Headscarf and Veiling Glimpses from Sumer to Islam

Abstract

This volume – which stems from an international conference held at the University of Graz on March 2, 2020, just before the outbreak or the COVID-19 pandemic – represents a small, but specifically targeted contribution to a field of research and discussion that has increasingly come to the fore in the last two decades, regarding the practice of covering or veiling womens’ heads or faces over different times and places. “Dress is never value free”, as anthropologists state, and veiling functions as an assertion/communication of relationship dynamics in terms of gender, social and cultural identity, phases and stages of life (puberty, marriage, death) or of religious beliefs – even reaching to a typical dichotomy of our times, the female condition between tradition and modernity.