**1. Introduction**

One of the most important features of the worldwide Islamic diaspora at the present time is how the socialisation of individuals into Islamic belief and observance operates. How the transnational migration of people, ideas and practices affect modes and methods of socialisation requires careful consideration. This chapter considers such matters in relation to the socialisation of women into Islamic religious observance in a contemporary north-west European context, namely Finland. Any consideration of the relations between Islam, women

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

and gender has to deal with the sometimes controversial issues surrounding Islamic female dress and bodily comportment. This includes types of garments intended to cover parts of the female body in certain ways that are taken to be expressive of Islamic piety. Such clothing objects are often made available to women and their families by a complexly globalised Islamic fashion industry, the latter being part of broader trends towards the appearance of multiple Islamic cultural industries [1]. (For an extensive review of the production and consumption of Islamic garments, see [2]).

important ways in which the broader religious group to which women already belonged, or were about to enter, sought to invite, encourage, and compel those women to dress in certain ways, and thus to act and think in manners felt to be appropriate by the group at large or by the moral leaders within it. Standing behind such micro-level practices of gift-exchange stand a range of macro-level and often transnational factors, including competing interpretations of Islam. Through gift-giving, these interpretations are projected onto material objects, which in turn work as subtle but compelling tools of socialisation of individuals into community

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

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Garments, as material objects invested through gift-giving with deep religious significance, are taken out of both the capitalist commodity economy and the realm of the globalised Islamic fashion system, and come to operate within more localised moral economies characteristic of particular migrant and convert groups. This allows us to focus on a relatively under-researched area, that of the micro-politics of Islamic veiling within communities, in contrast to much of the academic literature, which often focuses on Islamic cultural industries and the intrusion of macro-level politics into everyday life [4–5, 8]. We also show the ongoing relevance of Mauss's ideas about gift-giving for understanding phenomena of religious

Since the initial publication in 1925 of Mauss's *Essai sur le don* (translated into English as *The Gift*) [3], there has been a huge amount of critical responses to his claims about the roles played by gifts in human societies, some being sympathetic extensions of his arguments, others involving sometimes severe refutations of the work on theoretical or empirical grounds [9]. Nonetheless, the central arguments remain influential in understanding how gifts operate

The general thrust of Mauss's argument is that the phenomenon of the gift is highly ambivalent. Gifts operate in the socio-psychological spaces that exist between sets of opposed values: kindness and aggression, disinterestedness and self-interest, cooperation between individuals and conflict between them, care for others and endeavours to control them, giving away wealth and making personal gain, the power of the giver over the receiver (and vice versa), inner volition and social obligation and interior piety and the social display of virtue [10, 11]. Gifts are uneasily, yet dynamically, located within a complex social-psycho-

For Mauss, in most if not all societies, a great deal of 'everyday morality is concerned with the question of obligation and spontaneity in the gift' [3]. On this view, the act of one person giving a gift to another is at one level a spontaneous and self-willed act of kindness, and may very well be experienced as such by the giver. But the giving and receiving of gifts is a social, rather than individual-psychological, phenomenon *par excellence.* Gifts, 'which are in theory voluntary, disinterested and spontaneous … are in fact obligatory and interested … the gift [may be apparently] generously offered … [but] the transaction itself is [in fact] based

norms and relations.

socialisation.

logical terrain.

**2. Thinking about gift-giving**

within particular social contexts.

Garments conventionally associated with Islamic observance are important tools for socialising individual women into the expectations of Islamic faith, as these are held by both local and transnational religious groupings. Garments can of course be used by women as means of individualisation and resistance to group norms [2]. Here, by contrast, we will focus on the means whereby such sartorial objects are used by representatives of religious groups to encourage females to adopt certain kinds of practices, which are thought to be expressive of the religious norms of a given community.

A potentially powerful means of socialisation and persuasion in this regard is the act of giftgiving. We focus on what happens, or what is intended to happen, when one woman gives another the gift of some sort of Islamic garment. When such an object is rendered as a gift, it brings with it a set of obligations on the part of the receiver, and these obligations function as often potent means of ensuring acceptance of group norms as to acceptable and unacceptable visual appearance and behaviour. We consider the obligatory nature of gifts, which pull recipients into a broader social system (here, observance of religious rules and community norms), in light of Marcel Mauss's classical anthropological work on the institution of giftgiving [3].

Since Mauss's time, gift-giving has been widely acknowledged by social scientists as an important form of socialisation. For Islamic people today, gift-giving is tied up in various ways with diaspora, migration, and the Islamic fashion industry [4, 5]. Life in diaspora contexts necessarily transforms the ways a religious or ethnic community operates, creating new practices that may be different from those back in the country of origin. Younger generations are engaged in different sorts of religious practices from earlier generations, as well as creating newer forms of gift-giving. One major innovation here is the ubiquity of giving low-cost Islamic garments, often with the aim of recruiting new believers into religious observance. The low prices of such garments are made possible by the ready availability of them made possible by the globalisation of the Islamic fashion industry [1]. The easy access to clothing of this sort makes some women's wardrobes so large that charitable gift-giving becomes not just possible, but instead a practical necessity, as well as a religious imperative, as we will see below.

The empirical material that we consider here is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork carried out by one of the authors (Almila) in 2011–2012 among Islamic diaspora groupings in Finland [6]. The particular groups in question are Finnish-born converts to Islam, and Iraqi Shi'a and Somali Sunni migrants to Finland.1 In each case, gift-giving and gift-receiving functioned as

<sup>1</sup> Migration of these ethnic groups into Finland is a relatively recent phenomenon [7], and all the women cited here are first generation immigrants.

important ways in which the broader religious group to which women already belonged, or were about to enter, sought to invite, encourage, and compel those women to dress in certain ways, and thus to act and think in manners felt to be appropriate by the group at large or by the moral leaders within it. Standing behind such micro-level practices of gift-exchange stand a range of macro-level and often transnational factors, including competing interpretations of Islam. Through gift-giving, these interpretations are projected onto material objects, which in turn work as subtle but compelling tools of socialisation of individuals into community norms and relations.

Garments, as material objects invested through gift-giving with deep religious significance, are taken out of both the capitalist commodity economy and the realm of the globalised Islamic fashion system, and come to operate within more localised moral economies characteristic of particular migrant and convert groups. This allows us to focus on a relatively under-researched area, that of the micro-politics of Islamic veiling within communities, in contrast to much of the academic literature, which often focuses on Islamic cultural industries and the intrusion of macro-level politics into everyday life [4–5, 8]. We also show the ongoing relevance of Mauss's ideas about gift-giving for understanding phenomena of religious socialisation.
