Die Bedeutung des muslimischen Kopftuches. Eine kleidungssemiotische Untersuchung Kopftuch tragender Muslimminnen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland by Reyhan Şahin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Die Bedeutung des muslimischen Kopftuches. Eine kleidungssemiotische Untersuchung Kopftuch tragender Muslimminnen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland by Reyhan Şahin Kate Zambon Die Bedeutung des muslimischen Kopftuches. Eine kleidungssemiotische Untersuchung Kopftuch tragender Muslimminnen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. By Reyhan Şahin. Berlin: LIT, 2014. Pp. v + 527. Paper €44.90. ISBN 978-3643119001. With new regulations on female covering up for debate in Germany and France, it appears that the European preoccupation with Muslim women's clothing continues to grow. These debates betray a public fixation on Muslim femininity, mining images of covered heads for evidence of patriarchal tyranny. Linguist Reyhan Şahin's first book engages the Muslim headscarf as a matter of semiotics, taking it as a communicative medium that wearers mobilize for a broad variety of personal and communicative reasons. Şahin begins by deconstructing common narratives built around the headscarf, contesting its use as a symbol of an East-West divide. The book opens with a brief overview of head covering across time, space, religion, and gender. Şahin disrupts the common association of Islam with patriarchy and Christianity with liberal equality, showing that the Bible has much clearer prescriptions demanding submission and female covering than the Koran. Şahin challenges both leftwing feminist and patriarchal religious approaches that impose their interpretations of the headscarf on wearers, abstracting the headscarf for their own political use. This book makes a clear political intervention by using semiotic analysis to center the manifold motivations and meanings held by the wearers themselves. This book is based on Şahin's dissertation and includes many conventions of the genre, including an extended review of relevant literature and theory. Because of its origin as a dissertation, this book provides more details than most readers will want, particularly in its theoretical and methodological justifications. However, the book is clearly organized and is well mapped out in its table of contents, allowing readers to pick and choose areas of interest. The first half of the book develops the theoretical and methodological foundations for the study of the headscarf in terms of a "feminist semiotics of clothing" (feministische Kleidungssemiotik) (19). This section engages foundational theories of linguistics and semiotics, laying the groundwork to consider the whole person—and the whole headscarf wearer—as a sign. Doing so requires considering the headscarf in relation to the habitus of the wearer, including her approach to style, her gestures and mannerisms, and her social context as well as her religious views. This method reveals the fallacy of speaking of the headscarf in the singular. The first section also draws on German jurisprudence on the right of self-expression to declare the right 1) to cover or uncover one's hair, 2) to freely choose the style of head covering and to combine it with more or less discreet styles of clothing, and 3) to deny the instrumentalization of headscarf wearers for symbolic uses by third parties (25). The second half of the book demonstrates the polysemy of this contentious form [End Page 480] of clothing through Şahin's empirical work with a transnational group of second- and third-generation German residents of Sunni Muslim faith. Şahin began by interviewing university students, but, after noticing a distinct fashion orientation among some headscarf wearers, she expanded her investigation to include what she calls "expressive-fashionable" (expressiv-modisch) wearers who tended to be high school students or young retail workers. This empirical portion of the work also uses photographs for visual analysis of informants' use of the headscarf (fabric, color, coverage, binding style) and general dress and style (clothing fit, makeup, accessories). The images are combined with structured interviews and participant observation to tease out the diverse motivations and meanings behind informants' sartorial choices. This book makes several important original contributions to work on German and European studies, semiotics, feminist theory and methodology, and European Islam. Şahin calls her method a feminist semiotics of clothing. This method draws together the sparse literature examining fashion and clothing through semiotics and develops it using foundational linguistic theory. The key methodological contribution is the addition of critical feminism. This normative and politically engaged approach outlines legal norms that include dress under the right to self-actualization. This allows two apparently...