Concealing to reveal: The informational role of Islamic dress

The marriage market as an example of why piety matters

Finding a suitable spouse is an important social transaction in Muslim societies where marriage is expected and considered a religious obligation (Hoodfar, 1997; Singerman, 1995). Establishing a household often marks entry into adulthood. In Egypt, for example, families are intimately involved in finding and selecting marriage partners because, as Hoodfar (1997: 56) states, ‘marriage is viewed not as a partnership between individuals but rather as an alliance between two families’. Finally, marriage can be extremely expensive, and the groom’s family traditionally bears the costs. Using data from household expenditure surveys, Singerman and Ibrahim (2001: 92) estimate the average cost of marriage in Egypt in the late 1990s was US$5,957 (LE20,194), which was four and a half times larger than GNP per capita (US$1,290). ⁴

Some, but certainly not all, Muslim men and families prefer pious women over less pious women as marriage partners. They expect pious women to have good moral character and exhibit propriety before and after marriage, which safeguards a family’s reputation. Families might be even more eager to identify a woman’s piety if they believe that pre-marital sexual activity is increasing. Families also might expect pious women to be more likely to raise virtuous children. Generally, Muslims might consider pious Muslims trustworthy and honest, important characteristics in a partner for most social interactions. Many Muslims also assume marriages to pious women are less likely to end in divorce than marriages to less pious women, a growing concern as both divorce rates and marriage costs rise. Pious Muslim women might be more likely than less pious women to accept significant restraints on a woman’s right to divorce. ⁵ Pious women might be less likely to seek ‘no-fault’ divorces, considered a loophole around Islamic law, and families might believe that pious wives make husbands less likely to seek divorce.

Significant ethnographic data support the assertion that families highly value female piety on the marriage market. Men and families often say a potential wife should be ‘a clever homemaker and a good mother’, of high moral character, and from a good family (Hoodfar, 1997: 57; Singerman, 1995: 77). Ethnographies emphasize the ideals of feminine modesty and honor. Some families, of course, also inherently value piety itself.

A family’s reputation is often associated with female members’ behavior and affects access to informal networks that provide a wide range of goods and services critical to survival. Singerman (1995) describes how residents of Cairo’s popular quarters rely on reciprocal informal networks of kin and neighbors to secure employment, obtain subsidized goods and services, and access informal savings and rotating credit networks. Rotating credit associations, in particular, are a critical financial resource for poor and lower middle class families.

Reputation affects access to social networks because ‘an important characteristic of the reciprocal flow of goods and services is that it presupposes continuity beyond a single transaction’ (Hoodfar, 1997: 218). Families constantly monitor and judge other families’ morality and propriety, particularly in the highly public marriage market and engagement process. Engagements in the Middle East can be long, and they occasionally end as information about the families is revealed. Information costs for evaluating reputation are often high. Singerman (1995: 85) describes,

long after families have publicly announced the engagement of their children, the moral behavior of the couple and his or her family is constantly evaluated and monitored until the marriage finally occurs. To this end, the family expects its members to act as private investigators.

Kin marriages remain popular in some locales partly because families have better information about relatives than they do about strangers. Kin marriages are lower in both information and financial costs. ⁶ Although the discussion here focuses on the marriage market, the theory should apply more broadly since some people prefer to interact with pious individuals in a wide range of social situations.

Piety as a hidden characteristic

In the language of game theory, piety is a hidden characteristic that is not directly observable. A woman knows her own piety. Potential suitors, however, only have a pre-existing belief about the distribution of pious women in the community, not ex-ante information about any individual woman’s piety. This information asymmetry is particularly acute where interaction between unrelated men and women is socially constrained. In such communities, gossip networks and reputation maintenance are even more valuable. As long as a sufficient number of men and their families prefer pious wives over less pious ones, unmarried pious women benefit if they can reliably transmit information about their piety to suitors. This is difficult, however, since less pious women might want to misrepresent their level of piety. How can uninformed men trust information in the absence of a mechanism to authenticate? ⁷

Biologists and economists have analyzed similar interactions characterized by asymmetric information, with informed individuals on one side of the market and uninformed individuals on the other. Signaling models demonstrate how, under conditions of incomplete information, informed parties can gain a market advantage if they can reliably convey their private information to uninformed parties. ⁸ My central argument rests on a claim that, under certain conditions, wearing clothing associated with Islamic precepts can emerge as a solution to this asymmetric information problem. ⁹

An action credibly transmits information about a characteristic if individuals with that characteristic face a sufficiently lower cost of doing that action than individuals without it. In Spence’s (1973) foundational model of job market signaling, for example, education levels emerge as a credible signal of ability because low-ability workers expend more effort to acquire education than high-ability workers do, therefore requiring higher wages in compensation. This holds even if education does not increase workers’ productivity. Credible signals often consume resources, and some individuals are more willing or able to pay those costs for reasons associated with the characteristic that is valuable to signal.

