Articulating displacement: Sierra Leonean Muslim dress practice and the aesthetics of negotiation

Mosque encounters

On any given Friday, men and women dressed in various states of Muslim attire can be seen walking on Massachusetts Avenue headed for noon prayer at the Islamic Center of Washington, DC. Located in the heart of Embassy Row, the center was built in the 1950s in response to the arrival of peoples from the Muslim world to the District of Columbia. Initially meant to cater solely to the diplomatic community, the center, at present, hosts Muslims from all walks of life. Taxi drivers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, corporate executives, homemakers, and diplomats attend services there and seek religious instruction from an institution they consider a principle player in local and global Islamic networks (Grewal, 2014). Unlike other Islamic centers in the United States organized around ethnic affiliation, this congregation's diplomatic mission fosters the national, cultural, and sectarian differences of its members. However, despite a unique diversity that cuts across race, class, and regional variation, the official position of the director/imam of the mosque, and many who attend services at the center, is that Islam is a coherent closed system of belief with stable and uniform practices. For congregants who seek answers to vexing questions about who may or may not be a worthy member of the global ummah, ² encounters with orthodox and textual interpretations that challenge their understanding of social and religious orders compel them to consciously interrogate personal Islamic piety, religiosity, and practices (Kuppinger, 2015; Grewal, 2014). However, the troubling task of deciding which new interpretations of lifestyle and religious practice to accept or reject is not without problems. Congregants who find themselves involved in debates about religious reorientations and transformations of practices and knowledge generated by global Islamic discourses are confronted with pious self-making strategies that counter their understanding of what Lara Deeb (2006: 49) has called an ‘authenticated Islam’. Thus for Sierra Leonean Muslims the negotiation of pious subjectivities unfolds in the context of differing, and at times conflicting, agendas about the moral order of community membership (Bammer, 1994). It is in this context that the uncertainty of life lived far from their homeland manifests and emerges in forms that center on concerns about the way groups and individuals live and participate as pious Muslims in everyday life (Kuppinger, 2015; D’Alisera, 2004; Akou, 2004).

For many of the women I work with, negotiating the social tensions and conflicts that emerge in contentious, and at times hostile, discussions and debates about religious practices and ideologies with fellow congregants occur in chance encounters before and after daily prayer at the center. These encounters, fraught with complicated, and often infuriating, misunderstandings of localized practices and knowledge, have – for many of the Sierra Leoneans who attend services at the Islamic Center – generated conflicting feelings about worshipping in a multinational mosque. As one Sierra Leonean woman told me:

These Arabs ³ are always looking at me with narrowed eyes when I come to pray at the Mosque. They ask me questions about my practice and sometimes tell me I am wrong. The first time that happened I got mad, but now I ask myself if I learned incorrectly back home. I sometimes wonder why I attend services here or at all. If I just prayed at home, I would not feel so confused. I want to change, but I also want to stay Sierra Leonean.

Faced with critiques that cast them as passive followers of traditions that are incorrect, and perhaps even sacrilegious, Sierra Leoneans are compelled by critical self-assessment to appraise, debate, and reinterpret their Islamic knowledge and practice. They seek solutions to profound anxieties that emerge when confronted with authoritative assertions that proclaim that there is only one ‘pure’, and ‘authentic’, version of Islam and that the practices that defined them as pious Muslims in their homeland are lacking in integrity. For many of the women I work with, one solution is to define themselves as members of a global community committed to one version of Islam through material expressions and acts of piety that accommodate the critical discourses of fellow congregants. These expressions and acts enable them to counter the multivalent complexities of marginality and challenge voices that critique Sierra Leonean Muslim religious practice. Their responses reveal the unimaginable contingencies that foreground the way ‘marginality and otherness increasingly figure as the predominant affirmative signifiers of (postmodern) identity’ (Bammer, 1994: xii). Thus, displacement is not about the erasure or replacement of difference but is instead about the reconfiguration of differences into new forms that emerge from the social and historical experience of marginality. At issue then is the relationship between the new meanings and subjectivities that emerge out of the experience of displacement, and the modes that people use to articulate and inscribe presence at the interface between the individual and the social worlds they inhabit (Allman, 2004; Bammer, 1994). The feeling of being marginal, passive followers of traditions that have been cast by fellow Muslims as incorrect, and perhaps even sacrilegious, has translated into an increased focus on religious practice and material expression, particularly dress practices, as an expression of their newfound and ubiquitous understanding of Islam (D’Alisera, 2004).

