I’ve never been religious, but wrangling my political convictions and a love for clothing taught me the vicissitudes of negotiating two value systems that are seemingly at odds while attempting to craft an image that reflects my beliefs and is aesthetically pleasing (to me, at least). It is this tension that drives Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith, which looks at Muslim women who cover in contemporary England through a series of ethnographic profiles highlighting the diversity of their practices and perspectives. Anthropologist Emma Tarlo attends at length to how individual women reconcile visibly displaying their faith with the desire to dress fashionably and self-expressively.

Tarlo describes in great detail how her subjects adapt and negotiate signifiers of both Islam and style in order to craft their own looks, and she repeatedly emphasizes the great creativity of Muslim dress in the West. Noting that some of her subjects have more than 500 hijabs, she argues that the headscarf serves as “a new form of Muslim personal art” that in many cases “provides the aesthetic focal point of a young girl’s appearance.”

Because her account is so grounded in individuals, she mostly addresses hijabi practices as strategies that enable the women to craft the appearances they desire. Thus, she dedicates a lot of time to what her interviewees’ clothing habits mean to them and how they came to decide whether and how to cover. This entails considerable detail into the minutiae of covering choices, for example how tight clothing should be or whether to hide or display one’s neck or wrists.

Which brings us to one of the more politically fraught themes of the book, how different hijabi styles communicate to other Muslims. Men are largely absent from her account, which is, after all, primarily a study of women who display their faith sartorially. But one chapter attends to a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir, describing the strict guidelines for covering the group recommends for its adherents and its critiques of the women who cover less stringently. Tarlo uses her discussion of the group to introduce one of the book’s more interesting tangents: the paradoxical tension inherent in thinking the hijab as a form of fashion at all. The point of hijab, of course, is to remain modest, following the Qu’ranic injunction for a women to hide her beauty. But how, then, do women draw the line between immodesty and fashion? Tarlo effectively points to the difficulties of reconciling the desire to conform to Muslim doctrine by not being too showy with the desire to appear fashionable where they meet, in the hijab that effectively signifies, in the West, the desire to visibly display one’s faith.

This book is primarily intended for an academic audience, and unless you’re really interested in the subject matter you might not take that much from it. I occasionally found the lengthy ethnographies in the first half of the book boring, although her case studies of political organizations and businesses were more gratifying, to this reader at least. Ultimately, Tarlo effectively addresses a weighty issue in a way that respects the autonomy and individuality of those it depicts.

Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith by Emma Tarlo, Berg, 2010
reviewed by Emily Raine
photography by Arden Wray

“Fashion is a social force that functions effectively not only as an economic engine but as a semiotic system that transmits social and political messages by means of nonverbal language rich in signs, symbols and iconography.” - Ayala Raz, The Equalizing Shoe

For most people, shoes are not the first thing that come to mind when thinking about Jewish cultural heritage. However, after taking a look at Jews and Shoes, a compilation of fourteen academic essays on the apparently unique relationship Jewish people have had with shoes, one must rethink the assumption that shoes are of no particular importance.

Given the Jewish people’s legacy as eternal wanderers, it makes sense that footwear may have taken on a deeper meaning for them. However, this book is far more detailed than that. Split into four thematic sections, it covers a variety of cultural instances where shoes play an important role: religion and the Bible, memorials, political ideology and the arts. To my mind, the strongest essay in this book is a fascinating analysis that questions the commodity fetishism of the piles of shoes found at Holocaust memorials. Having never been to a Holocaust memorial myself, I was surprised to learn of their emphasis on displaying the personal items of those interred and killed at the camps to show the magnitude of the numbers of possessions that were methodically sorted into piles by Nazis intending to redistribute them later. The author, Jeffrey Feldman, does an absolutely superb job of relating memorial attendees’ very visceral reactions to these piles upon piles of shoes of all sorts and the sights, smells, and textures that come from all that rotting leather. The questions posed are not only thought provoking in terms of the legacy of the Holocaust, but about how artefacts and museum objects are structured and displayed in order to evoke an emotional response.

An ancient Roman sandal. Essentially the type of shoe referred to in the book as a ‘biblical sandal’.

Unfortunately, not all of the essays are as well done. I found the first section, dealing with religious and biblical references to shoes, to be weak and tedious. In this section more than any other, I was struck by the dullness of the academic writing style and found that these essays in particular suffer from the Cultural Studies vice of overanalyzing commonplace objects trying to extract more meaning than there is. Sometimes a shoe is just a shoe. At times it also felt as if I needed a working knowledge of the Bible in order to really understand the points that a few of these authors were trying to make. Maybe I’m wrong, and that reference to shoes in Exodus is more significant than I think, however, not having sat down with a copy of the Bible before tearing into this I was left feeling a bit drowned in biblical minutiae.

The profession of shoemaker has historically and traditionally be held by Jews.

That said, although it has its weaknesses, I do recommend this book. Even though it only deals with one culture, as a non-Jewish reader I was fascinated by the importance of shoes in human history, and, as one author puts it, “the communicative role of footwear.” Plus, since this is formatted as a collection of essays, you can dive in and out as you please. At the very least the wonderfully rhyming title will surely make you smile.

Jews and Shoes edited by Edna Nahshon (Berg, 2008).
Reviewed by Anisha Seth.