Taste and Distinction

Religions are often divided into those that define faith as achieved through conscious individual choice and those that define faith as ascribed through being born into religious or “tribal” communities. Muslims cross this divide. Decisions about veiling, reveiling, and deveiling are socially and historically contingent and are variably perceived by differently positioned contemporaneous and historical observers. Secularists and feminists (Muslim and non-Muslim), she argues, should “defend women’s right to wear what they like, not in terms of individual ‘choice,’ but as a mark of female autonomy and emancipation from patriarchal control.” Muslim women may make tactical use of choice-based rights arguments in their struggles against local Muslim patriarchies, using revivalist study of the holy texts to argue that local ethnic conventions contravene the inherent equality that Islam offers to women.