A touch of Morocco

Don’t you know any moroccans? First time I wore something like that not like the picture you picked was umm 6ish years ago on eid:) I wear them to univ, they’re nice, different, comfortable, etc,etc:)

Munni, FlameZz I’m glad you liked them:)

MadCon, I saw another version of that, it was the same except wasn’t as bright, kinda a muted, hazy sunset type:)

Lz dz smile

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Girl_from_Quraysh · April 26, 2002, 8:31pm

For some unidentifiable (

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) reason you reminded me of an article I read recently.

I’ll paste it for you here, and you can draw your own conclusions.

Silence was never written down.

Girl_from_Quraysh · April 26, 2002, 8:35pm

For PA, (and anyone else who’s interested):

An Arab aesthetic
*Source:An Arab aesthetic | World news | The Guardian

By appropriating Arab-Islamic designs, couture houses recognise that fashion - and thus modernity - does not belong exclusively to the west, writes Brian Whitaker

Tuesday November 13, 2001 *

A photo in a Brazilian fashion magazine shows a Muslim woman’s face veiled in black with only her eyes visible. It’s an advertisement for lipstick, and the slogan says: “You who can show it, take advantage of it.”

Meanwhile, the chequered keffiyeh - an ordinary, everyday head covering for millions of Arab men - has become the hottest fashion accessory in Japan.

In Toyko, where teenagers wear it around the chin, often with camouflage T-shirts and army-style trousers, it has acquired military connotations. One result, perhaps, of worldwide TV coverage of the Palestinian intifada.

The scarves are sold in Japanese army surplus stores for around £17 - several times what they would cost in the Middle East.

According to fashion critic Yumi Nemoto, “soft military chic took off in Japan after Christian Dior’s spring-summer collection last year featured it prominently”.

None of this surprises Alexandru Balasescu, an anthropologist who is researching Arab-Islamic fashion design and the way it is perceived by outsiders.

He told a conference in Beirut last week of his interview with the designer at a Parisian fashion house, Impression, whose new collection had been ruined by recent events.

“I was preparing something Afghan,” the designer said, “but since September 11th, I had to cancel the collection.”

Fashion designers, Mr Balasescu told the conference, “develop a whole language that links geographic areas with aesthetic characteristics”.

They appropriate the stereotypes, dismantle them, reconstruct them and finally market them as the recognisable style of a particular region, race, class or gender - ghetto chic, for example.

In this, Mr Balasescu said, fashion designers deserve the credit for recognising, long before others, “that fashion - and thus modernity - does not belong exclusively to the western hemisphere”. The bad side is that they often reinforce popular stereotypes - and thus misunderstanding.

Looking in the opposite direction, there are also stereotypes of what customers in the Middle East might want from western fashion houses.

One accessories designer that Mr Balasescu spoke to had a very particular image of the “typical” Middle Eastern customer: "She is all the time veiled, which makes her look unstylish, but at the second glance one can notice the accessories: Prada, Gucci bags, fashionable matching shoes.

“She buys the most flamboyant evening dresses, orders without caring for money … and wears her dresses only once or twice.”

The one item of clothing that is always out of fashion in the eyes of these designers is the veil. Although liberal, multicultural societies accept and sometimes approve of the display of cultural identities, the veil is different.

It is viewed as a symbol of Muslim women’s subjection to oppressive customs and, more generally, as reflecting a lack of liberty in Islamic societies as a whole.

“There is a peculiar understanding of the veil as always signifying seclusion or resistance, struggle or submission, religion or interdiction - but almost never beautifying,” Mr Balasescu said. “Little is said about the aesthetic effort put into the creation and arrangement of the Islamic headscarf.”

It is easy to overlook the large number of expensive silk squares, made by Yves St Laurent in Paris, that are bought by Muslim women for use as headscarves, he said.

“The women are making real fashion statements with them, but the western eye is not trained to see it.”

In Iran, he added, there is continuous negotiation about the length of the manteau [black robe] worn by women - and the object is not always to show as much ankle as possible. If ultra-long becomes fashionable, the moral police will order women to shorten their skirts a little.

