Annelies Moors - Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America

A volume of this kind has many points of origin and accumulates many debts and friendships on the way. As authors and editors we were first brought together by a shared interest in the everyday dress practices of Muslim women situated in diverse circumstances around the world, whether in Britain, India, Palestine or Yemen. Following a workshop organized by Annelies at the University of Amsterdam in 2005, we went on to jointly edit a special double issue of the journal Fashion Theory on the topic of Muslim fashions. Although the volume focussed mainly on non-European contexts, and included contributions about Egypt, Turkey, India, West Africa, Iran and Yemen, working on it alerted us to the absence of research about the growing presence of Islamic fashion in Europe and to the potential offered by fashion as a tool for critiquing the limited and repetitive polemical debates commonly invoked in discussions of Muslim dress and of the place of Islam in Europe more generally. Our first debt, then, is to the many Muslim women in different European cities whose clothing choices and experiments commanded our attention and who willingly shared with us intimate details of their sartorial biographies, dilemmas and aspirations, many of which feature in this book.

We would like to thank NORFACE for its generous funding of our research project, Islamic Fashion: The Emergence of Islam as a Social Force in Europe (200710), which formed part of the wider programme, Re-emergence of Religion as a Social Force in Europe. We are also grateful to the Cultural Dynamics Programme at NWO (The Organization for Scientific Research in the Netherlands) for funding some of the costs incurred at later stages of the project. Our thanks also extend to Goldsmiths, University of London, the former ISIM (International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World) in the Netherlands, and the University of Stockholm in Sweden for hosting workshops linked to the project. We have greatly benefitted from the insights of all those who formed part of this initial team of researchers and participated with us in these workshops: Connie Care Christiansen, Leila Karin sterlind, Sigrid Nkel, Annika Rabo, Degla Salim, Irene Bregenze and Arzu nal. Later, we were joined by scholars who were working on similar themes in Poland, Romania, Italy, France, Germany, Turkey, Britain, Sweden, the United States and Canada, and we thank them all for their contributions. In particular we would like to thank Alessia Gammarota for offering a fashion photographers view of hijabi street fashion in the United Kingdom which captures some of the visual creativity and playfulness so often left out of discussions about Muslim women. A special thanks also to Zinah Nur Sharif for agreeing to be featured both on the cover of the book and inside, where she lends insight into the life and aspirations of a hijabi fashion blogger.

Finally, a collective volume of this kind with written and visual contributions from a number of researchers, many of whom are not native English speakers, requires a considerable amount of painstaking labour and we would like to thank Page McClean and Seyla Wachlin, both of whom provided invaluable assistance with the preparation of the manuscript. At Bloomsbury we would like to thank Anna Wright and Emily Roessler for their enthusiasm and support, without which the volume could not have come to fruition.

Hijabi street style. Photos: Alessia Gammarota

Fashion designer Sarah Elenany, at work and play in London. Photos: Alessia Gammarota