Rising East Online

Hijab in the Hood: Religion, Pop Culture and Public Policy

—Andrew Calcutt

The streets of East London now resound with two fashion statements: the hood and hijab. The first, as worn by ‘hoodies’, is an in-yer-face, hide-my-face declaration of rhetorical criminality. It says of the wearer to persons unknown: you’d better watch out, I’m the kind of character who needs to stay in the shade and off (security) camera. It is the equivalent of parental advisory warnings on the cover of rap records, except that, rather than designation as such by record company executives, hoodies select themselves as bad and bad taste.

The hood rhymes with the established, criminal imaginary of what was once called ‘black youth culture’, but it is a new variation. Before the recent requirement for respectable persons to present themselves hatless and hoodless for the benefit of CCTV, putting your hood up, rain or shine, was as uncool as tucking your shirt into your underpants. Now it is the sign of a potential outlaw.

The second hide-my-face declaration is the hijab, as worn by increasing numbers of young Muslim women (there is a third, the cyclist’s anti-pollution mask, but this is more characteristic of the West End). Whereas the hood is a recent variation in a rhetoric of sexual as well as criminal display, hijab is taken up and is widely taken to be the means of protecting a woman’s modesty in accordance with longstanding religious tradition (I am taking ‘hijab’ to mean the general principle of dressing modestly, encompassing not only hijab as headscarf but also niqab, where the face is covered with only eyes showing, and jilbab, where face covering is supplemented by full-length clothing).

However, I shall make the immodest suggestion that religious tradition is the new rock’n’roll, while in the current context religious clothing is a kind of (anti-) fashion. This is to suggest that, while formally continuous, religion is really an ongoing process of re-making in the image, not of a timeless divinity, but of changing, human circumstances – not only the ‘invention of tradition’, but continuous re-invention in response to specific, historical contexts. In which case, insofar as more young women are adopting it, hijab can be properly seen as an aspect of youth culture, derived like the hood from a secular conjuncture but taking a form which might be described as sect-ular (sacred) rather than sex-ular (profane).

In each instance, a particular item of clothing serves to identify wearers to themselves and to position them in relation to others. Although tending towards anonymity, in current circumstances both the hood and hijab function as identity cards.

Again, I recognise that to say such things is to position myself immodestly not only vis a vis religionists, who necessarily insist that their beliefs are taken in their own terms, but also against current incarnations of ethnomethodology, in which there is little to go on except what people say about themselves, and of interdisciplinarity, whereby those who inquire into society often go between various localities in order to construct a palimpsest of particulars. Equally, my immodest interpretation of the social role of the fabric of religion, puts me at odds with those who seem almost to apply ‘ethnomethodology’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’ in public policy, such that ethnicities are institutionalised and hence acquire further, local, disciplinary powers, while the public is reduced to a thinly populated inter-zone which exists largely to ensure that differences do not turn ugly, to discipline the disciplinarians. Home secretary Charles Clarke, as featured in the Rising East debate on the place of faith in a multicultural society, is a case in point.

I am brazen enough to strive for universality, an end which I hope to serve by means of interpreting specific, local phenomena in the light of what seems to me to be the cultural logic of general trends. This seems fitting for someone working in a university – an institution historically linked to universality – whose population is particularly diverse.

In East London, where hoodies live alongside hijab-ists, the contours of the cultural map have been re-drawn in the last 15 years by brands and by anti-branding. For their adherents, brands are tools for conviviality, symbolic of values shared by those who subscribe to them. For opponents of branded goods, the price of subscription is too high: brands lever us into buying more and paying more for that we buy – they are a rip-off; moreover, by applying a price tag to spiritual values as well as commercial goods, branding has enabled the market to encroach upon those areas of human life which previously resisted it, and this encroachment is itself to be resisted.

If branding/anti-branding has been one of the tropes of metropolitan cultural life, we should not be surprised to see it lived out in novel ways. The adoption of hijab is a case in point. While by no means simply an extension of anti-branding, hijab is nonetheless in keeping with it. To put it on is largely to divest oneself not only of clothes with brand names but also of the subjectivity of self-promotion – the promotional self. It is a spectacular refusal of the society of the spectacle; an eccentric rebuff to consumer-led individualism; and a rejection of ‘the sexual fix’ – fixing your life through sex and branded goods as the means to fix your sex life. Hijab does not only say ‘no’ to all these, but these three counts of ‘no’ are contained in the complex statement which it makes.

