The New York Times has an interesting article about the efforts some Muslim women to reach a sustainable balance between modernity and tradition within their dress codes. The article shows that for Muslim women in America are complex individuals and that for some of them the decision to wear the veil isn’t always about family pressure or made based on fear:
The search for balance makes getting dressed “a really intentional, mindful event in our lives every day,” said Asra Nomani, the outspoken author of “Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam” (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). Clothing is all the more significant, Ms. Nomani said, because what a Muslim woman chooses to wear “is a critical part of her identity.”
Many younger women seek proactively to shape that identity, adopting the hijab without pressure from family or friends, or from the Koran, which does not mandate covering the head.
“Family pressure is the exception, not the rule,” said Ausma Khan, the editor of Muslim Girl, a new magazine aimed at young women who, when it comes to dress, “make their own personal choice.”
The key issue to me is liberalization that is making it possible for any choice of dress, of fashion to be not only permissible for Muslim women, but also acceptable without implying that it says something definitive about them. It should be a given that the clothes don’t the woman for Muslim women to be able to make the decision to dress the way they want without it becoming a choice about who they are.
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