Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Booth, Marilyn

Titel

Islamic Politics, Street Literature, and John Stuart Mill: Composing Gendered Ideals in 1990s Egypt

Ist Teil von

• Feminist studies, 2013-09, Vol.39 (3), p.596-627

Ort / Verlag

College Park: Feminist Studies, Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• IN A SMALL BOOK SOLD ON A DOWNTOWN CAIRO street in 2002, at a stall that spilled across the pavement, a dialogue between female university students enacts the question of whether hijab is essential to the practice of one's faith as a Muslima, a female Muslim. In the book-as in common usage-hijab signifies modest dress, ideally (although not always) entailing loose clothing covering everything except face and hands, plus little or no use of cosmetics or conspicuous jewelry. The conversation among the book's characters takes place in a university quadrangle and ranges across different topics, drawing on sources from history, Qur'an exegesis, and hadith nabawi (attributed sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) to contemporary scandal and newspaper clippings. Some of the students are muhajjabat (hijab-wearing females) who draw books from their satchels in support of their arguments. Among them is Fatima who, along with her classmates, gradually persuades an uncovered classmate named Mayy to their argument that Islamic dress is inseparable from the correct practice of their shared faith. Mayy collapses into the arms of her muhajjabat classmates, overcome. Embracing her, they draw her away to a place of repose and contemplation for the purpose of adjusting her bodily and psychological contours to the coalescing landscape of the perfect society that can only be realized, the young women suggest, through the constant human performance of submission to the divine will. Adapted from the source document.