Islam and the Veiling of Women in the Arab World

This book is neither an ethnographic study of veiling among various groups of women in the Arab world, nor does it aim at “defending” or “rejecting” the legitimacy of female veiling as practiced among Muslims. Rather, the main objective of the current monograph is to delineate the transformations of female veiling and its perception as religious and social practice among Muslims during the last century against the backdrop of the prevailing conceptualizations in academic scholarship and intellectual discourses. Pursuing that task, the book re-reads relevant foundational sources of Islamic normativity and foregrounds key exemplars from the modern Arab world to analyze and (re-)conceptualize the connection between contemporary practices and classical religious and social regulations.