Veils, Turbans, and Islamic Reform in Northern Nigeria [Paperback]

Veils, Turbans, and Islamic Reform in Northern Nigeriatells the story of Islamic reform from the perspective of dress, textile production, trade, and pilgrimage over the past 200 years. As Islamic reformers have sought to address societal problems such as poverty, inequality, ignorance, unemployment, extravagance, and corruption, they have used textiles as a means to express their religious positions on these concerns. Home first to the early indigo trade and later to a thriving textile industry, northern Nigeria has been a center for Islamic practice as well as a place where everything from women's hijabs to turbans, buttons, zippers, short pants, and military uniforms offers a statement on Islam. Elisha P. Renne argues that awareness of material distinctions, religious ideology, and the political and economic contexts from which successive Islamic reform groups have emerged is important for understanding how people in northern Nigeria continue to seek a proper Islamic way of being in the world and how they imagine their futuresspiritually, economically, politically, and environmentally.

Elisha P. Renne is Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is author ofThe Politics of Polio in Northern Nigeriaand editor ofVeiling in Africa.

The topic of Islamic dress in Nigeria is very rich, complicated by gender, global-local networks, politics, the economy, successive waves of religious reform, and a vibrant, multiethnic society with a strong history of using dress to craft and perform identities. I applaud Elisha Renne for her objectivity and nuanced approach to this politically charged subject.

A detailed study of clothing of men and women in northern Nigeria in all its complexity, from underwear on out.

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Material Religion and Islamic Reform in Northern Nigeria

2. Islamic Dress, Tlƒ,