 1990s (p. 1). -- From https://www.jstor.org (Oct. 18, 2016).