Circulation of fashions: Deciphering foreign influences on the creation of Muslim Clothing in early Islam

Abstract

The article delves into the place and role of foreign influences on Muslim clothing, and the complicated and contradictory ways in which these influences found their way into the Muslim world through processes of adoption, rejection and adjustment. Clothing played a role in interacting with other regions and creating cross-cultural circulation and trans-medial and trans-material dynamics. Mapping the geographical movement of clothing enables us to trace the origins, define the main routes, and present the characteristics of Muslim mixed fashion of clothing as an outcome of circulation. Inferentially we learn that the jurists were active in the creation of proper Muslim clothing, or Muslim fashion. In other words, the consequence of the meeting between foreign cultures and Islam was Muslim clothing within the borders of jurisprudence, including an area of shifting boundaries with tolerance and creativity that enabled self-expression.