Conclusion
Women’s modesty is a fundamental component
of gendered moral systems in many societies across
the Muslim world. It has been analyzed using dif-
ferent approaches: tracing textual sources, noting
social functions, interpreting cultural meanings,
and exploring phenomenologically how it is expe-
rienced. Although modesty sometimes finds its
authoritative religious justification in the Qur±àn
and can be inspired by women’s desires to be pious,
it cannot in all its daily social practices be derived
solely from religious texts. Linked in many societies
to a cultural code of honor that determines the
respect and reputation of families, it both pressures
and motivates women. Such codes are found in
non-Muslim as well as Muslim societies, most
notably around the Mediterranean. The discourses
of modesty have been transformed radically in the
twentieth century as they have become integral to
piety movements, appropriated and generalized by
nationalist movements, and incorporated into mod-
ernizing reform movements, secular or Islamic.
Some modern nation-states’ enforcement through
law and the police of women’s modest behaviors,
whether of sexual propriety and segregation or
forms of dress, in the name of protecting public
morality and the nation’s health or asserting an
Islamic identity in contradistinction to the West,
has also fundamentally altered its significance as a
moral system. It has also generated critiques by
feminists within and outside these societies.Bibliography
L. Abu-Lughod, Veiled sentiments, Berkeley 1986, up-
dated with new preface 2000.
H. Afshar, Islam and feminisms, New York 1998.
P. Bourdieu, Outline of a theory of practice, trans.
R. Nice, Cambridge 1977.
D. Kandiyoti, The end of empire. Islam, nationalism and
women in Turkey, in D. Kandiyoti (ed.), Women, Islam
and the state, Philadelphia 1991, 22–47.
H. Lutfi, Manners and customs of fourteenth-century
Cairene women, in N. Keddie and B. Baron (eds.),
Women in Middle Eastern history, New Haven, Conn.
1991, 99–121.
S. Mahmood, Feminist theory, embodiment, and the docile
agent, in Cultural Anthropology16 (2001), 202–36.
A. Meneley,Tournaments of value, Toronto 1996.
A. Najmabadi, Hazards of modernity and morality, in
D. Kandiyoti (ed.), Women, Islam and the State, Phila-
delphia 1991, 48–76.
——, Unveiled bodies – veiled discourses, in Feminist
Studies 19 (1993), 487–518.
A. Parla, The “honor” of the state, in Feminist Studies 27
(2001), 65–88.
Begum Rokeya, Sultana’s dream and selections from The
secluded ones, ed. and trans. R. Jahan, New York
1988.
B. F. Stowasser, Religious ideology, women, and the fam-
ily. The Islamic paradigm, in B. F. Stowasser (ed.), The
Islamic impulse, Washington, D.C. 1987, 262–96.498 modesty discourses
Maulana Ashraf ≠Ali Thànawì,Perfecting women. Mau-
lana Ashraf ≠Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar, trans.
B. D. Metcalf, Berkeley 1990.Lila Abu-LughodCentral Asia and the Caucasus“Men can do what they like, and so can Russian
women, but not we Muslim women. We have to
keep our legs and heads covered. It is a sin for us to
expose them in the street. In the past, Muslim
women veiled their faces but even today we cannot
leave the house without permission and must not be
alone with a man except our husbands, whom we
must obey in all things.” This statement from
Tajikistan speaks to the way popular discourse
shapes the construction of hierarchical differences
between the sexes through the enforcement of
female modesty practices.
Historically, details of expected behavior pat-
terns differed considerably over this wide region.
Prior to the Russian revolution, some communities,
such as the Tatars, allowed women significant
mobility, including access to education and jobs,
while full seclusion was practiced in others, notably
by the Sarts of the Ferghana Valley area, currently
divided among Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyr-
gyzstan, with women wearing the all-covering
cloak (faranja or paranji) and thick horsehair veil
(chachvon) if they ventured outside. After the Rus-
sian conquest of Turkestan, some young women
expressed a wish to be allowed to abandon seclu-
sion, although those who actually did so were
mostly lepers, prostitutes, and other social outcasts.
The Tatar Jadidist movement and the young
Bukharans spearheaded a movement toward mod-
ernization, especially of education and, to a certain
extent, even of women’s position. However, it took
the Bolshevik attacks on Islamic traditions in the
1920s to produce real change, although for the fol-
lowing few decades some women continued to veil.
Eventually, Muslim communities adapted to the
new situation by changing their definitions of
female modesty practices to allow for coeducation
and a mixed-sex workforce, thus permitting women
to retain their respectability while wearing modern
clothes and interacting with males in public. Never-
theless, many families, especially in rural Taji-
kistan, took their daughters out of school soon after
the onset of puberty and never allowed their wom-
enfolk to take a formal job. In Central Asia, a
Sovietized form of traditional clothing, usually a
dress worn over loose trousers and a small head-
scarf, came to symbolize modesty for Muslim