HiHistory
This tab explores how portrayals and reactions to Islamic fashion throughout the years have been markers of a greater atmosphere of Islamophobia.
1538 - present
The first example of Islamophobia in fashion starts with a Spanish festival that has been celebrated for upwards of 250 years. Moros y Cristianos celebrates the defeat of the invading Moors on the Christian towns in southern Spain. During the festival, townspeople dress in costumes imitating the fashions of the Moors and Christian fighters. In most photos of these costumes the Moors are portrayed in a wildly inaccurate manner that almost always covers their faces, making them harder to relate to and seemingly less human than their opposition. On the other hand, the Christian costumes are generally more historically accurate, leave the face uncovered, and mostly unpainted.
The festival is seen as fun and innocent but carries connotations of Moorish people and their decedents as people to be beaten and/or driven out. Even today dark complexioned people from southern Spain will vehemently deny any suggestion of Moorish heritage as Jose Antonio Lopez did when interviewed for the Telegraph saying, “No! For God's sake! We did not have any moro in the family. We drove them all out centuries ago” (qtd. telegraph.co.uk).
The first example of Islamophobia in fashion starts with a Spanish festival that has been celebrated for upwards of 250 years. Moros y Cristianos celebrates the defeat of the invading Moors on the Christian towns in southern Spain. During the festival, townspeople dress in costumes imitating the fashions of the Moors and Christian fighters. In most photos of these costumes the Moors are portrayed in a wildly inaccurate manner that almost always covers their faces, making them harder to relate to and seemingly less human than their opposition. On the other hand, the Christian costumes are generally more historically accurate, leave the face uncovered, and mostly unpainted.
The festival is seen as fun and innocent but carries connotations of Moorish people and their decedents as people to be beaten and/or driven out. Even today dark complexioned people from southern Spain will vehemently deny any suggestion of Moorish heritage as Jose Antonio Lopez did when interviewed for the Telegraph saying, “No! For God's sake! We did not have any moro in the family. We drove them all out centuries ago” (qtd. telegraph.co.uk).
1921
The silent film "The Sheik" was wildly popular when it was released, showing a pseudo romantic fantasy world in a far-away exotic land. Based on a romance novel, the activities of the sheik character and the white woman he kidnapped were wildly discrepant with the activities of actual shieks in the Middle East. In addition, the costuming of the sheik character is campy and inaccurate, used to further exotify him especially when engaging in violence toward the main female character. Indeed, when the sheik character tells the main character that he can “maker her love him,” (33:12) and is physically overbearing he's in a turban, tunic, and loose pants. Every depiction of the sheik character's negative behavior is shown while he is in a similar costume and when, in the end of the film (1:23:02), the female character begins to sympathize with him he is stripped of the regular costume and shown in a simple shirt with no markings of his ethnic otherness. When this happens, it's revealed to the audience that the sheik character is in fact of European descent and therefore a more acceptable person to empathize with. In the rest of the film, the minor characters support what Jack Shaheen told NPR is the “ mythology of the Middle East as a place where [women] were either walking a hundred feet behind the men, or [were] just lounging around in the harem, waiting for the men to beckon them” (qtd. npr.org). NPR writer Neda Ulaby further surmises that “The Sheik was less concerned with authenticity than with perpetrating a fantasy of sexual extremes; in doing so, it promoted stereotypes of the Middle East as a decadent, primitive culture" (npr.org). |
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1930s - present
Though little is written about the clashes between Tibetans and Muslims due to the government's reluctance to publicize any disharmony within their country, many small Muslim businesses have been attacked by Tibetans in the past five years due to resentments formed over community interdependence and governmental actions. These tensions have been present in the Qinghai area since the warlord Ma Bufeng conquered part of the province in an attempt to create a Muslim territory and, in the process, displaced many Tibetan peoples. Today Tibetans are no longer largely displaced by the Muslim community but rather by the Chinese settlers who moved upon the occupation of Tibet by the Republic of China. Though both the Tibetan and the Muslim communities find themselves minorities, the atmosphere of Islamophobia is still largely present, making the Muslim community rightly fearful for their lives and livelihoods. A restaurant owner, Ma Zhongyang, interviewed in Golog by the Los Angeles Times says, “many Muslims have stopped wearing the traditional white caps that identify their religion. Many women now wear a hairnet instead of a scarf. Since the nearest mosque was burned down in August, the Muslims pray at home -- "in secret," Ma said (qtd. LA Times). |
1984 - present
Two classic photos show the dichotomy of how we are mostly fed images and stories of Muslim women who are either exotified and sexualized or downtrodden and disadvantaged. In the famous 1984 National Geographic photo titled “Afghan Girl,” the only thing in the frame other than her face is her hijab: a modern symbol of Islam. Her face and scarf are dirty, her eyes are angry and afraid perfectly summing up the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman. As Laura Navarro mentions in her article, "Islamophobia and Sexism: Muslim Women in Western Mass Media", the Afghan Girl and photos like it help create a societal image of Muslim women as victims that is “reflected through the recurrence of news stories describing conflicts (e.g., the Afghan or Algerian conflicts in which women are clearly victims), and through news stories on the veil, the imprisonment or exclusion of these women, all symbols of “the relations and limitations of women in the lands of Islam” (2005: 211). (Navarro, pg. 100). In contrast, we have a cigarette ad with a woman who, implied by being juxtaposed with the product, is exotic, indulgent, mellow, Turkish, rich, and classic. Including the word classic in the description implies that these are the standard attributes for an “exotic” Turkish woman. Though exotification may not seem obviously harmful to some, exotification puts people with certain physical features outside our mental container of normality, making them an outsider who does not fully belong in society. This idea can cause anxiety in otherized people and further fuels racist ideologies. Importantly, the exotified woman is also mostly uncovered, wearing a lowcut strapless top that solidifies her role as a sexual being to be consumed along with the cigarettes. |
2010
In 2010, the French government upheld a ruling to outlaw any face coverings that would “call into question the possibility of open interpersonal relationships” (bbc.com). This is a thinly veiled law against the wearing of the niqab as some face coverings including masks worn in “traditional activities” or religious processions are still legal to wear (bbc.com). According to the BBC, many in France view this law as beneficial to Muslim women seeing it as freeing them from religious oppression. Navarro states that when this law was being discussed by politicians and mass media “little attention was given to the voice of political, trade union and associative representatives, secular organisations and associations that opposed the law, or feminists who emphasized the need to support young women who wore headscarves at state schools at all cost” (Navarro, pg. 109). Instead, the media primed their audience with debates on “Islam vs. the West” (pg 109), setting up Islam as a way of life that threatened the French secularism. Thus, the debate over the law was less about specific ramifications of wearing a niqab and more about a culturalist interpretation of what it represented to to the French society. |