Islamicate Textiles: Fashion, Fabric, and Ritual

Textiles and clothing are interwoven with Islamic culture. In Islamicate Textiles, readers are taken on a journey from Central Asia to Tanzania to uncover the central roles that textiles play within Muslim-majority communities.

This thematically arranged book sheds light on the traditions, rituals and religious practices of these regions, and the ways in which each one incorporates materials and clothing. Drawing on examples including Iranian lion carpets and Arabic keffiyeh, Faegheh Shirazi frames these textiles and totemic items as important cultural signifiers that, together, form a dynamic and fascinating material culture. Like a developing language, this culture expands, bends and develops to suit the needs of new generations and groups across the world.

The political significance of Islamicate textiles is also explored: Faegheh Shirazi’s writing reveals the fraught relationship between the East - with its sought-after materials and much-valued textiles - and the European countries that purchased and repurposed these goods, and lays bare the historical and contemporary connections between textiles, colonialism, immigration and economics. Dr Shirazi also discusses gender and how textiles and clothing are intimately linked with sexuality and gender identity.

Faegheh Shirazi is a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, USA. She is the author of Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety (2016), Velvet Jihad: Muslim Women’s Quiet Resistance to Islamic Fundamentalism (2009), The Veil Unveiled: Hijab in Modern Culture (2001) and the Editor of Muslim Women in War and Crisis: From Reality to Representation(2010). Her research interests include textiles, dress, gender identity discourse, and material culture in the Middle East; the meanings of veiling; rituals and rites of passage as they relate to material culture.