LAURA PEARL KAYA City University of New York

The criterion of consistency:

Womens self-presentation at Yarmouk University, Jordan

A B S T R A C T
In the late 20th century, for the rst time, higher education became an attainable goal for Jordanian women of all backgrounds, and Jordanian universities became vibrant, coed public spaces. The rst-generation-female college students who enter these spaces take relational traditions of female identity construction that developed in intimate settings and adapt them for use in large-scale, anonymous environments. Identities based on relationships are reied for exchange in a public sphere, and imperatives that had seemed to keep women in a private realm are transformed as women move in public space. After exploring the meanings of womens dress at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan, I conclude with remarks on the implications of my study for the headscarf debate in France. [dress, identity, gender, consistency, public space, Islamism, the Middle East]

ur was a sophomore at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan, when her older brother, also a Yarmouk student, decided that she must wear a headscarf. He was a serious Muslim; thus, as is common in Irbid, he saw it as his duty to make sure that his sisters, for whom he was responsible, followed their religion. It embarrassed him for his colleagues to see Nur, the sister of a man they knew to be religious, on campus without a scarf. Nurs parents allowed that her brother had the right to make this decision. Nurs opinion was not considered; she was told in no uncertain terms that she must wear a scarf. Ironically, however, the scarf itself contributed signicantly to Nurs growing reputation as immoral. Nur did not dare to out her brothers authority, but she resented his decision deeply. Nurs appearance was important to her. She enjoyed attracting attention with her clothing and makeup and felt that her thick, straight hair was a particular asset. When I complimented her hair shortly after she had taken up the scarf, she told me wryly, A lot of good it does me now. In an attempt to comfort her, some friends asserted that she was just wearing a scarfshe was not being forced to change her whole style of dress. In hurt tones, Nur reported to me, Thats not true, you know. Many of her favorite outts were now off-limits. Among my acquaintances in Jordan, the idea that wearing a scarf also necessitated wearing clothing with long sleeves and high necks was uncontroversial. Previously, Nur had opted for short sleeves and scoop necks whenever the weather allowed. For the summer months, Nur needed a whole newand, she felt, less attractive wardrobe. Despite Nurs sense of sacrice, however, many of her classmates were far from impressed by these concessions. Nurs modied style of dress still included form-tting Lycra pants and tight shirts of imsy material that ended at her waist rather than masking her hips. Paired with a headscarf, these clothes attracted much more negative attention and comment than her previous style of dress had done. Whereas before, she had

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 526538, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2010 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01270.x

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been merely immodest, now she was a hypocrite. Even women who did not cover their heads described her outts with scorn. She did not respect the hijab (Muslim covering) or looked like she was hiding something.1 I was assured on several occasions that women like herwho continued to reveal their body shapes after they had taken up the scarfwere the worst ones, those most likely to engage in illicit relationships with men. (This claim was also made about Islamists, as I discuss below.) My protests that Nur had been forced to wear the scarf against her will did not mitigate these assessments. Although many friends felt sympathy with her situation, they did not allow that it justied a form of dress that they judged highly improper. If a woman wears a scarf, they believed, she must pair it with appropriate clothing, regardless of her personal opinions and preferences. In this article,2 I discuss how Islamist and non-Islamist women students at Yarmouk University present consistent identities through their clothing.3 I argue that, through dress and adornment, relationships are reied to construct personhood and personal identity. I examine what worn signs express about informants conceptions of themselves as well as the semiotic practices that informants employ. I also show how the performance of identities can succeed or fail.4 In fact, the failure of identity claims proves to be the most useful ethnographic evidence of how these claims, and, hence, selves, are structured. As I show, the semiotic practice of consistencyNurs failure at which made her the subject of gossipcomprises one of the most important forms of evidence that informants use to support their assertions of identity. The system of signication that I describe has developed as a result of the increasing acceptance of womens higher education in Jordan and the consequent growth of socially diverse, coed college campuses. Jordans rst university opened in 1962; between 1970 and 1996, college enrollment increased more than twenty-ve-fold (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2003). During that time, the nations female university population rose from 1,394 to 52,934 (UNESCO Institute for Statistics 2003). In the 1970s, informants told me, womens attendance at universities was highly controversial. Many families would not allow their daughters to take a public bus to a nearby town for class, let alone to live in a dormitory at a more distant university. According to conventional wisdom at that time, women should stay near home, they should avoid mixed-sex environments, and they should not sleep away from the protection of their male relatives. Such spatial dictates intimately bound concern for womens safety with issues of reputation (see Ghannam 2002; Wikan 2008). Nevertheless, by 1998, female students were in the majority at Yarmouk (Yarmouk University 2003). When I conducted my research between 2000 and 2005, although public high schools were gender segregated and the desirability of womens employment, es-

pecially after marriage, was widely debated, womens presence at coed universities was generally seen as positive both for individual women and for society. In this article, I investigate how Jordanian women adapted traditions of identity construction to suit their new surroundings. Cynthia Nelsons 1974 Public and Private Politics is usually considered to be the seminal article on Arab womens public roles and identities. As Nelson demonstrated, women have always inuenced public life in the Middle East. Nevertheless, two key features distinguish many Arab womens identities from public identities as these are usually conceived. Firstly, the identities of both women and men are often constructed relationally, in gender-specic ways (Abu Lughod 1986; Boddy 1989; Joseph 1999; vom Bruck 1997). Womens identities depend both on the particular context in which they are represented and on long-term relationships to specic people. They thus may not be easily readable in a generic public space. Secondly, ethnographers have reported segregated social worlds (Nelson 1974:559) in many Middle Eastern societies; the social world of women is often understood as private in relation to that of men. For Arab women, presenting a respectable identity has often meant claiming protection from specic men and avoiding others. As Willy Jansen writes, in Algeria, women who work as prostitutes, wash the dead, perform magic, do not veil, hold jobs, or attend a university or mosque are often considered immoral, an attribution that is expressed in phrases like She has no husband, She has no father, Her father is blind, and She was bewitched by her husband (1987:6). Womens claims to be appropriately situated socially are often made through dress; the modesty or embellishment of womens clothing can make complex statements about deference, relatedness, marital status, class hierarchy, ethnicity, or interpersonal relationships that make reference both to present interlocutors and absent kin (Abu Lughod 1986; Boddy 1989; vom Bruck 1997). So, for example, Lila Abu Lughods Egyptian Bedouin informants wore black headscarves in front of respected men to signify their married status, and Gabrielle vom Brucks Yemeni interlocutors displayed makeup and jewelry at all-female gatherings for the same purpose. Although the meaning of styles or items of clothing varies greatly from place to place, it usually depends on reference to a shared social context in which a woman displays known kin relationships to her acquaintances. Whereas women represent themselves and their families in female society (cf. Meneley 1996), they often do not present individual identities in ofcial contexts open to strangers or men outside their families. For example, rural Jordanian families of my acquaintance did not print the brides name on wedding invitations, instead identifying her as a daughter of her father. Such families considered it improper to expose a womans name in printed