The hood is equally complex, but differently so. As a cover-all, it covers some of the same anti-consumerist ground while at the same time suggesting that underneath his hooded top the appetites of the wearer are especially voracious. With his hood on, the super-consumer is in mufti; whereas his dress uniform is the night attire of ultra-branded Bling Bling. This change of clothes and connotations itself connotes the co-existence of branding and anti-branding as performed by young people in East London (the complexity of the relationship is confirmed by the recent appearance of subtle ‘CK’ signatures on black headscarves).

So far I have suggested that the hood and hijab are two sides of the same coin. But these two sides have differences not only from one another but also one against the other. In a context where personal security has never been more important, ‘hoodies’ secure themselves in a ‘gang’, while the hijab makes an important statement in the interests of personal security: my back-up (Allah and the mosque) is more powerful than your street-gang, so don’t mess with me. Insofar as hijab maps onto ‘Asian’ and the hood is coded ‘Afro-Caribbean’, these two fashion statements say something not only about currents such as branding/anti-branding which are common to young East Londoners, but also about the experiences which divide them.

Another unavoidable facet of East London life is cultural regeneration, or, more precisely, urban regeneration by means of cultural policy. On the part of policy makers, the turn to culture is intended to facilitate a more integrated society; but it also represents the integration of values and attitudes once singularly associated with youth culture into the habitus, the spontaneously recurring disposition, of government and public administration. If Tony Blair is, as he famously claimed, ‘of the rock’n’roll generation’, then Elvis lives in 10 Downing Street, the corridors of Whitehall, and perhaps even Newham Town Hall. All of which means that for young people post-1997, there is little or no asylum to be found in the now institutionalised lunacy of rock and pop culture and its radical 1960s roots.

Counterculture, once the exclusive property of the young, is now over-the-counter-culture, as Thomas Frank neatly observed; and the counters which have been made-over include those of the state bureaucracy as well as the corporate market. With much of youth culture colonised, there is all but nowhere to go, and wannabe rebels have to find different ways of dressing up.

I suggest that one such attempted break-out is the costume criminality of ‘hoodies’; another is the turn to radical Islam in all its theatrical trappings, both of these serving as the means to identify oneself by dint of distance from the state-sponsored free expression of Creative Britain, Creative London, Creative Lewisham etc.

Yet while the hood and hijab refuse the legacy, perverted or not, of the ‘great refusal’ which reached its high point in 1968, they seem destined to re-live it. As far back as the pioneering days of the 1950s, the ‘great refusal’ was a badge of alienation, a display of knowingness, and a dramatisation of the search for community even as the non-fiction of collectivity was going into decline. All of these are reprised today in the hood and hijab.

The roots of this triptych can be summarised as follows:

Alienation as shown in the Outsiders (Colin Wilson, Albert Camus and countless others), echoed faintly today in the nasal whine of the Artic Monkeys, but perhaps most forcefully expressed by Marlon Brando in The Wild One. When a waitress asks ‘what are you rebelling against?’, Brando punctured the entire gamut of Western capitalism and its political discontents in three slurred but stiletto-sharp syllables: ‘whaddyagot?’

Knowingness as in brown-skinned, beautiful Chuck Berry singing about a brown-eyed, handsome man making it big in a white-dominated marketplace; in John Lennon’s withering self-consciousness; and in the mockery and self-mockery of Johnny Rotten and George Clinton.

The search for community as in the first Beat ‘happening’ – Allen Ginsberg’s ‘wholly communion’ at City Lights bookshop, San Francisco; in subculture and in subcultural wars such as Punks versus Teds, the ‘us’ thereby constituted as against ‘them’; and writ large in the Ecstasy-derived togetherness of mid-1990s ‘rave culture’ in opposition to the fag-end of Conservative government and right-wing hegemony.

Then there is the recurring interplay of all three, whereby an alienated community constitutes itself as such by knowing use of an exaggerated rhetoric or argot designed to inflame or provoke a response from the mainstream and thereby amplify the sense of its communally deviant, collectively alienated character. Punk springs to mind, as does the ‘dread’ in Rastafarianism, alongside ragga in its most knowingly homophobic moments.

It requires no imaginative leap to see the latter as an antecedent of the ‘hoodie’. But I suggest that similar interplay between these same constituent parts – alienation, self-consciousness, the search for community – also occurs in the self-defining, rhetorical statement which is the hijab. Explicit in its adoption is profound alienation from the fundamentals of Western subjectivity – the individual, the political, the consumer.

