Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of cloth and clothes as retainers and expressions of ambivalence and attachment in the case of visibly Muslim women in Britain who trace diasporic relationships both to their countries of origin and to the imagined community of the global Islamic uma.

Paper long abstract:

Wearers of visibly Muslim dress in the UK come from a variety of cultural backgrounds (whether Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Jamaican or other). Through their dress they often try to maintain relations of affective engagement both with the material and aesthetic heritage of their "homelands" and with that of the imagined community of the global uma (original Islamic community) to which they simultaneously trace their origins. In forging emotive attachments to the latter they often find themselves in a relationship of ambivalence to the former. These dual and sometimes triple heritages are often perceived by women as making contradictory demands owing to the different aesthetic and moral values they seem to valorise. At the same time they provide a rich range of visual and material resources on which women can draw, leaving considerable room for aesthetic manoeuvre and re-invention. In this complex process of self-fashioning, the clothing worn by young visibly Muslim women in Britain is invested with considerable emotion, not only by its wearers but also by a wider public including family members, friends and outsiders who often interpret their dress as a gesture of affiliation, incorporation or desertion. Exploring these tensions, this paper highlights the emotive qualities of cloth and clothes in the fashioning of complex doubly diasporic identities in which religious attachments are often portrayed as "deeper" and more meaningful than regional ones which may none the less be referenced in more subtle ways such as through preferences in colours, patterns or modes of tying cloth.