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announcements. Guests learned which daughter was going to be married through word of mouth, if they were close enough to the family to do so. For similar reasons, Joseph Massad (2001:8990) reports, early in the 20th century, some Jordanians feared that women teachers would be corrupted by education outside the home and thus would be poor role models for children. Many perceived a contradiction between being a proper woman and functioning in public. As Arlene Macleod (1993) has shown, the veil can be used to solve such problems by symbolically identifying women with the homefemale world even when they must work outside the home, among men. This article extends her work by showing that more complex forms of identication with the family can be communicated through dress in public space. Most of the women students I knew at Yarmouk University veiled, but membership in the coed university community was also signicant to their identities. Coeducation was widely viewed by professors and students as an essential feature of a modern university. Through their presence, women constructed the university as modern and themselves as educated, modern people. Like college students in many parts of the world, my informants explored and dened their identities at Yarmouk. They presented these identities in a gender-mixed social sphere. Nevertheless, the identities that female students put forward at the university reected the importance of relatedness and protection. In this article, then, I show how identities based on kin relationships are reied for exchange in a public sphere and how imperatives that had seemed to keep women in a private sphere are transformed as women move in public space. I conclude with a short comment on the headscarf controversy in France.

during my eldwork while discussing public displays of affection with a Jordanian friend, Samiya. I told her that although Americans do sometimes exhibit sexual behavior in public, this display is also often condemned. She replied, Well, it cant be shameful or people wouldnt do it! I would contend, however, that it is shameful and people, nevertheless, do it. In part, they do so because the willingness to go against social mores can be cast as an expression of authentic feeling. As Niklas Luhmann argues, many symbols of passion displayed in the West can be read in this way. They imply that one is subjected to something, something unalterable and for which one cannot be held accountable (Luhmann 1986:26). Being willing to embarrass yourself and others can demonstrate the strength and authenticity of your love. The same could be said for public displays of anger. Authenticity demands that external signs be produced by internal dispositions, and it assumes that they are. As this ideal is never fully achieved, people expend much effort in trying to disentangle interlocutors real selves from their masks. Erving Goffmans Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) contains many useful examples of this phenomenon. For instance, Goffman writes, in the Shetland Isles, when a neighbor dropped in to have a cup of tea, he would ordinarily wear at least a hint of an expectant warm smile as he passed through the door into the cottage. Since lack of physical obstructions outside the cottage and lack of light within it usually made it possible to observe the visitor unobserved as he approached the house, islanders sometimes took pleasure in watching the visitor drop whatever expression he was manifesting and replace it with a sociable one just before reaching the door. However, some visitors, in appreciating that this examination was occurring would blindly adopt a social face a long distance from the house, thus ensuring the projection of a constant image. [1959:8] Appearing to smile solely to greet a friend is framed as inauthentic and thus mildly shameful. This conception contrasts markedly with the statements of Jordanian informants, who told me that it is of positive moral value to smile at others, as one woman put it, to make them feel that we like them. Goffmans example demonstrates that, in certain circumstances, consistency constitutes important semiotic evidence of authenticity. As it is an open question whether people are adhering to social norms authentically or merely for the sake of form, consistency demonstrates genuine motivation. At the same time, inconsistent adherence to the social norm of conning sexuality to the private realm is also a sign of authenticity. The willingness to incur shame indicates true feeling. Tracing which kinds of consistency

Authenticity
It is useful to begin with some brief remarks about the conception of the person that is assumed in much anthropological work on identity. This prominent Western ideal asserts that the external, presented self should be generated not by social position or pressures but by internal qualities. Lionel Trilling (1971) offers a useful discussion of this principle, which he calls authenticity. Authenticity implies that one should be able to read information about a persons internal states and qualities from his or her self-presentation. This representation should not be constrained by external forces such as society or culture. The importance of this lack of constraint means that some of the most salient signs of authenticity contradict social norms and roles. Trilling writes, Authenticity is implicitly a polemical concept, fullling its nature by dealing aggressively with received and habitual opinion (1971:94). Thus, in the United States, violations of social norms are condemned only equivocally. I became aware of this point

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are important, then, reveals which motivations for action are socially valued. As the above examples show, although people are expected to follow them, social norms are often considered to be an improper motivation for action or selfpresentation in the West. Producing signs of authenticity was not an important constraint for my informants, as will become clear below. Saba Mahmood (2005) provides one possible explanation for this insignicance. Her Islamist informants, she argues, do not enact behaviors because they reect already existing internal states but, rather, undertake them to produce such states. She provides several examples of this phenomenon, including the case of women who wear headscarves not because they feel modest but because they aim to feel modest. Some informants mentioned this potential of headscarf wearing to me, but it was not a primary concern, even among Islamists. Instead, some Islamist women told me that being religious meant not necessarily transforming but, rather, overcoming their aws. For example, one Islamist woman said, I am a hard person (qasiya), but I deal with people according to religion, so Im not like that. If Im annoyed by noise [in the dormitory], for example, I dont say anything. Im better than my personality (shakhsiyati). This woman was not concerned with changing her personality but with suppressing it to obey God. For her, behaviors, not dispositions, are the central goal of Islamist practice. In this context, dress was not a means of gaining modesty but was, rather, a behavior that was required by Islam. As I show below, this requirement follows the logic of other Jordanian practices that employ clothing to signify relationships. Like the Arab women discussed in the earlier literature (reviewed above), who dressed to signify specic relationships, my informants clothing signied and reproduced relationships with othersboth divine and human. Their clothing built connections with those present by signifying the wearers connections with absent others, and it reinforced connections with absent others by representing them to interlocutors who were present. In this way, clothing helped construct selves that were positioned in complex, meaningful ways within a large-scale, anonymous social landscape. Before turning to issues of consistency, I lay out a few of the key principles according to which styles of dress were assessed.