In answer to the question, what of the West are you rebelling against?, hijab, like Brando and the hoodie, says: whaddyagot? There is knowingness, too: I know you will find it shocking that I want to be identified by covering my face (or part of it), the bodily signature of individuality. And of course, there is the sense of community which the wearer achieves by positioning herself away from the majority and therefore in proximity to a small number of fellow-fashionistas, and by connecting to an apparently ancient tradition of true believers.

In the turn to hijab, therefore, there is a turn away from ‘cool’ and its incorporation in Cool Britannia; yet it also re-presents much of the same sort of subjectivity which formed the counterculture 50 years ago and has helped to re-form the mode of government during the past decade.

Thus far, in my reading of both the hood and hijab, they are constituted as original phenomena yet derived from both local factors in East London and from national and international developments of the last half-century, not least of which is the turn to self-expression as the site of self-definition and, now, state formation. But there is another aspect of modern life which has been even more widely experienced and which also finds particular expression at this specific conjuncture: the ubiquitously recurring experience of depersonalisation.

Both the hood and hijab are statements of identity: this is me. But they are also declarations of anonymity: this is the me you can’t quite see. The result is a construction of individual selfhood but a self which is not consistently identified and therefore not fully nameable – a reprise of Mary Shelley’s fable of the creation of the modern persona, Frankenstein.

Famously, Frankenstein was written in a single sitting during a house party which included poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. Mary Shelley beat her peers hands down because her story of the new-man-with-no-name is a page-turner which evoked the new ensemble of social relations emerging in England during the early nineteenth century. In the context of these relations humanity was created anew and with a new range of powers, as also described by Percy Shelley in Prometheus Unbound. But the social change which prompted the expansion of the human persona also tended towards de-personalisation.

Even though modern individuality did not exist as such prior to the coming of capital, the expansion of capital takes precedence over its indirect creation, and the circuit of capital does not differentiate between those individuals required to take part in it, hence, insofar as they are participants, they all but lose their new-found individuality. This conundrum – the simultaneous construction and deconstruction of modern personality – is readily discernible in Mary Shelley’s formulation of the new, man-made man, Frankenstein’s monster, who is monstrous in that he is disconnected from community and therefore comes to exist as an individual, but whose individuality is negated to the extent that he has no name.

The conundrum of individuality and anonymity afforded by capitalist social relations, such that our personality only exists in the context of anonymity and vice versa, is represented in a host of cultural formations from the man in black (Baudelaire and Johnny Cash) to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, and even in the black, bourgeois business suit. It is also, I suggest, evident in the simultaneous disclosure and decomposure of individuality as worn and displayed in both the hood and hijab. In the case of the latter, this is to suggest that its adoption has much more in keeping with modernity than with apparently unchanging tradition. It is a sign of modernity modified, not a return to the pre-modern.

In their own terms, the hood and hijab are antithetical: one is religious while the other is more in keeping with the ostensibly profane character of recent popular culture. In my terms, they are derived from the same historical conjuncture from which both piety and profanity are currently reconstituted, and are therefore cognate in providing the prospect of identity. This is not to preclude those aspects in which they are opposed: my interpretation encompasses the sense in which hijab is a reaction to the weakening of the politics of popular culture (counterculture) just as the latter represented the exhaustion of party politics – a double negative of which the hood is both a rejection and a continuation. But it is unhelpful to regard today’s religious reaction as cultural time travel, even if the desire to reclaim fundamentals is an important part of how it is lived out by participants and interpreted by others. Fundamentally, it is a reaction to current conditions which requires the re-making of religion even as religious reconstruction lays claim to the past. Accordingly, the recent pluralisation of Islam indicates the current re-creation of religion and religion as recreation.

It is often assumed that Islam has reclaimed many young Britons of Asian origin, as if the tide of tradition had receded only temporarily before flooding back into their lives. But this is less than half the picture, and perhaps the least representative part at that. Of course the turn to Islam and hijab occurs mainly (not exclusively) among ethnic groups in which Islam is not unprecedented. But the current versions and new-found interpretations of Islam – the proliferations of Islams (plural) – are unprecedented in their diffuse and disparate character.