Headscarves as reliable signals of piety until the 1970s

Late 19th and early 20th century colonial authorities and nationalist reformers in the Middle East associated the headscarf and Islamic dress with backwardness and anti-modernization. In 1923, Huda Shaarawi famously removed her veil in a Cairo train station after returning from an international feminist conference in Rome, a seminal moment in early 20th century Egyptian and Arab feminism. Reformers in the 1920s and 1930s increasingly attacked traditional female dress as a symbol of oppressive traditions. Although these feminists initially impacted mostly upper class women, their activities and writings influenced broad discourses and public attitudes on the headscarf, veil, and Islamic dress. Marxist and other secular groups pressured female members to remove head coverings and encouraged their abolition in wider society.

Some governments, including Republican Turkey and briefly Iran, banned headscarves. Throughout the 1930s and until his ouster in 1941, Reza Shah led an anti-headscarf offensive, believing that a nation had to look Western in order to be modern. Wearing the Iranian chador became a criminal offense in 1936, and police tore headscarves off women in the streets. ¹⁰ Ministries refused to employ or teach covered women. Although formal bans were rare in the Arab world, reformers depicted the headscarf as emblematic of a traditional mindset that retards national development. In most Middle Eastern states, headscarves were widely associated with backwardness and anti-nationalist sentiment by the 1940s. ¹¹ Bureaucracies in the Arab republics considered covered women as backward, uneducated, and unsophisticated. Wearing a headscarf could be occupationally and socially limiting for both the woman and her husband. A covered woman might have found it difficult to find a suitable job. A man working for the state might have been embarrassed to be seen in public with a covered wife. Over time, fewer women covered. Fernea (2002: 151) claims that until recently, ‘Walking on the streets of Turkey, Lebanon, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Jordan, and Egypt, a visitor would find a veiled [wearing hijab] woman the exception rather than the rule’. ¹² What differentiated those ‘exceptional’ covered women from the uncovered others?

Only pious women were willing to bear the social stigma and legal costs of wearing headscarves under such conditions. Their piety provided psychological benefit for fulfilling what they saw as a religious obligation, even at the cost of social ridicule and poor treatment from state bureaucracies. Some pious women may have perceived themselves as preservers of Islamic tradition and values in the face of secular modernism and nationalism. Social and state sanctioning was insufficient to induce truly pious women to abandon the headscarf, but less pious women were more susceptible to such pressures and went uncovered.

In game theoretic terms, a separating equilibrium existed. By wearing different clothes, pious women and less pious women sent different signals, allowing men to reliably identify their piety. Headscarves and Islamic clothing are a credible signal of piety when pious women have a sufficiently lower cost for wearing them than less pious women have for wearing them. ¹³ Under such conditions, concealing reveals.

Despite the same Quranic justifications ¹⁴ and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims in different locales have long held different notions of proper Islamic dress, which can change over time. Analyzing dress as signals of piety might account for such variation: communities coordinate on styles of Islamic dress to signal piety in response to differences within each community in the marginal costs of wearing Islamic dress for pious women and less pious women.

‘Re-veiling’

Millions of women in the Middle East adopted the headscarf in the 1970s and 1980s in what has become known as the ‘re-veiling’ phenomenon. Few studies based on systematic data exist (Hessini, 1994; Macleod, 1991; Williams, 1979; Zuhur, 1992), but the widespread resurgence of the headscarf and Islamic dress throughout the Muslim world is a widely acknowledged stylized fact. At the beginning of Macleod’s ethnographic study of lower middle class Cairene women in 1983, about one-third covered. By 1988, she found that ‘about three-quarters of the female workers of this study had adopted some version of Islamic dress. The higab in some form seems to be approaching the norm for these women’ (Macleod, 1991: 105). ¹⁵ Of Zuhur’s (1992) 50 Cairene interviewees in 1988, 25 wore the headscarf and six wore veils. The percentage of Muslim women wearing headscarves and Islamic dress increased in almost all Middle Eastern urban areas in this period, except for the few places where it was already the norm or required.