Signs of the self

A well-known Jordanian proverb advises, Eat according to your own tastes, and dress according to the public taste. I initially found this saying surprising because I believed that external signs such as clothing should signify facts about the internal self. To dress according to public taste appeared deceptive to me. When I asked Jordanian informants about the proverbs meaning, they explained that others are more affected by a persons clothing than the

wearer isthey have to look at it. A person thus must dress attractively out of respect for those who will see him or her during the day. One woman, for example, told me that she would not speak to a fellow student who came to the university looking dirty or disheveled. Consideration dictates that a person present a neat and attractive appearance to others. A properly constructed, neat (muratab) appearance indicates that effort and attention have been expended in its pursuit. This effort and attention is enacted as an obligation to the other people whom one will see during the day. The respectful effort that is displayed through a neatly constructed appearance is particularly salient when compared with the way the people I knew in Jordan dressed at home. The contrast between the state in which a woman might be discovered in her home and the way she adorned herself to go outside was stark. At home, most women wore loose, inexpensive housedresses or pajamas, designed only with comfort in mind. Their hair was usually carelessly pulled back or wrapped in an old cotton scarf, and they wore no makeup. Even stains or holes in clothing were sometimes evident. In fact, women received visitors in their homes in the same clothing they wore to sleep; their respect for their visitors was reected in the perfect neatness of their homes rather than their attire. When going out, by contrast, most Jordanian women dressed far more tidily than most Americans. Every hair or fold in their headscarf was in place, their often heavy makeup was never the slightest bit smudged or streaked, regardless of the heat (and despite the poor quality of much of the makeup sold in Jordan, which made this feat even more difcult), and every stitch of their clothing was painstakingly pressed and free of stains or holes. Even teenage boys often shined their shoes every day. To do otherwise would express a rude lack of respect for the people one would meet during the day. A persons dress was understood to be the fulllment of an obligation to others. Specically, clothing must signify the proper attitude toward others, an attitude of consideration. Peoples concern with presenting a generally acceptable appearance was reected in the kinds of comments that were considered polite to make about a persons clothing. In my observation, it was common for acquaintances to comment about each others appearances. If a woman changed some aspect of her presentation beginning to wear makeup or ceasing to wear it, changing her hairstyle, taking up the hijab headscarf, and so onher classmates would offer their opinions about this change. One woman, for example, passing an acquaintance on campus who was uncharacteristically unmade-up, stopped her to ask why she was not wearing makeup. The second student replied that she did not like to wear makeup in the summer heat. Her critic looked at her signicantly and said, Take care. You look very different. Although these women were not closethey knew one another only as classmates

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who studied in the same departmentboth considered the comment appropriate. Remarking on a persons clothing, whether positively or negatively, is considered to be helpful to the person. Standards of attractiveness are understood to be relatively uniform and objective. Offering ones own opinion about an acquaintances outt thus provides useful information; it implies what general opinion may be. Thus, whereas an unsolicited negative comment about ones appearance from a casual acquaintance would be perceived as rude by most Americans, the Jordanians I knew were not offended by such remarks. The imperative to dress attractively is closely tied to clothings role in demonstrating wealth and social class. Informants told me that, in Jordanian society, many people particularly respect the wealthy. People who appear wealthy often receive better service in shops and restaurants. It is thus of practical value for Jordanians to display whatever wealth they have, and many do. Although dressing attractively and neatly was sufcient to ensure polite treatment from others, many women on campus were highly concerned with reading others material status from the quality and variety of their dress. Women often asked one another how much they had paid for their clothes, and a woman who felt that she had not spent enough might lie and present her clothing as more expensive than it was, denying, for example, that she had gotten a discount or purchased an item on sale.5 Clothing that had been purchased used, as much of the clothing worn on campus had, in fact, been,6 lost all of its value to signify statusregardless of its often considerable original valueand wearing it was considered shameful. Value thus stemmed not from the intrinsic worth of the item but from the social relationships through which the item had been acquired. The ability to spend signicant money on clothes had two important implications: family wealth and the paternalistic care of a family that was willing to expend its resources for the sake of a daughters self-presentation. People thus could not be said to display their wealth for others benet (as they dressed attractively for the sake of others), but the display of wealth did gain much of its signicance from representing human relationships. A students display of wealth claimed the respect of near interlocutors by asserting the loving protection of a high-status family.7 In addition to the imperative to appear attractive, an often opposing but also very high value is placed on modesty of dress in the Yarmouk community. The few women students who outed basic standards of modestymost commonly by exposing a small, brief glimpse of their midriffs were widely discussed and condemned, and even shunned by many. Interlocutors read immodest dress as a sign of immorality, which was likely to result from the absence of proper connections to family. This association is demonstrated by the rumors surrounding the most notoriously im-

modest dresser on campus. She was said not only to have no living father or brother but also to be the daughter of a blind woman who was unable to see how her daughter was dressed. The students relationship with her mother, further, was said to be extravagantly improper; she was accused of beating her mother and forcing the old, blind woman to wear immodest clothing. If these rumors are untrue (as seems likely), they, nevertheless, provide a useful allegory for the meaning that the university community read from this students short skirts and bared midriff.8 Like conspicuous consumption, modesty displays proper relationships with paternalistic protectors, who are expected to want to prevent men from looking at their female relatives; like attractiveness, however, modesty is also performed out of respect for ones interlocutors. Dressing immodestly is considered to be tna, a complex concept that may be rendered in English as provocation or sedition. Immodesty is seen to be highly inconsiderate to others, as it may cause them to involuntarily feel sexual arousal, which they may, for religious or moral reasons, prefer to avoid. Fitna in dress can start a chain reaction that could lead to improper sexual behavior and, ultimately, the destruction of family relationships, which many Jordanians feel are the basis of society itself. Thus, tna is not to be taken lightly. Nevertheless, there is a ne lineor, more accurately, a moving, complexly determined, and often contested line between an attractive outt that indicates proper respect for ones interlocutors and the attractiveness that could (disrespectfully) cause tna. The balance between attractiveness and modesty was managed in vastly different ways by different women on campus. Some women covered their faces with black scarves trimmed in amboyant fake fur or allowed platform sandals (with socks for modesty) to peek out from under their full face-and-body black covering; others asserted that even this ornamentation was tna. I was initially surprised when women who wore relatively plain black or neutral clothing and covered their faceswomen who were religiously opposed to adornmentconsistently complimented my fancier makeup, hairstyles, and clothes. They preferred to see me wearing fashionable clothing and makeup rather than more casual dress. Although they would have been happier still, I am sure, if I had adopted Islamic dress, they favored the prettier, dressier outts in my wardrobe. My wearing such clothing was understood to be more respectful to them as my interlocutors. A casual survey of women students at Yarmouk reveals four progressively more conservative categories of dress, each of which appears to resolve the contradiction between attractiveness and modesty in a different way: Women can go bareheaded, cover with a headscarf, wear both a headscarf and a full-length jilbab coat, or add some style of face covering to the combination of jilbab and headscarf.9 These categories were ideologically signicant, though there was

