Islamicate Textiles: Fashion, Fabric, and Ritual - Softcover

Shirazi, Faegheh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350291269 ISBN 13: 9781350291263

Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025

Synopsis

Textiles and clothing are interwoven with Islamic culture. In Islamicate Textiles, readers are taken on a journey from Central Asia to Tanzania to uncover the central roles that textiles play within Muslim-majority communities.

This thematically arranged book sheds light on the traditions, rituals and religious practices of these regions, and the ways in which each one incorporates materials and clothing. Drawing on examples including Iranian lion carpets and Arabic keffiyeh, Faegheh Shirazi frames these textiles and totemic items as important cultural signifiers that, together, form a dynamic and fascinating material culture. Like a developing language, this culture expands, bends and develops to suit the needs of new generations and groups across the world.

The political significance of Islamicate textiles is also explored: Faegheh Shirazi's writing reveals the fraught relationship between the East – with its sought-after materials and much-valued textiles – and the European countries that purchased and repurposed these goods, and lays bare the historical and contemporary connections between textiles, colonialism, immigration and economics. Dr Shirazi also discusses gender and how textiles and clothing are intimately linked with sexuality and gender identity.

About this title

About the Author

Faegheh Shirazi is a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the The University of Texas at Austin, USA. Her research interests include textiles, dress, gender identity discourse, and material culture in the Middle East; the meanings of veiling; rituals and rites of passage as they relate to material culture.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350291269
• ISBN 13: 9781350291263
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208