Ellen McLarney

Introduction: Muslim Women, Consumer Capitalism, and the Islamic Culture Industry

This special issue of JMEWS examines the intersection of consumer capitalism, women, and the Islamic culture industry. While capitalist forms of economic development have long been part of Muslim societies in various (and often contested) forms (Gran 1979), in the last decade there has been a marked change in both the substance and the scale of the relationship between Islam and capitalism.1 Islamic movements and neoliberal consumer capitalism have arisen simultaneously in many settings, leading to newly articulated and contextually different manifestations of “Islamic capitalism” (Buğra 1998; Hefner 1998; Öniş 2000; Tuğal 2002; 2009; Kuran 2004; Adas 2006). A new market for commodities, media, advertising, businesses, and consumer segments identified as “Islamic” has helped in the creation of a new culture industry.2 While by no means uniform, this Islamic culture industry is increasingly central to the production, packaging, and dissemination of religious products: from traditional print media, cassette sermons, and online fatwas (Bunt 2009; Hirschkind 2009) to the fashionable hijab (Kılıçbay and Binark 2002; Balasescu 2003; 2007; Akou 2007; Lewis 2007; Moors 2007; Sandıkcı and Ger 2007; Schulz 2007; Tarlo 2007; Gökarıksel and Secor 2009). Islamic knowledge, performances, and selves are more and more mediated through increasingly commodified cultural forms and spaces. From memoirs, novels, lifestyle magazines, and newspapers to television channels; from religious education centers and halal markets and restaurants (where food is prepared according to Islamic rules) to holiday resorts and posh gated communities, Muslim identities are constructed

The Burqa in Vogue Fashioning Afghanistan

In the months leading up to 9/11 and in its immediate aftermath, the media demonized the burqa as “Afghanistan’s veil of terror,” a tool of extremists and the epitome of political and sexual repression. Around the time of Afghanistan’s presidential and parliamentary elections in 2004 and 2005, there were noticeable shifts in apprehensions of the burqa in the Western media. In Fall 2006, burqa images even appeared on the Paris runways and in Vogue fashion spreads. This article charts the burqa’s evolution from “shock to chic” and the process of its commodification in the Western media. The article specifically analyzes Vogue magazine’s appropriation of the burqa as haute couture.

The islamic public sphere and the discipline of adab

Recently, there have been many compelling new theories of the emergence of an “Islamic public sphere.” Few studies, however, have examined the role of literary writing in contributing to its emergence, even though such writing was critical to the intellectual elite’s shift toward Islamic subjectsinmid-20thcenturyEgypt.Inaddition,littleofthisscholarshiphasexaminedthegendered nature of this public sphere in any depth, though gendered rights, roles, and responsibilities were among the most hotly contested debates in public discourses on religion. This article looks at how literary writing not only shaped particular interpretations of gendered relationships in Islam but also developed hermeneutical techniques for reinterpreting religious sources. It specifically examines the work of Egyptian literary scholar and Islamic thinker Bint al-Shati and how her writings helped define the nature of the family, gender relations, and the private sphere in Islamic public discourse.

The private is political: Women and family in intellectual Islam

In Hiba Ra’uf’s Woman and Political Work, she argues that the family is the basic political unit of the Islamic community or nation (the umma). Her thesis is both feminist and Islamist, as she argues that the ‘private is political’. By drawing analogies between family and umma, family and caliphate, the personal and the political, the private and public, Ra’uf seeks to dismantle the oppositions of secular society, to challenge the division of society into discrete spheres. This entails an implicit challenge to the secular state, but effected through the politics of the family. An Islamic family, she argues, is a powerful site for the transformation of socio-political institutions; a politics of the microcosmic with macrocosmic ramifications, effected through the very embodiment and practice of an Islamic ethos at a grassroots, capillary level. However, though Ra’uf contests liberal secularism’s division of spheres with feminist and Islamist critical methods, she reproduces some of its fundamental assumptions about the nature of the family: as the domain of religion, in opposition to the secular state; as rooting community, in opposition to the individualism of the citizen; as an ethics grounded in affect; and as an essentially feminine world. In making the family the sphere of Islamic politics, Ra’uf re-enacts secularism’s division of spheres, sacralizing the affective bonds of intimate relations and making the family the domain of religion. Furthermore, by emphasizing the family as the domain of women’s political work, she reinscribes the family as a feminine sphere, so that woman’s vocation is familial, as is her ethical disposition.

Women’s Rights and Equality: Egyptian Constitutional Law

This chapter charts the genealogy of the language of “women’s equality” in successive Egyptian constitutions, culminating in the 2012 constitution in which the liberal language of women’s rights and equality converged with Islamist political aims. In the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, the new Egypt converted the fervor of revolutionary change into the civil liberties of a new constitutionalism. This partly involved the re-institution, or re-constitution, of the existing power structure, even with the guarantee of new liberties for women. This sexual contract is the counterpart of citizenship’s social contract in a liberal secular order. Its origins lie in secular state politics (both colonial and post-colonial) that depend heavily on religion for its legitimization, religion that is said to reside in the family, in women’s bodies, in the sexual contract, and in the inviolability of private property.