Explaining re-veiling – socioeconomic factors and harassment

Most of the considerable literature on the ‘re-veiling’ phenomenon concludes that previously uncovered Muslim women who adopted headscarves and simple Islamic dress did so chiefly for economic, political, and social reasons instead of religious ones. Many authors link socioeconomic changes in Arab societies to the voluntary adoption of such dress. As lower class and lower middle class women increasingly entered the formal workforce, they often adopted Islamic dress to appease male family members concerned about their interaction with men in the workplace, which Macleod (1991) memorably described as ‘accommodating protest’. The use of Islamic dress to minimize harassment from unrelated men and facilitate access in the male-dominated public sphere is a common theme in ethnographies, indigenous films, and documentaries. Since men fear social (and divine!) sanctioning if they harass a pious Muslim woman, less pious women working outside the house might mimic the dress of pious ones in an attempt to minimize harassment. Anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that harassment of women in headscarves and simple Islamic dress has increased. ¹⁶ The signaling approach accounts for this – harassers now know that many covered women are not really pious and are therefore more willing to verbally harass, approach, or grope women wearing headscarves (but not women with face veils). If harassers thought piety was increasing in society and all covered women were pious, they should not be more willing to hassle covered women.

Some observers see the adoption of Islamic dress as a response by lower middle class women to diminished family resources. Islamic clothing can reduce the cost of attire for working women because they do not need outfits for each workday or spend as much time and money on hair products. Instead, they can wear clean, inexpensive, casual clothes underneath the same over-garment; only family members see the clothing underneath.

Explaining re-veiling – protest

Headscarves and Islamic dress also became forms of protest against globalization, the perceived hegemony of Western cultural values, the spread of materialism, the commodification of women’s bodies, existing Arab regimes, and pan-Arab secular nationalism (especially after Israel’s military victory in 1967 and Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel in 1979). Headscarves became associated with popular support for anti-colonial and revolutionary movements, such as in Iran, Algeria, and the Palestinian Intifadahs (on Algeria, see Fanon, 1965: 61–62). In pre-Revolution Iran, ‘wearing a chador symbolized that a woman was anti-Shah, anti-imperialism, anti-corruption, anti-moral decadence and against capitalism’s exploitation of the “modern consumer woman”. Secular women donned the chador in street demonstrations to show their anti-Shah solidarity’ (Bullock, 1999: 151). During the first Palestinian Intifadah, ‘the veil became a patriotic obligation, a uniform proclaiming that its wearer supported the Intifada’ (Bucaille, 2004: 23.) Other scholars view students’ adoption of the veil as a form of generational assertiveness and protest against their parents’ lifestyle (El Guindi, 1999). Popular preachers, such as Amr Khalid of Egypt, describe the headscarf as a form of cultural authenticity. For many, the headscarf and Islamic dress came to be seen as a form of protection for individuals, society, and the Muslim community as a whole. Negative connotations and social stigmas associated with wearing a headscarf declined considerably after 1967. Most state bureaucracies gradually reduced or eliminated penalties for women in headscarves either because public opinion forced them to allow more conservative dress or as a deliberate state strategy.

Explaining re-veiling – selective incentives from Islamist movements

Islamist organizations and movements commonly offered women incentives – both positive and negative – to adopt headscarves and Islamic dress. The Muslim Brothers in Egypt and elsewhere, for example, operated buses for women dressed in what they consider appropriate attire. Islamist student groups reserved desired seats in university lecture halls for covered women, regardless of their affiliation with the group. Adopting Islamic dress makes it easier for a woman to continue her education and increase family income when Islamist societies and organizations subsidize education, employment, and healthcare (Clark, 2004; Sullivan, 1994). Jordanians, for example, widely assume that Islamic hospitals and clinics only provide jobs and healthcare to covered women (author’s interviews in Jordan 2004–2005; also see Clark, 2004). Although Islamist groups hope to inculcate a wide range of Islamic morals and behaviors, they may economize information-gathering by conditioning the provision of goods and services for a family on how its women dress. Less pious women clearly garner greater selective benefits now than in previous decades if they cover.

Members of Islamist movements sometimes pressure women in their families and neighborhoods to wear basic Islamic dress. They, of course, have also convinced some women that wearing Islamic dress is a religious obligation that should not be ignored. El Guindi (1999) has argued that women in the Islamist movement use a standardized form of Islamic dress to mark themselves as members.

Explaining re-veiling – intimidation by Islamic states and Islamists

In a few places, vice and virtue squads intimidated women into covering their hair and adopting Islamic dress. Iranian women were required to wear headscarves and Islamic dress soon after the 1979 Islamic revolution. ¹⁷ Komitahs enforced a standardized ‘correct’ form of Islamic dress through public scolding, beatings, and imprisonment. ¹⁸ Graffiti in Tehran still states ‘death to the improperly veiled woman’ and ‘the improperly veiled woman is a stain on the Islamic Republic of Iran and must be eliminated immediately’ (Shirazi, 2001: 107–108). A particular image or style of Islamic dress is often enforced. The Iranian government’s Agency for the Fight Against Social Corruption/Agency for Public Education issues posters showing the proper ‘pattern of Islamic hijab’, dictating type of covering, color (preferably black, dark blue, brown, or dark gray), shoes (mandatory low heels), and acceptable tightness of clothing (Shirazi, 2001: 105–106). The Taliban in Afghanistan forced women to wear full-face and body veils. Saudi Arabia has long required women to cover, and the government empowers ‘religious police’ to enforce such laws.

