The Hijab as Gift: Mechanisms of Community Socialization in the Muslim Diaspora

One of the most important features of the world-wide Islamic diaspora at the present time is how the socialization of individuals into Islamic belief and observance operates. This chapter considers such matters in relation to the socialization of women into Islamic religious observance in a contemporary north-west European context, namely Finland. This involves consideration of issues surrounding bodily comportment and those types of garments intended to cover parts of the female body in ways that are taken to be expressive of Islamic piety. Such clothing objects are made available by the globalized Islamic fashion industry. The chapter focuses on the means whereby such sartorial objects are used to encourage females to adopt certain kinds of practices which are thought to be expressive of the religious norms of a community. Attention is directed to what happens when one woman gives another woman an Islamic garment as a gift. The gift brings with it a set of obligations on the part of the receiver, and these obligations function as often potent means of ensuring acceptance of group norms as to acceptable and unacceptable visual appearance and behaviours. The chapter considers the obligatory nature of gifts, which pull recipients into observance of religious rules and community norms. This is done with reference to Marcel Mauss’s classical anthropological work on the institution of gift-giving. It is found that Mauss’s original insights continue to be valuable for understanding socialization processes in globalized, diaspora contexts today.