This was made clear to me one Friday before midday services began at the Islamic Center. Settled in the women's section of the mosque, my friends and I would quietly chat while waiting for services to begin. The space, surrounded by screens to avoid any possibility of the prying eyes of men, was a sea of colorful and somber dress styles from all parts of the Muslim world. Wearing stylish dresses and elaborately wrapped turbans made from beautifully tie-dyed material, the Sierra Leonean women present that day discussed with great concern a recent incident in which a young Sierra Leonean woman, new to the community, was told by the elderly Arab women who often sat at the front of the group of women in attendance that her style of dress was inappropriate. When they noticed something of which they disapproved, they would point it out loudly, perhaps meaning to shame the offending woman into compliance. Dress indiscretions were often the subject of their disapproval. Sierra Leonean women, especially the women who had chosen not to adopt the somber dress styles of many of the women who attended Friday services at this mosque, were often the target of more conservative women's scrutiny. They responded in many ways. Some actively resisted the critiques of these women. Others felt insecure and decided to shed the colorful cloth and elaborate headscarves of their homeland. Yet, for others, a new style that combined the modesty of the Arab women who attended the mosque and the color and style of Sierra Leonean dress emerged. In all of these cases, a keen sense of appearance is at play that centers on larger feelings of marginality coming from being deemed an outlier Muslim by their fellow female congregants.

For Muslim women living where Islamic dress is a cultural and political liability, the monitoring of dress practices by fellow Muslims indexes misunderstandings increasingly defined by the ‘good-Muslim/bad-Muslim’ dichotomy in which the bad Muslim ‘is a creature who violates good Muslim code’ and the good Muslim is ‘the real Muslim’ (Shryock, 2010: 9–10). The demanding embodied regimes of power imposed on Muslim women's bodies by a problematic binary whose origins reside in the non-Muslim world is particularly problematic for women whose place of origin is considered by Muslim women who hail from the Middle East, and especially from the Gulf States, to be on the margins of the Muslim world. Women who do not comply with dominant modesty discourses often find themselves at the center of passionate arguments, where the anxieties produced by popular understandings of Muslim dress crisscrossed with global Muslim debates about Islamic authority and knowledge focus on bodily deportment (Jouili and Amir-Moazami, 2006). A glimpse of skin meant to be covered, or a bit of hair showing from under a scarf, frequently created a moral crisis for non-African women. In transnational environments where dress conventions are complexly varied, but focused, in most instances, on the demand of culturally inflected moral codes, certain clothing styles produce an atmosphere in which bodies and appearance are rigorously monitored. For many of the women who hail from the Arab world, for example, the dress styles of Sierra Leonean women are confusing. These women often scorned Sierra Leonean sartorial preferences for colorful cloth, bold accessories, and dress cut styles that allowed shoulders and necks to go partially uncovered. For example, a close Sierra Leonean friend told me that she was once approached by an elderly Arab woman at the mosque and was accused of dressing inappropriately. ‘She told me that good Muslim women are not vain. Women, she said, do not wear bright colors, perfume, and jewelry, if they are modest.’ According to my friend, the elderly woman was particularly disturbed by her bare neck and partially uncovered shoulder and loudly proclaimed to the entire group in the women's section of the mosque that ‘inappropriate dress was haram [prohibited]’.

Sierra Leonean women do not often cover their neck and shoulders and take great care to adorn themselves with jewelry and cosmetics to enhance their beauty. They see this style of dress as within the bounds of normative dress codes for Muslim women. Yet, in a mosque that hosts people from across the Muslim world, confrontations about appropriate deportment are inevitable. Discourses of dress categorized as not sufficiently modest and subject to disciplinary critiques by women who cast themselves as more knowledgeable of appropriate Muslim dress codes compel strategies that both accommodate and resist imposed regimes of dress. For example, the young woman disciplined for her style of dress, who in the end vehemently challenged the critique and stated that she ‘would not dress like an Arab’, was told by the elders in our group that the situation was easily resolved. ‘What she must realize’, one woman stated, ‘was that she could go to the fabric store and buy a piece of cloth to match her outfit and drape it over her shoulders. She does not have to give up being Sierra Leonean, but she must learn to dress like a proper Muslim.’ For this woman, Islamic propriety took front stage, but she was keenly aware that national identity was also important, if not as important as Muslim piety. Her solution to the problem points to the way that individuals improvise the rules as they orient themselves and their actions to social expectations (Bourdieu, 1977).

