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REVEALING REVEILING: ISLAMIST GENDER IDEOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY EGYPT. By SHIFA ZUHUR. (SUNY Series in Middle Eastern Studies). Albany, State University of New York Press, 1992. pp. 207.
Increased use of Islamic dress among the women of the Middle East has become one of the more visible signs of increased religiosity and often of allegiance to Islamist organizations. In Revealing Reveiling Sherifa Zuhur examines aspects of this phenomenon and proposed explanations for its popularity in Egypt in the early 1990s.
In prominent Muslim countries such as Turkey, Iran and Morocco political leaders escorted unveiled female family members in public in order to influence women to abandon traditional dress. In Egypt, political leaders never linked women's dress to nationalist sentiment or political ideology, but dress patterns nevertheless acquired political or ideological connotations. Dress, especially women's dress, has been continually utilized as an outward manifestation of ideological leanings. As Zuhur shows, dress patterns tap into a deeply held sense of self-identity, but are also responsive to outside factors such as occupation, education, residence, income, group identification and religiosity. In this book, Zuhur sets herself the task of examining the presentation and reception of the multiple avenues women now possess to express their identities by focusing upon the Islamist expectations for women in the 1980s and 1990s (p. 1).
Zuhur surveyed fifty Egyptian university students and included information gleaned from interviews with a number of other Egyptian women, including women in prestigious government positions. The responses of the women provide a good picture of the changes in women's dress, but more so, changes in their attitudes towards women's roles. Islamic dress was pervasive among the women Zuhur interviewed. Of the fifty women surveyed 62% were veiled (muhaggabat); 14% of the veiled women completely covered their faces with a face veil and often wear gloves as well (p. 59). Many of...