Some Islamists used physical intimidation to force women to adhere to Islamic dress, justifying their behavior with the frequent Quranic obligation to ‘command right and forbid wrong’ and claiming that uncovered women harm public morality. Bucaille (2004: 23) describes how vigilantes forced women to cover in Gaza during the first Intifadah:

before long, any woman walking bareheaded in the streets of Gaza was liable to be insulted or stoned. Brutal intimidation quickly persuaded those few who resisted that they would have to obey the laws laid down by militant gunmen, who had no political training or experience but retained a monopoly on physical coercion. [Consequently,] only a few committed women in Gaza, one year into the intifada, continued not to wear a headscarf. (Hammami, 1990: 24)

Some women in Gaza would don a headscarf and over-garment to travel between places, but remove them when in a place where unknown people would not threaten them. In post-Saddam Iraq, Islamist militias coerced women in many Arab-majority areas to adopt headscarves and conservative clothing. In late 2003, a prominent local Islamist militia in Basra hung signs around the city stating that ‘a woman who reveals one strand of hair is from the family of Yazid’. ¹⁹ Many Basrawi women who had never previously worn a headscarf adopted it after being harassed by vigilante enforcers of ‘Islamic’ morals or hearing accounts of attacks on uncovered women.

Intimidation by vigilantes or state enforcement should lead most uncovered women to adopt the minimal level of Islamic dress needed to avoid harassment, which is often a basic headscarf and loose-fitting clothing. Being forced to cover, however, cannot explain why women would adopt more conservative clothing styles than necessary, such as the face veil.

Explaining re-veiling – fashion

Once a sufficient number of women in a community adopted headscarves and Islamic dress, a fashion ‘tip’ often occurred. One of Macleod’s (1991: 112–113) respondents, explaining the rapid spread of the headscarf in Egypt, expressed this idea,

I don’t know why fashions change in this way, no one knows why; one day everyone wears dresses and even pants. I even wore a bathing suit when I went to the beach at Alexandria one time. Then, suddenly we are all wearing this on our hair!

This view is common. About 60% of Macleod’s 58 respondents say they simply did not know why female clothing had changed, but that they are participating in the movement to cover, whatever its fundamental causes. Many women adopted the headscarf simply because so many other women had; 56% of them directly associated the hijab with dictates of fashion. One stated, ‘Since everyone is becoming muhaggaba, it has become the thing to do’ (Macleod, 1991: 112). When everyone wears the headscarf, no one wants to stand out by not wearing it. Islamic fashion shows are now common in Arab cities and broadcast on satellite television. Boutiques sell fashionable hijabs and Islamic clothes.

Explaining re-veiling – mimicry

Some less pious women might deliberately mimic being pious, either to minimize harassment or get a good husband. Macleod (1991: 110) found that, ‘Non-veiling women sometimes commented that women wearing the higab were especially religious, but they just as often claimed that the muhaggaba just wanted to be considered religious, although she was really no different from everyone else’. ²⁰ Women whose reputations had been sullied by dating or gossip might be reborn socially if they adopt a headscarf. Many women believe that relatively rich and desirable bachelors returning from working in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf prefer covered women after living in conservative environments.

The existing literature overwhelmingly concludes that the spread of the headscarf and Islamic dress resulted from utilitarian considerations, not newly-discovered piety. ²¹ Macleod (1991: 110) found that,

only a very small percentage of these veiling [adopting a hijab] women seem to be actually turning to religion in a genuine way; women who read the Qur’an on their own, attend meetings for women at their local mosques, pray daily the prescribed five times, or concern themselves with fulfilling their other religious duties remain a tiny minority.

When newly covered women are asked why they have not become more observant, despite access to religious knowledge, ‘they reply that they are too busy, too involved with their duties at home and at work, or even that they are just not interested’ (Macleod, 1991: 110). Only a small number of the newly covered women interviewed by Macleod discussed the headscarf as a religious form of dress, a demonstration of true piety.

