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cock and J. Osborn (eds.), Endangered peoples of
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B. McGowan, Muslims in the diaspora. The Somali com-
munities of London and Toronto, Toronto 1999.Mary-Catherine DalySub-Saharan Africa: West AfricaModesty practices are closely related to region-
ally and historically variable, discursive construc-
tions of propriety and of men and women as
embodied sexual beings. Modesty discourses
impinge upon and reflect women’s and men’s
respective agentive capacities, capacities that are
often class- and age-specific. Most local under-
standings of modesty refer to the idea that an indi-
vidual should acquire certain emotional and
cognitive capacities to be able spontaneously to dis-
tinguish between “shameful” and “decent” acts.
Key terms, such as “shame,” “restraint,” and
“patience” are rendered in local vernaculars that
sometimes reveal an Arabic origin. Most under-
standings see modesty as an embodied capacity
for self-restraint and control that can be visibly
enacted and asserted as a virtue, and that simulta-
neously constitutes a way of practicing virtue.
Modesty standards, the ways they are defined
and negotiated through locally variable notions of
respect, honor, and shame, form part of a broader
discursive system through which gender relations
and other social hierarchies are defined. The latter,
based primarily on age and rank difference, feed
back into the constructions of moral personhood
and reputation. Male modesty practices reveal a
concern with the assertion of status among equals
and within a hierarchical social order. Gender dif-
ference tends to be constructed as a matter of men’s
and women’s differential need for protection.
Women are seen as being essentially defined by
their bodily constitution. This makes them more
vulnerable to moral and physical assault, yet also
turns them into a potential threat to the social and
moral order associated with men.
Most of the (comparatively scarce) historical
and ethnographic documentation on modesty dis-
courses in Muslim West Africa deals with construc-
tions of moral personhood that are related to Sufi
orders (†uruq). In northern Nigeria and Senegal,
modesty, as a capacity and an act of virtue, is espe-
cially valued in aristocratic women, particularly in
the daughters, sisters, and wives of Sufi leaders.
Practicing modesty augments the prestige these
women enjoy on the basis of their genealogical506 modesty discourses
descent and, occasionally, their scholarly erudition.
The scholarly preoccupation with Sufi-based Islam
in West Africa has sometimes led to the assumption
that Sufi-related modesty practices are representa-
tive of constructions of moral and social difference
in West African Muslim societies. There is, how-
ever, considerable historical and regional variation
in the forms and social effects of modesty dis-
courses. The discourses emerge at the shifting inter-
sections between particular regional histories and
broader, sometimes global, processes. Modesty
practices are interrelated with kinship structures
and with the ways these and other social institu-
tions express regionally varying constructions of
gender. Historical reconfigurations of modesty
standards are often related to political economic
transformations which affect women’s opportuni-
ties for public intervention and their capacities to
create themselves as “valuable persons” by means
of income generating activities or gift exchange.
Contemporary discursive constructions of modesty
reveal traces of the changing intertwining of socio-
economic and gender inequalities in nineteenth-
century polities and under colonial and postcolonial
rule. They mirror the social standing of religious
and political authorities who articulate particular
readings of Islamic normative systems. The dis-
courses thus expose different historical trajectories
of the institutionalization of Islamic moral stan-
dards and of their intermingling with non-Islamic
notions of propriety.
Late colonial rule witnessed the invigoration of
debates on female virtue in many territories of West
Africa. These debates revealed that earlier certain-
ties about gender-specific divisions of labor and
realms of political intervention were unsettled.
Notions of female modesty gained a particular
salience insofar as they defined, and were in turn
shaped by, the domestic and public activities in
which women could legitimately engage. Starting in
the mid-1970s, in an atmosphere of widespread dis-
illusionment with the promises of political inde-
pendence, new debates on cultural authenticity and
political autonomy emerged which focused on
women’s embodied propriety. Since then, female
modesty has been of key significance in public con-
troversies over the relationship between national and
religious identities and over the normative founda-
tions of the political community. Rather than
reflecting a neat divide between secularist and so-
called Islamist viewpoints, the controversies reveal
an often fierce competition among protagonists of
various Islamic viewpoints.
Current modesty discourses highlight ideals of
female domesticity; they are closely related to the