Disciplining the body, as Entwistle states, ‘operates through the establishment of the ‘mindful’ body which calls on individuals to monitor their own behavior’ (Entwistle, 2000: 18). Wrapping oneself in an extra piece of cloth is, in the minds of some women, an easy solution to mark pious aspirations and to counter misunderstandings. Further, it allows them to powerfully mark their presence in spaces where a plurality of social difference is often expressed through materiality, chance encounters, and popular discourses of morality. In this way, dress, as it is lived and experienced by individuals, stimulates ways of thinking and acting on the self. The dressed body in this context becomes a self-portrait designed by intersubjective as well as subjective experience (Entwistle, 2000). Thus, sartorial expression is both intimate and social, the focus for community discourses and self-assessment about moral subjectivity (Hansen, 2013). For Sierra Leonean women, new ways of understanding their positions as Muslim and West African produce an intense self-reflection that discloses the way the dressed body serves as a vehicle to challenge misperception and enact belonging (Entwistle, 2000: 18; cf. Foucault, 1980; Bell, 1976). It follows, then, that personal deportment becomes both a matter of religious concern and a willed submission to fellow Muslims that enables the production of pious subjectivities through performative dress practice in public venues (Mahmood, 2005; Moors and Tarlo, 2013). Dress, as such, is a crucial dimension in the process of pious subjectification not only in the articulation of personal identity, but in terms of how clothing operates as part of a repertoire of strategies that highlight the ‘multifaceted interactive relationship people have with hijab’ (Moors and Tarlo, 2013: 6). By paying strict attention to their presentation of self, these women create a pious visibility, one that illustrates how repertoires, dispositions, and habits are made tangible and given material form in the embodied micropractices of daily life.

‘It's hotter in Hell…’

As I came to realize the importance of Islamic attire for creating a sense of belonging for many of the women with whom I work, I would often make a point of spending Friday mornings with them as they prepared for midday prayer at the Islamic Center or one of the many storefront mosques that dot the cityscape. While women are not required to attend Friday services at the mosque, many see midday prayer as an opportunity to socialize with Muslim friends away from the stresses of everyday life lived in non-Muslim environments. I would arrive at the home of a friend, modestly dressed, but my head uncovered. While I understood the importance of Islamic attire for creating a sense of belonging for many of the women with whom I worked, I often waited until I reached their homes before covering my hair with one of the brightly colored scarves I favored. I knew that my friends thought me careless about my dress, but I also knew that my choice to wear colorful scarves and clothing pleased them. They would often tell me, ‘You dress like an African, JoAnn, not like those women who think wearing black makes them good Muslims.’ Nevertheless, no matter how pleased they were about my stylistic choices, they still chided me about my ‘naked head’. They would try to discourage my ‘bad habits’ by reminding me of the benefits of dressing appropriately. ‘You will get more blessings, JoAnn, if you wear that head wrap all of the time instead of just carrying it in your bag. Put it on before you leave the house instead of waiting until you get here.’ While they jokingly disciplined me about my attire, they were also confident that I would not leave their home for our trek across town without my head properly covered.