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endless variation in how each could be realized. A womans mode of dress was often used by others to identify her and was considered to be an important fact about her. So, for example, when women met in the all-female environment of the dorm, where scarves and jilbabs were never worn, relatively early in their conversations they would usually discuss the level of covering that they wore outside. They would then use this information to identify one another, saying, for example, Do you know Layla who studies chemistry? She wears a jilbab? Nearly two-thirds of the women at Yarmouk wore headscarves at the time of my eldwork.10 Both the scarves and the clothing women wore along with them varied greatly in elaboration. Every year or so over the period during which I regularly visited Jordan (200005), a new fashion in scarves appeared on campus. Old fashions correspondingly disappeared. Styles varied in fabric (velvet, raw cotton, lace, smooth imitation silk, sporty Lycra blends, gauze), pattern (solids or various prints, ranging from white or black through pastels to bright colors), and shape (long and narrow or square, fringed or plain; alternatively, a head covering could take the form of a pair of tubes slipped over the hair and neck); fashions of tying scarves were equally diverse.11 Although the scarf was not always worn with a jilbab, the jilbab was always worn with a scarf.12 Like the scarf, the jilbab itself could be plain or elaborated. Some jilbabs were quite colorful and mirrored current fashion; for example, I saw one jilbab made of denim. Jilbabs were worn by about half of the women at Yarmouk, whereas approximately 5 percent covered their faces. These numbers appeared to be steadily increasing. Some women paired their headscarves with outts that conformed to international fashions. These varied greatly in modesty. A typical modest outt might consist of a long skirt with a tted shirt of suitably thick fabric, or loose pants matched with a shirt that ended at mid-thigh. Garments were often layered to hide body shape; for example, long sweaters or jackets could be used to mask the hips. Some women wore form-tting Lycra pants and shirts with their headscarves; this pairing, however, was widely considered to be inappropriate.

Consistency
In the opening passages of this article, I describe how Nur failed to present a consistent identity at the university; when she took up the headscarf, she put on long sleeves and high necks but continued to wear form-tting clothing. A graduate student, Tamador, was keen to avoid such mistakes. Tamador normally wore casual, loose pants and shirts and kept her head bare. She dressed neatly but was not particularly interested in clothing. She told me that she

disliked wearing skirts. Near the end of my period of eldwork, however, Tamador was involved in a car accident and had her head partially shaved for medical reasons. She decided to wear a headscarf to cover her baldness and appeared on campus conservatively dressed in a long, loose skirt and scarf. I asked a mutual acquaintance, a young professor named Abdullah, who was popular with the students and who dened himself as nonreligious, if she had any religious reasons for changing her dress. He afrmed that she did not. But, I countered, she is wearing a skirt! I interpreted this additional, appropriate, act of covering as a sign of her internal conviction. Even though I knew that dress did not always reect internal motivations, I still read consistency as an index of authenticity, much like the residents of the Shetland Isles described by Goffman. Abdullah corrected my interpretation. He told me that Tamador wore her skirt merely because it went along with the scarf. I countered that many women on campus wore pants with their headscarves. He asserted that this was wrongthe hijab should be worn with a skirt. Tamadors choice was correct. Nevertheless, he told me, Tamadors lack of conviction would be demonstrated when she took off the scarf, and went back to pants, after her hair grew back. Her consistency in wearing hijab properly was thus unrelated to her motivation for doing so; it was, further, admired even by a nonreligious man who discouraged his own female relatives from wearing hijab at all. The body-masking jilbab coat, worn by approximately half of the women on campus, invoked similar constraints. This coat is considered to be Islamic dress (which should not be confused with dress that indicates membership in the Islamist movement). The range of irreproachable clothing that could be paired with the jilbab was therefore narrower than that which could be worn with a scarf alone. One informant, Raniya, told me that she intended to wear jilbab after graduating from college, but she did not want to do so before then because she enjoyed makeup. She wore a headscarf but considered the level of adornment she paired with it to be inappropriate to the jilbab. Jilbabs should be loose, simple, and dull in color and should be worn with little or no makeup. She admitted that she loved fashion too much to dress in that way while she was still young; she, nevertheless, believed it was right to wear jilbab and would do so when she got older. Until then, she wanted to enjoy dressing up. The scarf and jilbab assert standards to which the wearer is then held in the rest of her dress. These items are signs of a certain kind of identity that should, ethically, motivate other aspects of appearance. To understand the meaning of these dominant and subordinate elements of self-presentation, it is necessary to examine the relationship between these articles of dress and action. To do this, I examine Raniyas views more closely.

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Dress and behavior

At one point during my eldwork, Raniya told me that she wished to end her relationships with her male friends on campus. She felt that they were endangering her reputation. Still, she did not feel free to cut them off. Her obligations to men whom she considered friends required her to continue to talk to them, even at the expense of her good name. Raniya told me that above and beyond her fears for her reputation, she was also convinced that it was against her religion for a woman to associate closely with so many men. She noted stoically that there was nothing she could do about the situation at that point and said that when she graduated from the university and got a job, she would be in a new environment and would have a chance to make decisions about her relationships differently. I was puzzled at Raniyas consternation and pointed out that many women on campus stopped talking to their male friends for religious reasons. Many of my Islamist informants had done this when they decided to commit themselves to their religion. I asked Raniya why she did not renounce her male friends as they had done. She told me that it would be impossible for her to do so without changing her style of dress. Although Raniya did talk to men, she was also serious about her religious duties. She prayed faithfully ve times a day and wore a headscarf with clothes that masked her body shape more completely than those of many other university women. However, she was clearly interested in fashion and wore brightly colored, attractive clothes and heavy makeup. She told me that these clothes were incompatible with the claim that she did not want to talk to men for religious reasons. To blamelessly stop talking to men on religious grounds, she would have to wear a jilbab coat. If she continued to dress fashionably, no one would accept her desire to stop talking to men as legitimately religious or moral. As I have stated, however, she did not want to wear a jilbab because she enjoyed fashion too much. Her love of fashion meant that she must continue her relationships with men to be consistent. She felt constrained to do so until she started dating Wail, who forbade her to talk to other men. This relationship provided her with an acceptable excuse to behave as she had wished. For Raniya, then, taking on the jilbab would be a step parallel in some ways to getting a boyfriend who forbade her to talk to men. Both of these events would provide a context in which it would make sense to change her behavior toward her male friends. Forming a relationship with a man and taking on modest clothing were parallel in one further way: I was told by several informants that, in the recent past, a woman often used to begin to wear a headscarf when she got married. Although this association was no longer commonly enacted among the women I knew, it was widely known. Specic symbolically important items of