How ‘re-veiling’ undermined the piety of the hijab

Women in some places adopted Islamic dress as a form of protest; others did so under familial pressure. Islamist movements encouraged or ‘bribed’ some women into adopting the headscarf. Elsewhere, women were intimidated into covering. The stigma of wearing a headscarf largely disappeared, and state bureaucracies tolerated more conservative dress. In general, these diverse economic, political, and social factors led many less pious women to adopt headscarves and Islamic dress in the 1970s and 1980s. These factors, one way or another, decreased the costs of wearing such clothes, raised the costs of not doing so, or provided benefits for doing so. The difference between the marginal costs of wearing a headscarf for pious women versus less pious women decreased. In the language of game theory, a pooling equilibrium occurred, in which both pious and a sufficiently large number of less pious women wore headscarves and Islamic dress. Observers could no longer reliably infer a woman’s piety from her clothing.

The devaluation of the hijab as a signal of piety changed the way Muslims talk about the headscarf. Many Muslims, both young and old, lament that ‘the hijab has lost its meaning’. The Arabic word for a woman wearing a headscarf, muhajjaba, no longer connotes piety and modesty like it did a few decades ago. Arabs today are more likely to use the word multazima (literally, ‘committed’) to refer to a pious woman. ²² A muhajjaba is not necessarily multazima. Pious women and Islamist literature increasingly emphasize that what really matters is what is inside a woman’s heart, not if her hair is covered (Bullock, 2004: 77–78; Mahmood, 2004: 31). Hajja Nur, one of Mahmood’s (2004: 50–51) interviewees, states,

what we have to do is to educate Muslim women that it is not enough to wear the veil [headscarf], but that the veil must also lead us to behave in a truly modest manner in our daily lives, a challenge that far exceeds the simple act of donning the veil.

Young unmarried men now commonly say that headscarves tell them nothing about a woman’s piety. As the headscarf came to symbolize many different things, it lost its definite association with piety. A woman now wears the hijab for a number of reasons; its social meaning is ambiguous.

Pious women respond

As headscarves proliferated among less pious women, pious women initially altered how they wore headscarves. They began to advocate stringent ways of tying and wearing the headscarf, often to minimize the likelihood of any hair showing. Complete covering of the neck became common. A distinction arose between ‘good hijab’ and ‘bad hijab’. Consistent with the observable implications of the theory, the criteria for ‘good hijab’ are stricter than what was common a few decades ago. Changes in how to wear hijab were insufficient, however, since less pious women seeking to mimic pious women could easily and cheaply copy these styles. ²⁸ These innovations in clothing styles can be thought of as pious women searching for styles unpalatable to less pious women.

Pious women moved to wearing plain and longer headscarves tightly around their neck and head. These headscarves often reach far down the back. Many wear a slightly visible skullcap under the hijab to demonstrate how critical it is to them not to show any hair, even inadvertently. The khimar, a long piece of cloth that drapes over a woman’s torso and arms, has surprisingly become popular among pious Cairene women. Less pious women are less willing than pious women to adopt the khimar because of its rural associations, the restrictions it places on movements (especially of a woman’s arms), and the perspiration it causes in hot weather. Previously considered the dress of newly urbanized peasants, the khimar appears to be increasingly common across social classes in Cairo.

Some pious women have adopted a full-face veil, or niqab. ²⁹ These are almost always a black or white cloth that covers a woman’s face. A slit often, but not always, reveals her eyes. Mahmood (2004: 43) interviewed a number of Egyptian munaqqabat and found,

Women who wear the niqab understood their practice to accord with a strict interpretation of Islamic edicts on female modesty, and often see themselves as more virtuous than women who wear the khimar (the veil that covers the head and torso) or the hijab (headscarf).

The social costs of wearing a niqab in most countries remain high such that only pious women bear them. Shopkeepers might consider munaqqabat a nuisance if their presence deters other shoppers or interactions with male employees are awkward. Many government institutions ban or informally punish munaqqabat. Getting a permit or driver’s license, for example, might require extra time-consuming security checks. A 1994 Egyptian Ministry of Education regulation prohibits students wearing the niqab from attending university. ³⁰ Some private institutions also punish munaqqabat; the American University in Cairo banned them from its campus and library in 2000. The Egyptian government justifies the niqab ban for security reasons and to prevent cheating on exams. Social stigmas are still attached to wearing niqab; some gossip that unattractive women adopt the full-face veil to hide their ugliness. A new form of veiling is the boushiya, which typically consists of a see-through layer or two of cloth draped over the head and face. A recent survey of Middle Eastern face veils states that, ‘this type of face veil is a twentieth century development, typical in the first place for urban Arab circles. As a face veil it is a unique type, not known among traditional forms elsewhere in the Islamic world’ (Vogelsang-Eastwood and Vogelsang, 2008: 222).