I had learned early on that an intense concern for public piety, as expressed by the wearing of headscarves, was intricately connected to the critical gaze of fellow congregants at the center, and so participating in prayer services at this mosque required extra sartorial diligence. So, when Kadi, the wife of a taxi driver with whom I was particularly close, and who was a regular companion of mine, called me on Thursday evening to ask if I would join her the following day for midday prayer, I knew I would need to meticulously plan my wardrobe to avoid critique but also to accommodate her concerns about public presentation. Admittedly, I was careless with my headscarf, and a stray strand of hair would often work its way out from under the silky cloth. Having been disciplined by the self-appointed arbiters of modest dress at the Islamic Center on more than one occasion, I understood the need to make sure that I was dressed to their standards. My association with Sierra Leonean Muslims had occasionally made me a target of their displeasure, and so before I learned how to effectively wear a headscarf without worrying that an offending strand of hair might make an appearance, I would ask the women with whom I regularly worked to advise me on what to wear to attend services at the mosque. They took great pleasure in offering me fashion advice and often joked that they should host a TV show that focused on Muslim women similar to the popular TLC show, What Not to Wear. ⁵ Critiquing my dress became part of our Friday routine, and so I was not surprised when Kadi, before hanging up the phone, reminded me to be extra careful with my clothing choices. I knew that when I arrived at her house the next day, she would look over my attire and make adjustments as needed.

Kadi, a healthcare worker, the mother of three school-aged children, and in her words, ‘a born-again Muslim’ (D’Alisera, 2004: 66), always requested Friday as her day off. When the manager of the facility where she worked was agreeable, we could easily make plans, but when she was not, Kadi often felt at odds, disconnected from the routines that she felt defined her as a pious woman. Friday was the only time she could focus solely on her religious concerns. Spending the morning preparing special foods for the evening meal and readying herself for noon prayer before leaving the house gave her great pleasure. It was one of the many ways she inscribed her Islamic aspirations onto her everyday domestic activities and articulated her religious identity. For Kadi, this was the one day that she could be, in her terms, a ‘proper Muslim’. Having spent the better part of her early years in the United States ignoring religion, she had found a new sense of well-being in Islamic practice after marrying her husband, a cab driver and imam who found the Islamic fashions from the Gulf States particularly attractive for both men and women. The target of critique from women who hailed from the Middle East for her flamboyant use of color, pattern, elaborately styled headscarves, and dress design that in their minds exposed ‘too much skin’, she reinvented her dress style to accommodate their wishes and to please her husband. Unwilling to entirely abandon the colorful cloth and elaborate headscarves that many Sierra Leonean women wear, she created a dress style that was modest (no skin on view except face, hands, and feet) and discreetly colorful. She replaced the hot pinks and oranges she loved with muted versions of her favorite colors. ‘I know they do not like the color’, she once told me, ‘but they cannot say that my outfit is not modest.’ Her style was, therefore, a mixture of African cloth and some of the conservative dress conventions of Muslim modesty.

When I arrived at Kadi's apartment the next day, I was not surprised that she had completed many of her daily tasks. She invited me to sit at the kitchen table while she finished washing the breakfast dishes. We would have to wait to leave for our outing until a neighbor who had agreed to walk her children to the school bus-stop arrived. Once the dishes were washed and the children on their way, we sat leisurely drinking morning tea, eating bread and butter, talking, and listening to the weather report on the radio. It was going to be a blistering day by all accounts and Kadi decided that we should leave the house earlier than usual. ‘It's hot today’, she told me, ‘I want to leave early, so that we can take our time walking to the center, maybe sit on a bench for a bit and talk.’ Moving swiftly in the summer heat of Washington, DC was not my strong suit, so I quickly agreed to leave earlier than planned. And so, following our usual routine, Kadi looked over my clothing choices before we began our journey across town and gave her approval. ‘You look like a proper Muslim today, JoAnn. Your enemies at the mosque’, she teased, ‘will be disappointed.’ Laughing aloud at her joke, I urged her to hurry so that we could get to the metro station while the temperature was still in the double digits.

Our usual routine was to hop on the train at the nearest station and make our way to Dupont Circle. From there we would walk briskly down Massachusetts Avenue to the center, usually just making it to the women's prayer area as the call for prayer ended. But today was different. Having arrived at the station an hour early, we leisurely rode the escalator out of the cool but humid interior of the metro station, staying to one side so that harried commuters could leap two steps at a time into the heat of the day. Our walk from the station was also leisurely, but the sun was brutal. Halfway to the center, Kadi suggested we stop and sit under a large shade tree that grew alongside one of the numerous small memorials that dot the urban landscape. We sat quietly, grateful for the extra moment of calm before being immersed in the commotion of Friday services at the Islamic Center. I noted that Massachusetts Avenue seemed empty that day; the usual parade of congregants dressed in their Friday best seemed sparse. Perhaps, I thought, the unbearable heat was keeping them away. I certainly could understand that; the scarf I was wearing, made from a mystery fabric whose quality resides in its lack of breathability, clung to my head. Overheated, dripping with sweat, my head pounding, I turned to Kadi, and asked, ‘Do you ever want to take your scarf off, for just a minute so that you can cool down? It is so hot today I want to rip this thing off my head!’ She sighed and said, ‘JoAnn, it's hotter in Hell …’ Sensing my skepticism, she said with a bit of annoyance in her voice:

Look around you; look at the other Muslims on the street walking to the mosque. They're hot too, but you don't see them removing any clothes. Dressing like a proper Muslim in public, covering myself up even when it is hot, tells the world my intentions are good. Why would I want people to think my intentions were not good for one moment of relief from the heat?

As Kadi and women like her wrap themselves in cloth that signifies their piety, their sartorial choices create numerous modes of expressing religious sensibility, identity, and belonging. Their encounters with unexpected responses and the improvised actions of the people they encounter in the mosque, on the sidewalk, and in the privacy of their homes, shows how people once separated by geographic distance are reconstituted through contact in complex urban social fields (Faier and Rofel, 2014; Pratt, 1992). Through complex sacred repertoires of pious action, these women link the fragmentary stories of people they encounter to produce an ‘emotional climate … that both affects and is affected’ (Low, 2017: 155) by spatially located feelings that suffuse places of encounter with an affecting presence. In this way, the ‘negotiations and unforeseen outcomes’ (Faier and Rofel, 2014: 364) of converging, and at times conflicting practices and actions ‘denaturalize’ space and rework it into dense webs of localized meaning inflected with a ‘global sense of place’ (Faier and Rofel, 2014: 369; Urry, 2007; Massey, 1994). Clearly these sites of encounter are dense with human experience and consciousness that ultimately shapes my respondents’ sense of self and reminds us that the complicated connections between displacement and belonging emerge through contested processes of interpretation that find expression in the words, gestures and material expressions of everyday life (Cresswell, 2015; Pinder, 2010; Pink, 2008; Tonkiss, 2005:115; de Certeau, 1984).

Conclusion

In this paper, I examined the lived experience of religion through an exploration of pious dress practices among Sierra Leonean Muslim women living in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Pointing to the link between material religious expression and the social forces that inform clothing choices, I explored how dominant discourses of normalcy, propriety, and appearance are disrupted by the crafting and re-crafting of their everyday dress. Focusing on the connection between moral discourses about pious Muslim bodies and the way women accept or resist those discourses, I show how individuals improvise rules as they orient themselves and their actions to social expectations (Bourdieu, 1977). In so doing, I shed light on the way these discourses are put into practice at the micro-level of the body in public spaces. Thus, I contend that the dressed body regarded as the ‘locus and site of inscription for specific modes of subjectivity’ (Grosz, 1998: 42; see also Bastian, 1996) illustrates how the material culture of clothes stands as one of the many important ways that the relationship between dominant discourses about public propriety interface with personal moods and motivations to form mutually constitutive subjectivities that challenge the dislocating aspects of being multiply displaced across the intersecting categories of exclusion and inclusion. In so doing, I show how the spatial tactics and emotional poetics deployed by Sierra Leonean Muslim women in search of sartorial strategies that mark them as pious individuals form the backdrop and context within which devout Muslim immigrants shape their everyday lives (de Certeau, 1984; Knott, 2005; Bendiner-Viani, 2005). Thus, I argue that dress practice as lived, experienced, and embodied is a combination of practical consideration, style and technique, and discourses that expose ‘the potential for women to use it for their own purposes’ (Entwistle, 2000: 24), even in the face of a powerful critique that condemns the material textures of Sierra Leonean self-making. And finally, through the layered and evolving meanings that emerge from the densely entwined experiences of these women, I show how they become active agents rather than passive subjects in the re-writing of Muslim subjectivities in the diaspora. In so doing, they signal that religious expression is a dynamic component and a critical element in the ways that they register their presence and transform the textures of the spaces they occupy into places of belonging. In so doing, Sierra Leonean Muslims inhabit their own, imagined world, becoming subjects in an American immigration history of their own making.