Embodying and consuming modernity on Muslim pilgrimage: gendered shopping and clothing practices by Malaysian women on “umrah and ziarah Dubai”

Abstract

Muslim pilgrimage has gained much attention in public debates and academic research. This article examines gendered shopping practices among Muslim Malay Malaysian women performing pilgrimage (umrah) connected with ziarah, which is understood here as part religious observance and part holiday and leisure, through a multi-sited ethnographic study. Only a few studies have examined Muslim pilgrimage using a theoretical gender optic and fewer by taking processes of consumerism and modernity into account. The article is based on Arjun Appadurai’s concept of modernity as rupture, which refers to the idea of modernity as an unprecedented break between past and present. I argue in this article that Muslim Malay Malaysian women on “umrah and ziarah Dubai” constitute themselves as modern women through purchasing the abaya – a long black garment which is usually worn by Arab women – in Dubai, and thereby do not break with the past but transcend the past and the present. Hence, in contrast to Appadurai’s understanding, modernity in this article is conceptualized as the ability and possibility to bridge the past with the present.