The signaling argument yields a number of observable implications that future anthropological studies might evaluate: (1) Uncovered women (presumably less pious) should only adopt hijab, not niqab; (2) The spread of the hijab in a community should precede the spread of the niqab; ³¹ (3) Unmarried women should be more likely to adopt niqab than married women. Confidence in the theory, or at least its relevance for the marriage market, would be weakened if women were more likely to adopt the niqab after marriage than before it; (4) Women should see their marriage prospects improve after adopting the niqab; munaqqabat should not remain unmarried for long. The signaling theory of piety cannot account for women who adopt face veils and ever more austere clothing styles after marriage; another explanation is necessary to account for those individuals.

In addition to face veils, pious women have adopted other clothing restrictions to credibly signal their piety. A virtual uniform for pious women has evolved that includes an ankle-length over-garment called a jelbab. In the early 1980s, Rugh describes the ‘standard fundamentalist’ dress style as flowing ‘from the shoulder to the ankle, usually in one somber color, concealing the outlines of the figure as completely as possible. The head covering surrounds the face like a nun’s cowl and falls loosely to the shoulder’ (1984: 230).

When less pious women also adopted jelbab (perhaps to limit clothing costs or mimic pious women), pious women limited themselves to drab colors, such as black, brown, dark blue, and dark green. Further restrictions include plain shoes and long sleeves that conceal wrists. Some women now wear gloves. The unwillingness of less pious women to adopt these increasingly stringent restrictions makes them credible signals. ³² Unlike a few decades ago, it is now common to see local women on university campuses in the Levant or North Africa dressed head-to-toe in black without an inch of skin showing. These styles are not traditional to those areas.

Escalations in clothing restrictions and increasing stringency can be seen as attempts by pious women to find styles that less pious women will find too burdensome to emulate. Once this threshold is reached, pious women should not seek further clothing restrictions. Clothing styles should stabilize over time, and some intermediate styles should die out. ³³ The escalation in the strictness of head coverings and dress resembles runaway evolutionary processes studied by biologists, such as peacocks’ tails, and applied by sociologists to social patterns (Boyd and Richerson, 1985).

Even in officially secular Turkey, the headscarf and Islamic dress spread to such an extent that pious women resorted to a particular style of covering and an accompanying lifestyle after 1983 (Göle, 1996; White, 2002, 2005). Called tesettur, this style consists of an oversized headscarf with matching tailored coat or suit. But, unlike other countries where drab colors prevail, tesettur colors, patterns, and styles ‘respond to tastes in fashion and are continually transformed’ (White, 2005: 124). Pious women in Turkey do not need to adopt as many restrictions as pious women in other countries because the headscarf has not spread as extensively in Turkey as it has elsewhere.

Post-revolution Tunisia will likely offer a test of the theory. Law Number 108 of 1981 banned Tunisian women from wearing niqab or hijab inside state-run bodies, including schools. Until 2011, niqabs were unnecessary to credibly signal piety in Tunisia and consequently were extremely rare; pious women could signal their piety by wearing a simple hijab. If bans on hijab are lifted or unenforced, as Islamist and many civil society groups propose, the signaling approach suggests that many less pious Tunisian women would adopt the hijab. Already covered Tunisian women would then soon respond by adopting more conservative clothes, and the niqab would become common among (and only among) Tunisian women who covered before the changes.

The frequency of conservative dress in any area should reflect the distribution of piety and level of demand for identifying pious women. Since those vary across places, the spatial distribution of conservative dress should vary. Muslim societies should only converge on similar distributions if those factors were the same across space.

Do Islamists encourage the niqab?

Three alternative explanations for the rise of the niqab imply that its adoption is independent from the spread of the hijab. Many journalists mistakenly believe that Islamist movements encourage the spread of the niqab. Although political Islamists provide selective incentives for women to adopt headscarves and encourage women to adopt the headscarf and simple Islamic dress, they rarely advocate face veils. The Muslim Brothers and other mainstream Islamist movements, for example, are deeply committed to spreading the hijab but are internally divided on the niqab. Most contemporary Islamic scholars believe that wearing a hijab is a religious obligation but that the niqab is not, although some say the niqab is recommended on precautionary grounds. ³⁴ A group of Islamic scholars from al-Azhar University in Egypt summarized the mainstream view in 2008 when they declared that the headscarf is required but that the niqab is a custom and not a form of worship (al-niqab ‘ada wa-laysa ‘ibada). Most knowledgeable political Islamists might say that wearing the headscarf is obligatory (wajib or fard) but the niqab is recommended (mustahabb or sunnah). Most leaders of the Muslim Brothers do not advocate for the face veil. For example, Ishaq Farhan, the founding Secretary-General of the Jordanian Islamic Action Front Party, encouraged munaqqabat students to rethink their position when he was President of the Islamist-oriented al-Zarqa Private University. ³⁵

