ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how social media operate as a forum for public dialogue without religious authority, and contribute to the fashioning of a Muslim self through the performance of dress. Islamic dress in its various cultural iterations continues to provoke controversy, as Muslim actors weigh in on what dress for women is constitutive of Islam and representative of the ummah. For many, focusing on aesthetics is an example of modern concepts polluting Muslim girls’ minds. Many Muslim women are responding to the emergence of hijab in public spaces in Muslim and non-Muslim countries by reconceptualizing Islamic dress and how best to express materially their modern Muslim identity. The chapter highlights the inclination to associate hijab with the non-modern encourages the edifice of social boundaries where shared values are rarely acknowledged and difference. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the rise of Islamic revivalist movements in Egypt and Iran, dress became crucial to the construction of Islamic religious, and national identities.