Those who appear to be rediscovering Islam do not tend to re-enter the orthodox institutions of their forefathers. Often they shop around for their own Islam, and this consumerist approach is made possible by the extent to which their parents and grandparents came close to abandoning religion and may even have come to Britain the more easily to do so.

Since there is no single line of unbroken tradition, in these conditions Islam is necessarily fragmented. It is open to almost as many re-writes as there are individuals adopting it not as servants of one god, but so it may serve them in their identity formation. In this latter role, it boasts a rich mix of gratifying properties.

To those with ready access, Islam offers sufficient familiarity and homeliness, combined with an aura of substance and rootedness. Yet inasmuch as it was less of a fixture in the lives of post-war immigrants, in the lives of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren it is also exotic, and sufficiently weightless for them to make it more exotic and exciting in line with the quest for personal identity. This is religious tradition which is being re-made-up as its new adherents go along.

Yet even when these further circumstances are taken into account, the religious kernel of Islamic popular culture remains uncracked. To put it another way, if the hijab and the beliefs associated with it are no more and no less than popular culture, why is it that popular culture is now taking an ostentatiously religious form?

The significance of religious culture as opposed to other cultural forms is that the terms in which it is practised hinge on a fantastic version of the non-human. Insofar as there is resort to something greater than humanity, humanity itself is necessarily reduced; in today’s circumstances, it is cut down to size and deemed less sizeable than previously claimed.

So where have young East Londoners picked up on the downsizing of humanity? Of course they could always have gone to the temple, church, synagogue or mosque, but it is significant that for much of the past 50 years (the period of immigration into East London from countries where Islam was established), most of them did not.

The moment when religion makes a return among the young coincides with the turn away from humanism on the part of the ruling elite. Not that it is acknowledged as such by those conducting it, but this has now reached a stage where the aforementioned home secretary recently redefined the British population as a series of ‘faith communities’, including those whose ‘faith’ does not include god. Clarke also re-wrote government in the ecumenical role of bringing faith communities together and holding them in a ring of democratic values.

To reach such a point where, to paraphrase, ‘we’re all religionists now’, the following historical conditions will have been met: (1) end of Empire and embarrassment about it (abandonment of the British ruling class mission); (2) rejection of the working class as historic subject (abandonment of working class politics); and (3) mounting concern that hubristic humanity has over-reached itself – where Red turns Green and conservatism acquires a radical hue. All of which amounts, even among the world’s most powerful, to the acceptance that people cannot, after all, take control of their own circumstances, which in turn comes close to saying that, if humanity is not in control, someone or something else must be. Thus the sense of relative powerlessness now prevalent among the elite, prepares the ground for religion which galvanises circumstances and forces currently beyond our control into an apparently controlling force.

This is the sense of human frailty and curtailed subjectivity which the elite has writ large among the young. The latter are bound to exaggerate what they did not originate, even as they insist they thought of it first. In heightened forms such as the veiling of the human face, they represent the partial occlusion of the human subject. Thus the lowered expectations of high society are amplified in the street-level fashion statements of the hood and hijab.

In my reconstruction of them, the hood and hijab are the acting out of conjunctural conditions made in the West and compounded by ruling elites in the West. This has policy implications. Post 9/11 and 7/7, much public policy is devoted to understanding different belief systems without regard to the common conditions from which they are derived, which they cannot but express, and to which they in turn contribute. In other words, it is one thing to recognise the desire to be other than British, the wish to stand aside from the impression management of Creative Britain, as expressed in both the hood and hijab; but to take them at their word is only to compound the problem of social incoherence even as universal characteristics are discernible to anyone who cares to look.

What needs to be understood about the wearing of these value-laden clothes is that their acquisition of cult status is driven by the lack of a credible, secular belief system, a problem compounded by the dearth of opportunities for public discussion where erstwhile private characteristics (religious belief, personal identity) do not come up trumps. While the ideal of the public sphere – the part-real, part-mythical place where what happens in society is open to democratic deliberation – has been roundly and rightly criticised for inattention to particulars, especially the way in which society particularises some groups and says they may not enter this supposedly open space, nevertheless the indifference of the public sphere to the significance attributed by different groups of people to their own, separate cultural practices, is essential if the common significance of the turn to religiously-inflected culture is to be understood and acted upon. It is in the spirit of public scrutiny (I am not opposed to spirituality, only the theft of it by religion) that I offer this essay and invite responses to it for publication in Rising East.

Andrew Calcutt (a.calcutt@uel.ac.uk)

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