modest clothing, then, can signify both a womans commitment to a relationship of protection and obedience and the particular limits she has accepted on her interactions with others. Maintaining a relationship of protection and obedience with family or a boyfriend implies accepting limits on ones relationships with others. Such relationships can be signied by dress. Through symbolically important items of clothing, then, obligations are reied to form an individuals public identity and self-presentation. Clothingthe choice of bare head, headscarf, jilbab, or face coveringasserts a womans acceptance of a specic, publicly recognized, mode of submission to authority. Each mode is associated with a rough set of expectations for a womans behavior and likewise informs men how she expects to be treated. Every woman in Irbid is not held to the same standard of modesty or the same level of restriction in her relationships with men. The rules to which a woman must conform may be determined in different ways. Families make different demands of their female members, depending in part on their own afliations; for example, Nurs brothers identity as an Islamist determined the demands he made on his sisters. Regional origin, class, religiosity, personal tastes or beliefs, and life experiences all contribute to families preferences for their daughters. Women themselves also have different views of modesty and use variedand variously successfulmeans of attaining their families approval to enact their own views. All of these myriad factors are reied in the symbolic category of dress that a woman wears and reected in the behavioral expectations associated with each category. It is impossible to know from a womans dress exactly why she has placed herself in a particular category, and, in fact, in many senses it is not important. It is clear to all what obligations she has thereby accepted.13 Male interlocutors can, to an extent, take their cue for how to deal with a woman from her clothinga useful tool, as the treatment that different women are comfortable accepting can be highly variable. For example, a bare-headed woman can be expected to welcome casual, friendly approaches from her male classmates so long as these overtures are not sexual; a man would need to exercise considerably more caution before approaching a woman who wears jilbab. Men are also widely expected to yihafuz ala women in jilbab, a phrase that can be glossed as protect but that was also translated by one informant as refrain from violatingharassing.14 Whereas some believe that a man should help a woman in jilbab if she is in trouble or give her a seat on the bus, others emphasize that he should avoid harming herprimarily through advances that could be taken as sexual. Wearing the scarf or jilbab is thus an entailing indexical sign (Silverstein 1979). Women have certain rights or obligations because of the act of wearing specic clothing. A mode of dress carries the rights and obligations it does

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because it is a statement to observers of a connection to authority constructed through obedienceincluding obedient dress. Nevertheless, the act of signicationwearing a scarf or jilbabis both sufcient and necessary to claim the identity it implies. As Raniya noted, wearing a jilbab was the only change she would need to make in her life to justify refusing to talk to men for religious reasons. She already prayed regularly and was diligent in her fasting, which many university students were not. These private acts of commitment and obedience did not bear on her relationships with men, however. To claim to be religious, she would have to dress the part. She would have to signify that religiosity to others. The entailing character of these obligations is especially clear in the case of Tamador. She did not wear a headscarf in actual obedience to anyone; she wore it only to cover her shaved head. Nevertheless, by wearing a scarf, Tamador took on the obligation to wear a skirt. Issues of consistency arise because the claims that are invoked by the key symbols of headscarf and jilbab are, in part, performed through the use of other clothing and accessories. Through the twin values of modesty and attractiveness (discussed above), clothing and accessories constrain and enable relationships with interlocutors. Constructing a pleasant appearance makes others want to talk or (as the informant quoted above stated) be willing to talk to an individual. Modesty prevents men from feeling sexually attracted to a woman. Different categories of dress promise different kinds of relationships with men, so they also necessitate clothing that would encourage the appropriate kind of relationships. Thus, although a veil (of whatever type) makes an assertion about how a woman will relate to others, the way she accessorizes this symbolic item constitutes her practice of relating to others. Her headscarf or jilbab makes a promise, but her other clothing fullls this promise. The relationship signied by the veil should rightfully determine how she interacts with people, but her other clothing reveals whether it actually does. Thus, improperly wearing a jilbab or headscarf is an act of hypocrisy. My Islamist informants encouraged me to wear the same clothes they themselves avoided as tna because, when such clothes were not prohibited by other claims, they signaled attractiveness and respect. The makeup that Raniya considered attractive for herself while wearing a headscarf would be inappropriately engaging if she began wearing jilbab because this adornment worked to create the relationships she would be expected (and, in fact, glad) to abandon in jilbab. Raniya wore makeup because she liked it, not because she wished to attract men, but she could not wear attractive makeup and then refuse to talk to men. The makeup itself attracted men and encouraged them to talk to her, a result she could only repudiate when she was able to frame her boyfriend as the audience for her adornment. Conforming ones dress to such key symbols is important, then, because it demonstrates that behavior is gen-

erated by the proper motivation. Relationships with those who are present, constructed through modesty and attractiveness, should conform to an individuals more permanent commitments to authority. Specic types of veil such as the headscarf, jilbab, and face veil signify permanent relationships with authority gures whose actual presence or absence is irrelevant; attractiveness in dress constructs relationships with those people who are present. Consistent dress demonstrates that relationships with present interlocutors are motivated by more permanent commitments to authority.

Obligation to God
I indicate above that a woman may choose a particular type of veil because of her own views. Although this is true, it creates the misleading impression that she veils as a consequence of her own will. In fact, as my argument implies, veiling in Irbid is generally an act of submission to authority. It may signify obedience to an earthly authority such as a brother or husband, or it may be a response to Gods command that a woman cover. Covering constructs a modest identity; in doing so, it implies a relationship with a protector who has asked a woman to be modest. This protector may be God. Almost all of the women I knew in Jordan, whether they personally covered or not, agreed that, according to Islam, God requires women to wear a headscarf.15 My acquaintances were more divided about the necessity of wearing jilbab or face covering. Most people agreed that wearing jilbab, if not required, was encouraged by Islam. The face veil was the most controversial article of clothing, with some asserting that it was required and others that it was not even encouraged. Face veils, in my observation, were only worn by women who were members of the Islamic movement, though not all members of the Islamic movement wore them.16 Older relatives usually reacted with disapproval when young women came to them asserting that Islam demanded that they cover their faces and that they therefore intended to do so. Some people said that they reacted this way for nancial reasons; they expected daughters to repay at least part of their tuitions by working after graduation and knew that women who covered their faces had difculty nding jobs. Some said that families were worried about their daughters marriage prospects. Whatever the motivation, however, most families tried to dissuade their daughters from wearing a face veil. Face veils were, among my acquaintances, always worn for religious, rather than family, reasons. The headscarf and jilbab, then, could be read as signs of submission to family dictates and, hence, adherence to the social order, whereas the face veil was in some sense a sign of rebellion. This association could be seen as problematic,

