Roche, T., Roche, E. & Al-Saidi, A. (2014). The dialogic fashioning of women’s dress in the...

The Dialogic Fashioning of Women’s Dress

in the Sultanate of Oman

THOMAS ROCHE, ERIN ROCHE and AHMED AL SAIDI

Abstract: This paper provides a brief introduction to women’s dress practices in the Sultanate

of Oman. We explore women’s clothing practices as dialogues with religious and regional

communities. Our introduction provides concrete examples of how dress practices from

neighbouring communities, such as coastal Iran, neighbouring India and the East African

island of Zanzibar, have been appropriated and reformulated to express regional Omani

identities. We discuss veiling practices in order to show how these practices reflect regional

and generational identities which Western observers often misunderstand as signifying

oppression, but are in fact rich in many-layered meaning for local women (e.g. marital status,

tribal affiliation). The data for this study was obtained through semi-structured interviews

with local women, which were conducted by a research team that included student-translators

who belonged to the villages and Bedouin camps visited for the purpose of this study in 2010

and 2011.

Keywords: Islamic Dress, Women’s Studies, Traditional Fashion, Abaya, Burqa, Niqab,

Oman, Dress and identity

Thomas Roche is the Director of Studies of the English Language Centre at Southern Cross

University, Australia, [email protected]; and an Associate Professor at Sohar

University, Sultanate of Oman. Erin Roche is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of

Technology, Australia, [email protected]. Ahmed Al Saidi is an Assistant Professor

and Director of the Education and Human Resources Development Sector of The Research

Council of Oman, [email protected].

Authors’ note: This research was supported by a grant from the Omani Research Council

[grant number ORG/CBS /09/002]. The authors would like to thank the comments from two

anonymous reviewers that have gone to greatly strengthening the paper. The authors would

also like to thank Sohar University teaching assistant Raya Al Rajabi and translation major

students for their help during data collection: Nasra Al Whibi, Naeema Al Mazyadi, Nahed Al

Kindi, Asila Al Qasmi, Raya Al Maqbuli, Sheikha Al Mazuori, Hanan Al Kiyumi, Maha

The dialogic fashioning of women’s dress in the Sultanate of Oman.

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Awadh Al Hosni, Halima A Maktoumi, Rabia Al Sadi, Fatma Al Mazyadi, and Munira Al

Beloshi.

1 Introduction

On 10 February 2012, an international jury announced the winner of its annual World Press

Photo Contest. Samuel Aranda won the prize with a photo taken following a tear-gas attack

on street protestors demonstrating against the then President of thirty-three years, Ali

Abdullah Saleh, in Sanaa, Yemen. Jury member Koyo Kouoh spoke of the picture saying: "It

is a photo that speaks for the entire region. It stands for Yemen, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria,

for all that happened in the Arab Spring”.1 The image is dominated by Fatima Al Qaws, her

figure clad head to toe in a black cloak, the abaya, with her hair fully covered by a hijab and

her face completely sheltered from view by a black cloth niqab; in her arms she cradles her

weeping, seemingly broken son, bare-chested and burying his face in the folds of her clothes.

The point Koyo Kouoh articulates is central to our paper: images of black abaya wearing

women are not only a readily understood representation of Arab women, but even more so,

have become a trope for the Arab and Islamic World.

This increased attention on Islamic women’s dress is evident not only in terms of visual

image, but in also in the language used in western media. This interest can be tracked in the

increasing number of articles and discussions in the media in languages such as English,

German, French, Spanish and Italian.2

1 World Press Photo, World Press Photo Award 2012, available online at

www.worldpressphoto.org (2012). 2 The frequency of occurrence of words can be diachronically tracked using corpus

linguistics tools, such as Google’s N-gram tool, which charts the use of lexical items in a

corpus made up of one trillion publicly accessible e-books and web pages [Michel, Shen,

Aiden, et al, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books”, Science

331(2011), pp. 176–182.]. In the appendix, Figures 10–13 trace the frequency of uni-grams

(unigrams are a single word linguistic unit, e.g. health, as opposed to bigrams, e.g. health

care, and trigrams etc.) used to describe Islamic women’s dress in publications from 1960 to

2008 in English (hijab, burqa, abaya, and chador), German (Burka, Hidschab, Abaya, and

Tschador), French (burqa, abaya, hijab and niqab) and Spanish (burka, hijab, hiyab and


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We would agree with other researchers in the field that, rather than reflecting a growing

understanding of the culture and dress of women from the Arab World, the increased presence

of the term hijab and concomitant images of Arab women in abayas, burqas and chadors in

niqab). For each of the four languages studied, texts in the corpus showed a noticeable

increase in the frequency of occurrence of Islamic women’s dress terms at the beginning of

the twenty-first century. In the Figures 10–13, the y-axis shows the percentage of unigrams

(i.e. burqa, hijab etc.) that constitute Google’s N-gram corpus, and the x-axis charts the

frequency of appearance of those words over time. Figure 10 shows the frequency of terms

for Islamic women’s dress in English publications from 1960–2005. It can be seen that there

is increased presence of the term burqa, the stiff fabric facemask, and chador, the full figure

cloak, in the late 1970s during the Islamic Revolution in Iran and throughout the Afghan-

Russian war of the early 1980s. This interest then declined (chador) or remained negligible

(abaya) until the first years of the twenty-first century, where we see a spiked frequency of

occurrence of lexical items relating to Islamic women’s dress, particularly for the term hijab.

