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In the course of the last decades, sonic forms of Islam--including sound, music, and the spoken word--have diversified and become publicly present through an increasingly wide range of new technologies. [...]

In our comparison of marriage arrangements and wedding celebrations during the first and the second intifada in Palestine, we focus on 'political marriages' wherein the political activism and affiliation of the marital partners are of considerable importance. During the first intifada, political engagement became a major consideration in choice of marriage partner in some settings, and conventional boundaries of religion and class were transgressed. Simultaneously, marriage celebrations were transformed, whereby a widespread culture of austerity and mourning made weddings far more simple and inexpensive, as well as signaling solidarity and resistance. In the second intifada, marriage arrangements and wedding celebrations are very different. The changed political climate, with the hope and popular participation of the first intifada turned into the despair and exclusions of the second, transformed political engagement from a positive into a largely negative qualification. The material side of marriage has again become more important, public displays of consumption acceptable, and celebrations more expensive. These shift s are shaped by the effects of the post-Oslo transition, as well as by the warlike conditions on the ground. Although these conditions, from Israeli army intrusions to physical barriers to marriage, are more insecure and dangerous than in the earlier intifada, they function largely as external threats to the shaping of wedding arrangements and ceremonies, rather than generating internal transformations., For Maha Mustaqlem Nassar (1954-2008) whose committed life inspired us. In 1989, at the height of the first Palestinian intifada, Suheir, age 30, a Birzeit University engineering graduate with a [...]

Abstract Most San'ani women appear in public completely covered in black, often including a face-veil. At first sight, this locates Sari a, the capital of Yemen, outside the world of [...]

This volume grows out of an awareness of the dearth of literature about Muslim fashion practices and a more general lack of literature that engages with the relationship between religion [...]

This article deals with the cultural politics of nationalism. It is argued that both the production and display of embroidered dresses and the particular ways in which these are presented on one set of picture postcards are part of the material formation of the Palestinian nation. Whereas the dresses on these postcards draw attention to a rural heritage that stands for territory and rootedness, the women-bodies presenting these dresses, both in their appearance and through the act of public presentation, express urban modernity. Such a style of representation avoids associations of the rural with 'backwardness' and enables the inclusion of elements of the rural in the modern national project. Keywords: Cultural politics; nationalism; dress; postcards; gender; Palestine.