Many critics of the niqab attribute its spread to the purported spread of ‘Wahhabi’ or Salafi schools of thought via satellite television and the return of unmarried men who worked in the oil-rich Gulf. Exposure to preaching and propaganda from Saudi Arabia, it is claimed, changes Muslims’ views on Islam and makes them more ‘fundamentalist’. Some women and families have probably adopted the niqab and more conservative behaviors after being exposed to Salafi outreach, but there are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to question how much this can explain. This supposed preference change after visiting Saudi Arabia has not been empirically demonstrated. In contrast, Clingingsmith et al. (2009) find that participation in Hajj, and the associated exposure to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, leads Pakistanis to adopt more favorable attitudes towards women’s equality.

The signaling argument developed here implies that pious Muslim women turn to fundamentalist justifications for the niqab after they need to find new ways to demonstrate their piety. Engaging in Salafi discourse and lessons is often time-consuming and tedious; it typically entails study of debates and traditions from Islamic history on how to conduct oneself on a daily basis (e.g., how to brush one’s teeth; how to enter a bathroom). Public expressions of piety might be increasingly ‘political’ if such expressions help pious women distinguish themselves from less pious women. Spending hours listening to tedious religious-political sermons might be more costly for less pious women.

Finally, not all Salafis demand women cover their face. Many prominent Salafi scholars agree with the mainstream view that the headscarf is obligatory while the face veil is recommended. For example, the late Sheikh Mohammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani, one of the most influential Salafi scholars and teachers of the 20th century, believed Islam allows the display of a woman’s face and hands (Al-Albani, 2002). Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, more likely to be associated with Muslim Brothers than Salafis, advocates the same position (Al-Qaradawi, 1994).

If munaqqabat actively encourage other women to adopt the niqab, our confidence in the signaling theory should decrease. Such behavior suggests munaqqabat do not view less pious women wearing niqab as a challenge to what the niqab means. If they thought it was a religious obligation, they should encourage all women (including less pious women) to adopt it. Anecdotal evidence from newspapers and Arabic blogs suggests that munaqqabat see the niqab as precautionary and recommended, not required.

Time-series data, if available, would help assess various explanations for the spread of the niqab. Confidence in the signaling theory explanation would increase if niqabs only proliferate in a country after many previously uncovered women adopt hijab. It should be unrelated to Wahhabi or Salafist funding of mosques and Islamic institutions in a country, unless those institutions provide benefits to women who wear hijabs. Furthermore, the timing of the niqab’s spread should be independent across countries, controlling for factors that lead uncovered women to adopt hijab. Changes in one marriage market should not affect other marriage markets. If the boundaries of ‘marriage markets’ were identifiable, variation between cities, neighborhoods, or tribes could be examined. Finally, the influx of tens of thousands of unmarried covered Iraqi Shiite women to Jordan and Syria since 2004 should not induce already covered Sunni women in those countries to adopt more conservative styles, since marriages between Iraqi Shiite women and Jordanian or Syrian Sunni men are uncommon.

The rise of non-clothing signals of piety

Pious women have also adopted non-clothing restrictions and behaviors to demonstrate their piety. Many minimize ornamentation, refuse to pluck eyebrows, and forgo makeup. Religion supposedly justifies such restrictions. Many pious women refuse to wear fingernail polish, claiming that polish impedes the obligatory ritual washing before prayers. These behaviors spread among pious women after less pious women began to cover.

A large international market for religious clothing and beauty products has emerged. The conspicuous consumption of goods explicitly permissible (halal) under Islamic law, such as beauty products and understated jewelry, might demonstrate an individual’s piety. The expansion of the supply of such products, however, reduced their cost. When the cost of a halal product is sufficiently low or close to that of its non-halal alternative, less pious women will begin to consume it. The halal product’s usefulness as a credible signal of piety should disappear. Islamic literature – cassette sermons, pamphlets, and books – rapidly expanded in recent years due to technological change and opening economies. Displaying religious paraphernalia and playing Quranic recitation no longer sufficiently signals piety because the monetary and social costs are low. ³⁶ Islamic ‘self-help’ books, such as Don’t Be Sad (la tahazan), can be bestsellers. The spread of explicitly Islamic products tells us more about changes in economic openness than it does about changes in ideology or piety.

