ABSTRACT
The various forms of veiling practiced by Muslim women have occupied a symbolic role in global encounters between Islam and the West, and they illustrate the ways that gendered “traditions” are subject to innovation and adaptation. The influences and counterinfluences of colonialism, globalization, migration, and information technologies can bring with them cultural hybridization, but they can also inspire a hardening of identities, an emphasis on difference and the purity of tradition. For example, in 1936 the first shah of Iran (Reza Khan Pahlavi) decreed that Iranian women should embrace modernization by throwing off the cloak known as a chador. In 1979, however, following the country’s Islamic Revolution, the religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini decreed that they should put it back on. This one example (discussed more later) illustrates that societies do not progress along a linear continuum of social change, but rather shift and change according to both internal and external dynamics.