Among the wealthiest Iranian women, cosmetic surgery on noses is especially popular, Mr Balasescu said. The interesting point about this is that - apart from the eyes - the shape of a nose is the only facial feature likely to be seen from behind a veil.

Western misconceptions about Arabs and Muslims have become a hot academic topic since September 11, though the debate probably started back in the 1970s, with Edward Said’s famous book, Orientalism.

Earlier this year, Jack Shaheen, a Lebanese-American professor published Reel Bad Arabs, a massive study of some 900 films featuring Arab characters - the only negative racial stereotype that is still acceptable in Hollywood.

But surprisingly, last week’s conference at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, entitled “Arab stereotyping”, was the first of its kind to be held in the Arab world.

The organiser, Ramez Maalouf, said it was inspired partly by a comment at the end of Edward Said’s book, where he noted that discussion of Arab identity has taken place, up to now, almost entirely in the west.

Some of this research has been done by Arabs studying at western universities, where they “play the role of informant”, but they have to publish their work in western journals, from a western perspective.

People arriving at the conference were greeted by a supermarket trolley piled high with tin cans illustrating various Arab stereotypes. I picked up a 15-ounce can of Fundamentalists which, according to the label, contained bullshit.

“Religious extremists 100%, Koran 100%, education 0%, civilisation 0%. Caution: do not open, avoid contact, highly dangerous.”

On the wall was the following quotation:

“Oh I come from a land, from a faraway place,
Where the caravan camels roam,
Where they cut off your ears
If they don’t like your face.
It’s barbaric, but hey
It’s home.”

This, a note explained, comes from a song in the Original Motion Picture film of Aladdin. The words (so witty and perceptive, don’t you think?) were written by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, both of whom won Academy and Grammy awards for their lyrics.

It doesn’t take much research to find other appalling stereotypes of Arabs, especially in the United States. But Mr Maalouf was determined not to let the conference become an exercise in US-bashing. Arab participants were encouraged to look at their own stereotypes of themselves and of minorities living in their society.

The opening session began theatrically - with a scene from Sanayeh Garden, a play about a Sri Lankan maid who is abused and raped by her Arab employer.

“There are no scholarly publications on Arab stereotyping of others,” Mr Maalouf said, “yet we do this with our own foreign workers and minorities such as the Shi’a in Saudi Arabia, or the Kurds in Iraq. It’s a form of justifying oppression.”

In a region where such issues are normally kept carefully under wraps, this certainly provided a gust of fresh air. As a visiting foreigner, I would have been interested to learn more about Arab stereotypes of the Americans, the British and - dare one say it? - the Jews, but perhaps that’s still too sensitive an area.

Possibly the most striking point made at the conference was that while Arabs rightly condemn other people’s stereotypes of them, Arabs sometimes rely on stereotypes themselves to claim authenticity for their views. And so, for example, we find people claiming to be “real” Muslims or “real” Egyptians.

Ahmad Abdullah, from Egypt, told the conference that there is no such thing as a “real” Egyptian. “We are Pharaonic, Islamic, Coptic, Mediterranean, Arab, Western,” he said. "Islamic fundamentalists deny almost everything but Islam in the Egyptian identity. This is nonsense.

"Any identity is a compound identity - it’s pluralistic. We should not, therefore, talk about “Islamic civilisation”, he argued. “There is one human civilisation but there are many different cultures.”

Silence was never written down.

[This message has been edited by Girl from Quraysh (edited April 26, 2002).]

Hinna · April 26, 2002, 9:19pm

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW HUGZ

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They’re so preeeeeeetttttyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!

“Allah extends His Hand at night so that He can forgive the sinner of the day; He extends His Hand in the day so that He can forgive the sinner of the night. He will continue to do so until the sun rises from the West (the Day of Judgment)”

[Related by Imam Muslim]

khan_sahib · April 26, 2002, 9:26pm

Wow amazing pics. I was expecting some sights pic of Morocco rather than these dresses.

since there is a farmaishee program going on, so can I have the first one please?

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