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because submission to parental authority was universally viewed as an important requirement in Islam, and Islamist women cast themselves as scrupulous followers of Islamic morality. Islam did provide a way out of this dilemma, however, according to informants; people are not required to obey their parents if their parents demands violate Islamic rules. Thus, if (and only if ) the face veil is required (not encouraged) by Islam, a woman does not need her parents permission to wear it. Grudging permission was, nevertheless, usually obtained; women I knew did not wear a face veil if their parents absolutely forbade it. All techniques of persuasion were valid, though, in working toward a religiously mandated goal; I got the impression that many of the face veils on campus had been earned through weeks or months of persistent argument and nagging. To this point, I have glossed women who veiled their faces as a distinct category. In fact, they should properly be considered together with those Islamists who did not cover their faces (many, though not all, of whom were engaged in the process of convincing their parents of the necessity of the face veil). Islamists all adhered to relatively consistent standards of behavior and were known as a distinct category on campus, usually termed the women from the prayer room or committed (multazimat, fem.) or religious (mutadayyinat) women (see N. 3). Although those who wore jilbab did not challenge the status quo in their dress, Islamists asserted that they adhered to Gods dictates before social norms. They wore their coverings in obedience to God, not their families. Like the other categories mentioned, Islamists were marked by their clothes, though in subtler and less absolute ways. Islamists without face veils could usually be distinguished from other jilbab wearers not only by their stringent adherence to simplicity and muted colors but also by certain details that they added to this form of dress. Islamists often wore a skullcap under their scarves (ensuring that hair was fully covered), cuffs to cover their wrists, socks with their sandals, and, in some cases, gloves. Some Islamists wore a particularly modest headscarf, known in Irbid as the yanis, which fell loosely to the waist and fully covered the chin; this scarf could be paired with the face veil, though each was also worn separately. Islamists were also dened by a lack of adornment, which went a long way toward eliminating the markers of wealth from their dress. Thus, they avoided dening themselves either by their family wealth or by their familys willingness to expend resources on them. Again, their dress most strongly professed allegiance to God, not to their families. In contrast to non-Islamist women who wore jilbab, Islamist women committed themselves to minimizing their interactions with men to the greatest possible extent. Such matters varied from person to person; here I provide a rough outline of the relevant distinctions. Women in jilbab usually limited the number of men to whom they spoke and

also the contexts in which they talked to men, conversing with men in situations that could be dened as collegial. For example, they discussed school assignments and engaged in social conversations with men while acting as lab partners or working on art projects. They might choose one or two men with whom to talk at greater length while on campus but did not, as Raniya regretted doing, form a large circle of male friends. Committed women, by contrast, debated whether they should greet their male professors with the Islamically sanctioned greeting As-salamu alaykum when they passed them on campus. They spoke to their professors when strictly necessary and to male students not at all. Just as face covering was not considered compulsory by all, this level of scrupulousness in dealing with men was often judged excessive by non-Islamists. It is because of their claim to strict propriety, I believe, that I often heard the remark that committed women were the worst ones. The reader will recall that this accusation was also leveled against women who wore headscarves with tight clothing. These women were worse than those who wore tight clothing with a bare head, because they had committed themselves to being relatively modest and had failed in this commitment. Islamist women were judged the worst for similar reasons. They had taken on a much greater load of obligation than had any other group in society. Thus, many people considered them highly likely to slip up. Once a contradiction had been established, these critics asserted, there was no longer any limit controlling Islamist womens behavior.

Systemic inconsistency
The system described above appeared to function well, but the existence of the Islamist category, in part, demonstrates its fundamental inconsistency. On the one hand, women who conformed their behavior and style to the assertions made by their category of dressbare headed, headscarf, jilbab, or Islamistcould avoid the criticism that they were inconsistent. On the other hand, inconsistency pervaded the whole system; the only two really consistent positions were the extremessecularism and commitment. Womens use of the headscarf illustrates this point. A headscarf signies commitments that all of the women I knew in Jordan accepted, regardless of class or style of dress submission to God (whether Muslim or Christian) and obedience to authority gures such as parents, older brothers, and husbands. As I have argued, standards of dress for women who covered their heads were different from those for women who did not. What actually differed, however, was not which clothes were permissible but how strongly impermissible clothes were condemned. Most people actually considered clothing approved for women who covered preferable for all women. Wearing a scarf with improper clothing merely emphasized the conict inherent in

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such clothes to begin with. Most people felt that a Muslim woman and a good daughter should not wear clothing that exposed the shape of her body.17 A similar analysis could be made of the restrictions surrounding the jilbab; both the item of clothing itself and the restrictions surrounding it were generally considered by most people to be more properly Islamic than the headscarf alone. Most people I knew in Jordan disapproved of the restrictions that were implied by the face veil, but many of those who rejected these rules nevertheless feared that they might be religiously correct. Many religious scholars at the university asserted that Islam did not allow men and women to work together and thus to socialize as colleagues. The university itself, they told me, was not an Islamically sound institution. Others, when pressed on this point, would often concede. The world today, they afrmed, is not constructed according to Islamic dictates. People must be practical and live in the world they were born into; God, some told me, does not require people to cloister themselves from their society or to sacrice their quality of life. Nevertheless, Jordanian society was not ideal. There, to pursue some Islamically sanctioned values, such as university education for both men and women, it was necessary to sacrice others, such the prevention of the mixing of the sexes. As one jilbab-wearing, non-Islamist woman told me, she would not cut off her friendly but formal relationships with her male colleagues, because she wanted to experience university life in all of its details (kul at-tafasil). Talking to men, she implied, was not actually allowed by God, but it was part of university life. To avoid men after having decided to go to the university would be self-defeating. Her comments echoed those of the one avowed secularist I knew at the university, Abdullah, who told me he had adopted this position because religion was not consistent with modern life. The meaning of the word secularism is quite different in Jordan than it is in the United States, where it is possible to make the assertion that one is both devout in ones religion and a secularist. In Jordan, secularism often seems akin to atheism. As I conrmed in the over 30 interviews with students, faculty, and Irbid residents in which I broached this topic, secularism is almost universally considered to violate Islam. Secularism, I was told, means conning religion to the space of worship and ignoring Gods commands for daily life, both individual and communal. These issues became clear to me in a conversation I had with Abdullah. Abdullah presented himself interchangeably as nonreligious or secular. He also said that he was agnostic. Though Muslim on his identity card, he observed no religious obligations and ostentatiously ate in front of others during Ramadana very unusual practice.18 Abdullah told me that in his younger years he had been somewhat religiously observant. Like many Jordanians, he had been tortured by the

