The Hijab as Gift: Mechanisms of Community Socialisation in the Muslim Diaspora

In the worldwide Islamic diaspora today, how does the socialisation of women into Islamic belief and observance operate? This chapter considers such matters in the contemporary Finnish context. It deals with issues of bodily comportment and types of garments intended to be expressive of Islamic piety, and made available by the globalised Islamic fashion industry. The focus is on the means whereby sartorial objects are used to encourage females to adopt certain kinds of practices, thought to be expressive of the religious norms of particular diasporic communities. Attention is directed to what happens when one woman gives another woman an Islamic garment as a gift. The gift brings with it a set of obligations on the part of the receiver, which functions as often potent means of ensuring acceptance of group norms as to acceptable and unacceptable visual appearance and behaviour. We discuss this with reference to Marcel Mauss’s classical anthropological work on the institution of gift-giving. It is found that Mauss’s original insights continue to be valuable for understanding socialisation processes in globalised, diaspora contexts today.