Powerful Headdresses: Africa and Asia Book

Fadwa El Gindi has set herself an extremely difficult task: to explain, anthropologically, the meaning and significance of the veil in contemporary Arab societies. She is extremely critical of approaches to the veil that come at it from Area, Religious/Islamic or Women's Studies approaches because, she says, they fail to grasp the diversity of significances of the veil; she is also extremely critical of anthropology, her field, for its failure to attend to dress.

She draws on a rich set of evidence, her own ethnographic work in the emergence of a demotic Islamic politics since the 1970s, a small but rich body of anthropological work dealing with Arab societies, and textual analyses of the Qu'ran, hadith and related scriptural sources. This range of sources means that there are times when the narrative flow of the text seems to be broken by the requirements of using a different form of information as evidence for the case, but bear with the demands of this diversity and watch out for the emergence of a vital distinction between seclusion, modesty and privacy as a key element of her argument.

The modesty/privacy distinction is, I think, essential here. Although there is a vibrant set of debates within Islamic cultural politics about the meaning of 'modesty' as restraint, humility and so forth, El Guindi is, I suspect, right to note that for many outsiders 'modesty' relates to sexual modesty only and as such use of that term to discuss meanings for veiling fails to adequately encapsulate the requirements on men and women towards modesty. Privacy, then, becomes a key trope and allows her to explore the idea of the eternally sacred within the secular - of sacred bodies, people, spaces - and ways in which the veil in its many forms acts as a mode of 'seclusion' for some and display and status for others, often the same person in different contexts. There is, in this context, an intriguing distinction between veiling as a distinction from slovenliness, as a form of care for the body and appearance that is class and status linked.

It is a rich and subtle argument that would have been enhanced has the photographic reproduction been better: Berg seemed to save money by stinting on the production costs at the expense of the clarity of the argument in a couple of places.