inconsistency between his religion and the other elements of his life. He had obsessed over his ablutions, fearful that he would perform them improperly and go outside in an unclean state. Finally, he had decided that the only way to resolve this inconsistency was to give up his religion entirely. To be a consistent, practicing Muslim in todays world, he told me, was impossible. So, I asked him, you dont care whether God exists or not. He stopped for a moment and then admitted, I dont spend much time thinking about it, no. The question for him was not whether Islam was true but whether it was consistent. If it was impossible to live consistently as a Muslim, he did not wish to follow Islam at all. Thus, he told me, he escaped the guilt that plagued most Jordanians. For Abdullah, then, the imperative to obey God and the inconsistency of not doing so did not follow either from Gods existence or from a persons belief in Gods existence. Instead, it was the consequence of an individuals own behavior. If Abdullah claimed to obey God in some of his actions, such as ablutions, he obliged himself to obey God consistently. That he could not do so gnawed at him. When Abdullah severed his relationship with God, he was able to drink alcohol and eat at Ramadan without guilt and with no regard for Gods opinion on the matter. I told Abdullah that Islamists had resolved the same issue in the other direction; they had chosen to consistently observe Gods commands. Though he had often expressed his disapproval of them to me, Abdullah agreed that their position was more consistent than that of most people on campus.

Conclusion
It would clearly be a mistake to generalize from my informants at Yarmouk to headscarf wearers in other contexts or countries. The meaning of the headscarf in Jordan says little, for example, about its meaning in France. Nevertheless, observers often make this type of mistake; as John H. Bowen writes, during various debates over the issue of permitting the headscarf in public spaces, such as schools, in France, commentators consider themselves justied in looking to events in any one Muslim society as evidence for the general nature of Islamismand for what may likely happen in France (2007:182). For this reason, it is interesting to consider how the actions and views of my informants might speak back to the French prohibitions. The French headscarf debates are motivated in part by an individualism that, although distinct, bears a family resemblance to the discourses of authenticity I discuss above. In the French context, individualism is linked to the republican conception of citizenship. The French model asserts that each citizen should participate in the state as an independent individual. French republicanism looks with suspicion on loyalties to institutions other than the state; if these loyalties are too strong, they are feared as

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markers of communalism. Strong communal ties are believed both to divide the nation and to create inequality (see Bowen 2007:155181). To avoid the specter of communalism, individuals [must] freely choose their afliations (Bowen 2007:185) and thus be able to alter them at will; any form of compulsion or even inuence, such as family or social pressure, is cast as dangerous. Just as the authentic individual should not be swayed by social demands in his or her self-presentation, so the republican citizen should choose his or her connections independently. Joan Wallach Scott points out, The basis for French republican theory is the autonomous individual who exists prior to his or her choices of lifestyle, values, and politics; these are but external expressions of a xed inner self (2007:127). The choice of afliation expresses an inner self that is very similar to Americans authentic self. The French version, however, emphasizes that this self can and must [exist] prior to any external inuence (Scott 2007:128). It is not only important that the individual choose freely at the moment; prior inuence that may have altered the nature of the inner self and its choice is also at issue. The U.S. form of individualism often leads to the simple conclusion that women should wear a headscarf if they want to; in Bowens words, the U.S. view assumes the possibility of choosing (2007:232) and therefore aspires to protect a range of different choices. The question is more complex in the French case, as the conditions surrounding a decision must be determined before the decision is respected. In France, Bowen argues, the headscarf question is considered in the context of two related assumptions about the scarfs meaning, both of which stem from the republican conception of the self. Firstly, the headscarf is read as a symbol of afliation. When my informants in Jordan discussed current events in France, they expressed puzzlement at the French assertion that the headscarf was a symbol of religious afliation; when the headscarf is worn for religious reasons, they said, it is worn in obedience to Gods command, not as a public expression of Muslim identity (cf. Bowen 2007:187). I would add that when the scarf does display afliation at Yarmouk, it displays an attachment not to a corporate body . . . [that stands] between the state and citizens (Bowen 2007:160) but, rather, to paternalistic protectors such as fathers, brothers, husbands, or perhaps boyfriends. In the republican view, this kind of family afliation should be contained in the private sphere. Bowen paraphrases the most successful argument against allowing the scarf in public schools: Girls who refuse to wear the voile are told they should wear it and thus are oppressed even within the school (2007:209). Patriarchal relations can be tolerated in private but they should not be brought into a public space such as the school, where citizens are autonomous and equal. For my informants, however, this view is nonsensical. As I argue above, the headscarf is not the only piece

of attire that expresses family afliations and submission to patriarchal authority: All decent clothing does so. Dressing within social norms of modesty asserts connections to protective men. My informants were proud of such connections and gained respect from their peers by claiming them through their dress. As I note above, the most conspicuously immodest woman on campus prompted extravagant speculation about her lack of proper family ties. Secondly, French republicanism asserts, afliations must be judged according to whether they are the product of a free choice. Thus, to determine whether the headscarf should be banned, the French ask whether the decision to wear it was made with or without external inuence (Bowen 2007:188; Scott 2007:135). If a brother requires his sister to wear the scarf, then her choice is not free; if the order comes from God, the determination is murkier (see Bowen 2007:176; Scott 2007:140145). This obsession with the circumstances of decision making also contrasts sharply with the common view at Yarmouk. The act of choice is precisely what is occluded by my informants dress; they do not communicate the process of deciding what level of modesty to follow but merely their conformity to the code that they have chosen. Nur exhibited her brothers coercion by pairing tight pants with a headscarf; this exhibition was condemned as improper by a range of people, many of whom, as a separate matter, disapproved of her brothers control. In part, her mistake was in displaying the struggle at home on her person. Tamador carefully concealed that she wore a scarf for cosmetic reasons by matching it with the correct modest attire; this decision was generally approved on campus. For my informants, the correctness of any style of dress stems not from the specic reason a person wears it but, rather, from the way that it is realized. They assumed that a womans family has given their approvalgrudging, encouraging, or coercedfor her level of modesty; the process through which this occurred is private. A womans proper enactment of her style of modestynot the style itselfreects her acceptance of the agreement she has made with her family and, thus, of male authority. By dressing consistently, Yarmouk students demonstrate that they are encumbered in Michael Sandels (1984; see also Scott 2007:125) sense; they are not the autonomous republican citizens of the French ideal. Instead, they have loyalties and convictions, such as membership in a family, that are inseparable from understanding [themselves] as the particular persons [they] are (Sandel 1984:90). These loyalties and convictions inuence their decisions, including their choice of dress. A female Yarmouk student is presumed to have chosen her mode of dressbare head, headscarf, jilbab coat, or face veilin consultation with her family and in consideration of her familys history, beliefs, reputation, class, and connections, among other factors. For many French commentators, this account might

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support objections to the veil; I have not exactly denied that, as French feminist Yvetter Roudy asserts, the foulard is the sign of subservience, whether consensual or imposed, in fundamentalist Muslim society (Bowen 2007:209). Nevertheless, the possibility must be considered that, as Sandel writes, to imagine a person incapable of constitutive attachments such as these is not to conceive an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth (1984:90). The particular types of attachments that my informants have may be objectionable to French tastes, but such attachments are precisely the kinds of things that people cannot fully pick and choose.