Instead, pious women rely on time-consuming demonstrations of knowledge and public behaviors to demonstrate piety. If behaviors and knowledge cost time instead of money, less pious individuals are less likely to adopt them or successfully mimic. Pious women, for example, study and emulate the ‘proper’ Islamic way of doing almost everything. Classes and pamphlets outline ‘the’ Islamic way to dress, interact with others, marry, engage in intercourse, raise children, breastfeed, cook, wash, etc. Pious women’s reliance on public expressions of Islamic behavior to signal piety contributes to the increasing popularity of scriptural and time-intensive Salafism, at the expense of Sufism and other strains of Sunni Islam.

‘Fundamentalist’ discourses on proper Islamic modesty have rapidly spread in the Arab world. Many pious women refuse to shake unrelated men’s hands, and sometimes refuse to make eye contact or speak to them unless necessary. ³⁷ Singerman (1995: 80) relates the story of a young man looking for a wife who approached the family of an unmarried woman in his building because ‘her upbringing had been very strict [and he] had never seen her despite living in the same building for years’. The young man’s family considered her seclusion and the traditional values of her family a sign of her good character. Shortly after the tea when the son met the woman briefly, the two neighbors were married.

Women’s mosque movements as public expressions of piety

Pious women now engage in new activities to publicly demonstrate their piety. Since the late 1970s, women in a number of Middle Eastern cities have called for a public space in mosques to pray and study religion. This was a new development, and it quickly spread. Mahmood (2004: 2) states ‘The burgeoning of this movement marks the first time in Egyptian history that such a large number of women have held public meetings in mosques to teach one another Islamic doctrine’. Mahmood (2004: 3–4) found,

By the time I began my fieldwork in 1995 [in Cairo], this movement had become so popular that there were hardly any neighborhoods in this city of 11 million inhabitants that did not offer some form of religious lessons for women.

The phenomenon is not limited to Egypt. Nageeb (2004: 176) quotes a migrant Sudanese returning to his country: ‘Women’s attendance at mosques is a new phenomenon. Mosques were always for men. Now you see young and old women coming in and out of the mosque at different times of the day’. ³⁸ As in Mahmood’s Cairo, Nageeb found that most Sudanese women’s religious groups were residentially based and focused on Quranic study and discussions of Islamic approaches to social issues. Spending time studying in local mosques (where reputations can be created and maintained) is a costly way to publicly demonstrate piety that is difficult to mimic. Mahmood (2004: 31) says,

In comparison with other currents within the Islamic Revival, the mosque movement is unique in the extraordinary degree of pedagogical emphasis it places on outward markers of religiosity – ritual practices, styles of comporting oneself, dress, and so on. The participants in the mosque movement regard these practices as the necessary and ineluctable means for realizing the form of religiosity they are cultivating. For the mosque participants, it is the various movements of the body that comprise the material substance of the ethical domain.

These mosque circles often set local standards for behaviors that demonstrate piety and which Islamic sources should be used to justify those behaviors. This reduces search costs for pious women by generating common knowledge; they know what to do to be seen by others as pious. Mahmood (2004: 47–48) states,

The piety activities seek to imbue each of the various spheres of contemporary life with a regulative sensibility that takes its cue from the Islamic theological corpus rather than from modern secular elites. In this sense, the mosque movement’s goal is to introduce a common set of shared norms or standards by which one is to judge one’s own conduct, whether in the context of employment, education, domestic life, or other social activities.

Anthropologists have studied similar women’s mosque movements in other countries, such as Lebanon and Syria (Böttcher, 2002; Deeb, 2006). Future ethnographies might reveal the ratio of married to unmarried women participating in mosque movements. Confidence in the signaling approach would increase if unmarried women were found to be more likely to participate than married women, who still might participate to demonstrate piety for access to social networks.

We should expect women to look for these non-clothing signals, such as making donations or attending pietistic meetings, if bundling up in clothes is either insufficiently onerous for less pious women or particularly onerous for both pious and less pious women. In the former case, less pious women could mimic such styles so pious women will search for behaviors that less pious women will not engage in. In the latter case, pious women, if they have the ability to make such choices, will avoid the overly onerous clothes and similarly seek non-clothing signals. This counter-intuitively implies that female mosque movements and the most conservative clothing styles (e.g., niqabs, head-to-toe covering) are substitutes instead of complements.

Like all clothes, Islamic clothing can signal wealth, regional origin, and class (Rugh, 1986). ³⁹ The initial ‘re-veiling’ movement of the 1970s and 1980s did not undermine this additional function of dress; wealthy women purchase designer headscarves and tailored jelbabs. Clothing can signal any combination of piety and wealth. Women in Saudi Arabia, for example, signal wealth in numerous ways (e.g. embroidery, shoes, purses), despite requirements to wear abayas and niqabs.