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Drawing on long term research – including topical life stories, interviews and participant observation – we analyze how women converts to Islam in the Netherlands signify and experience making hijra. Our interlocutors, all observant Muslims, had left the Netherlands between the late 1990s and the mid 2010s. In the course of the last 5 years many have again returned to the Netherlands. Their life courses indicate that physical and existential mobility are interconnected in their everyday lives as well as in their migration trajectories. Whereas they considered conversion to Islam as moving forward, the majority society did not share this perspective. They were sharply aware of how they were no longer seen as self-evidently part of the Dutch nation. This produced feelings of stuckedness - in an existential and a material sense - for themselves and their children, and hence a desire to move to a Muslim majority country. They differed amongst themselves as to whether and how they signified leaving Europe as making hijra in an Islamic sense. To some, making hijra was a highly desirable religious act. Others did not foreground such religious signification, but nonetheless expected positive effects of living in an environment where Islam would be an integral part of daily life. Their attempts to settle in various Muslim majority countries were, however, often not successful. Material conditions made it difficult to enact their ethical aspirations, that included the moral and material wellbeing of others, especially their children. Moreover, their appreciation of the self-evident presence of Islam in the countries of settlement was tempered, first, by the tension between their quest for a reflexive, deculturalized Islam and the culturalized practices they encountered in their new environment, and second, by their growing awareness of how their sense of self was much more shaped by habitual 'Dutch' conventions than most of them had envisioned beforehand. As a result they were often unable to develop meaningful social relationships in their new environment. Eventually, almost all of them returned to the Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch ban on face-veiling is a strong instantiation of the gendered racialization of Muslims in Europe. Racialization as a relation of power, with some in the position to categorize and impose an identity on others, produces and naturalizes difference. To justify the ban, politicians signified face-veiling as gendered oppression, as a security threat and as an obstacle to integration, bringing together ethical positions with affective and aesthetic sensibilities. The largely unheard narratives of face-veiling women, in contrast, highlighted the positive religious value of face-veiling and point to the state's infringement on their freedom of religion, expression, and movement. As face-veiling women are simultaneously defined as victims to be saved and as threat to be removed from the public, their racialization is ambivalent. It is also multilayered, with debates on faceveiling not only producing a divide between Muslims and non-Muslims, but with some Muslims also involved in the racialization of other Muslims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how, within less than a decade, face-veiling has turned from a non-issue into a threat to the Dutch nation-state. With good citizenship increasingly defined in cultural terms, politicians have used a strong affective discourse of dislike that produces a sense of national belonging amongst a wide range of people, but excludes face-veiling women. Not (only) the act of face-covering, but the fact that Muslim women are engaged in these acts causes discomfort, anxiety and resentment, as the very same women who are defined as oppressed, turn out to challenge Dutch normativities about gender and sociality through their corporeal presence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses several reports published within the issue including one on the presence of secular Muslim women in France, one on Turkish women wearing wig and another on Muslim minorities in Europe.

Most San'ani women appear in public completely covered in black, often including a face-veil. At first sight, this locates San'a, the capital of Yemen, outside the world of fashion. This article, however, argues that fashion is part and parcel of women's outdoor dressing styles in San'a. While some women link their dressing styles to authentic San'ani customs and traditions and others highlight ideological and religious convictions, all refer in one way or another to matters of style and aesthetics. Not only modernist women are engaged in wearing fashionable outerwear, but also women protagonists of an Islamist position, who may be critical of fashion as an institution, find it hard to avoid fashion altogether. Young women who wear covered dress and face-veils in order to conform to what is common in their social circles are also affected by the globalization of dress and attach much importance to being fashionable. Such sartorial practices are not simply a form of Islamic fashion, but rather are a strong example of a shift from a localized aesthetic to a more cosmopolitan style of dress, which remains within the boundaries of what San'ani women consider morally and religiously acceptable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]