Notes
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Fulbright-Hayes and the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman for funding the research that led to this article. Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Karen Hebert, Webb Keane, Alexander D. Knysh, Erik A. Mueggler, Edward Murphy, Bhavani Raman, and Andrew Shryock provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. 1. In the literature on the Middle East, the word hijab is often translated as headscarf, but it can also indicate any clothing worn for the purpose of religiously motivated modesty. In Irbid, the word hijab was more often used with the latter meaning, and headscarves were most often called isharb (scarf) in generic contexts (Does your new friend wear a scarf?) or else named according to their style. It would not, however, make sense to accuse a person of failing to respect the scarf, which is an article of clothingpeople, rather, respect the institution, hijab. 2. This article is based on a total of approximately two years of research in Jordan conducted between 2000 and 2005 and funded by Fulbright-Hays and the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman. 3. The term Islamist exists in Arabic but was not used in my presence by any Yarmouk student. I have chosen it because it is common in the literature on this topic and, to my knowledge, inoffensive to most Muslims. The word Islamist, in scholarly contexts, usually means a Muslim who is politically committed to creating an Islamic society and state; this denition applies to my informants, although their political activity is beyond the scope of this article. On campus, Islamists were most commonly called committed (multazimin, masc. and, thus, gender inclusive). 4. See Keane 1997 on the hazard of semiotic performances. 5. This cultural difference between the United States and the Middle East, broadly conceived, actually rst became salient to me in eighth grade, when an Israeli fellow student attempted to insult me by shouting, You bought your clothes on sale! I found this insult bafing as, in my highly status-conscious New York private school, buying on sale was, if anything, a positive value. The important thing was to get the right labels; doing this cheaply was the mark of a savvy consumer. 6. My genuine enthusiasm for the wonderland of foreign used clothing available at outdoor markets throughout Jordan elicited confessions from nearly all of my acquaintances of every social background that they had at one time or another bought used. 7. Unni Wikan reports a somewhat similar case among her informants in Cairo. There, men like to complain that women rush off to the sh market when the sh is at its most expensive just so they

can boast to the neighbors, See what my husband has given me! (Wikan 1996:118). 8. This students sister, whom I knew slightly, told me that their mother was German, which, as an explanation for their difference, t much better with my own preconceptions. 9. Throughout this article, I use the terms jilbab, niqab, and khimar as they are used in Irbid (see N. 16 for further discussion of the clothing items these terms designate). These words have histories in Islamic discourse that predate the garments to which they now refer in Irbid and elsewhere. For this reason, they are widely used in the Islamic world and are attributed different specic referents in different places. The reader should be careful to note the meanings that these terms have here. 10. I never conducted a statistical study of the popularity of different forms of dress at Yarmouk; however, I often counted the number of women wearing different styles of dress as I walked around campus as well as the number of scarved women pictured in the university yearbook. This method is less accurate than it might sound because more-modest women may be less likely to wish to be photographed for the yearbook. From these informal surveys, I gained a sense of how many women wore each type of clothing. 11. Conservative dressers avoided brighter scarves, opting, instead, for more subdued styles such as plain white polyester or pastel prints. Even these styles exhibited a degree of fashion, however, as pastel patterns were mostly replaced by white scarves on campus between 2000 and 2004; older women in Irbid, however, could still be seen wearing pastels. The various forms of conservative clothing increased in popularity over the course of my eldwork; near the end of my eldwork, though, I was surprised to observe the appearance of a series of scarves that were completely transparent, allowing the hair underneath to be clearly seen. Women who liked these styles but wished to remain more modest wore them over lace or, more conservatively, over opaque white scarves. 12. The jilbab was considered to represent an identity category, as did the headscarf and face veil, but to a far greater extent than these other coverings, it could be worn or discarded for instrumental reasons. Some women wore jilbab only in certain weather or only in certain environments, such as the university. Putting on the jilbab could entail a change in identity category, then, but this association could also be disclaimed. It was more difcult to disclaim the category associated with wearing a scarf or face veil. 13. I do not mean by this claim to assert that there is no difference in standard between women within the same category or that there is no overlap among categories. Rather, these identity categories provide a rough idea to interlocutors of what they may expect from a given woman. 14. This concept is controversial, as many would argue that men should yihafuz ala all women, not just those who wear certain clothes. This distinction depends in part on the denition of protection. 15. This assertion is not accepted by all Muslims, but it was accepted by all of the women I knew in Irbid except one. She had majored in Islamic law and thus was well read enough to make her own interpretations. 16. Face covering came in two main styles, the niqab, which revealed the eyes, and the khimar, which covered them. The niqab was usually white and paired with a neutral-colored jilbab; the khimar tended to be black and worn with a black jilbab. Women who wore khimar were not scrupulous about hiding their eyesall, as far as I know, uncovered their eyes while in classand there appeared to be little ideological difference between the two outts. 17. I do not mean to imply that tight clothing was always or even often disapproved by a womans actual family, just that many

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peopleparticularly those who were not wealthy and did not live in the cosmopolitan neighborhood of West Ammanfelt that it should be. 18. Eating in public during Ramadan is illegal in Jordan. Ramadan changes the rhythm of life for everyone, as most workplaces, including the university, government ofces, police stations, and most retail stores, change their schedules to accommodate fast breaking. Not everyone fasts, but those who do not usually eat less than usual during the day to join in the fastbreaking feast, and they avoid eating in front of those who may be fasting. Abdullah was the only person of Muslim origin I met in Jordan who ate regular meals during Ramadan and did not attend his familys fast breaking.

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accepted December 16, 2009 nal version submitted January 5, 2010 Laura Pearl Kaya School of Professional Studies City University of New York 365 5th Avenue New York, NY 10016 laura.pearl@gmail.com

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