In Figure 11 the data for German publications are presented. Occurrences of the lexical items

Burka, Hidschab, and Abaya were negligible in German publications from the 1960s–1990s,

with only the Afghani Tschador gaining much attention, perhaps here too reflecting an

interest in events in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The frequency of occurrence of terms

describing Islamic women’s dress then rapidly increases in the German publications in the

early twenty-first century. By 2008 the Burka is being used eleven times more often in

German publications than in 1996. Similar trends can be seen in the Spanish publication

corpus in Figure 12, where there is little record of the words hijab/hiyab and niqab until the

turn of the century. After 2001 these terms are present in Spanish publications with increasing

frequency, with burqa five times more frequent in 2008 than in 1998. French publications

evidence similar trends in Figure 13, burqa appears ten times as often in 2008 than in 1996,

and hijab appears approximately eight times more frequently in 2008 than in 1986. As far as

these languages’ publications can be considered representative of publications from Western

nations during that period, we can see that the West’s interest in Islamic women’s dress has

risen sharply since the turn of the century, with this rise occurring post al-Qaeeda’s attack on

the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 and then continuing to be of interest during the wars

in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Arab Spring.


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western press, have actually served to other or obscure Arab women and their dress culture,3

emphasizing their perceived weakness as a marginalized group at the expense of all other

aspects of their identity.4, 5 As we have noted elsewhere Islamic women’s dress practices are

largely given negative press throughout the Francophone and English speaking world,

disparaged by cultural critics and politicians alike as at odds with European values.6, 7 Former

British Prime Minister, Tony Blair describes veiling as a “mark of separation”.8 French

President, Nicholas Sarkozy describes them as “a sign of enslavement”. Popular anti-hijab

sentiments were legally enshrined in Europe in July and April of 2011 respectively, when

Belgium and France promulgated legislation permitting fines, imprisonment and/or

citizenship training to be imposed on women wearing any form of the hijab covering the face

of the wearer.9 The dominant reading of Islamic dress presupposes that veiling practices are a

male-enforced form of oppression, while precluding the very voices of the women its

proponents claim they wish to enable. Our study is an attempt to redress that imbalance by

giving voice to Muslim women from one Arab country in a Western academic forum.

In order to discuss Omani women’s views on dress, the authors begin with the premise that

dress practices can be read as texts that communicate information about both individuals and

the societies they belong to.10, 11 Our reading of the linguistic code of dress also draws on the

3 Said, Orientalism (1978). 4 Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America

(2011). 5 El Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance (1999). 6 Roche, and Roche, “Interwoven: Identity and Dress amongst Sedentary and Nomadic

Women of Oman” in Fashion: Exploring Critical Issues, ed. Brownie and Petican (2012),

pp. 109–133. 7 Roche, Roche, and Al Saidi. “Interwoven: Women’s Dress Practices and Identity on the

Arabian Peninsula”, International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 6 (2012),

pp. 133–144. 8 Jones, “Veil seen as mark of separation, Blair tells Muslims.” Daily Telegraph, 18 Oct.

2006, available online at www.telegraph.co.uk. 9 Newcomb, “France to Become First European Country to Ban Burqa”, ABC News

International, 10 Apr. 2011, available online at www.abcmews.go.com (2012). 10 Bathes, The Fashion System (1967).


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work of theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who stressed the polyglossic nature of communication,

emphasising its dialogic and interactional nature.12 Bakhtin argued that communication

should always be considered as a situated event which creates meaning in dialogue with

others and functions through appropriating other elements of other people’s language and

making them your own. As fashion theorist Anne Hollander writes, the messages sent in

clothes are not always the ones that are received.13 This study therefore does not represent an

attempt to establish a definitive reading of Muslim women’s dress but rather provides an

accurate record of what women in the Sultanate of Oman currently communicate to each other

through their appropriations of regional fashion, and understand as communicated in each

other’s dress practices.

2 The Study

The data for this study was collected between September 2010 and April 2011 in the

Sultanate of Oman, an Arab nation of approximately three million people on the south-eastern

end of the Arabian Peninsula (see Figure 1). Oman shares land borders with Yemen, the

United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and with 3,150 kilometres of coastline visited by

seasonal monsoon winds, it also has a long history of maritime relations with the littoral

peoples of neighbouring Iran, Pakistan, India and East Africa.

For data collection purposes the research team used the existing social and kin networks of

female- final year students studying a Bachelor of Arts degree in English-Arabic translation at

Sohar University. The primary data collector met and interviewed these women’s families

about dress practices throughout their regions. Due to the great regional variety in women’s

dress practices in the Sultanate we have chosen to restrict the discussion here to hijab, or

veiling practices, and embroidery practices in two regions, Ash Sharqiyah (sometimes written

al-Sharqiyah) and al-Wusta, and the northern-most region of Oman, Musandam. Preliminary

work on the variations in local women’s tunics or dishdasha in al-Batinah, Muscat,

11 Stillman, and Stillman, Arab Dress a Short History: From the Dawn of Islam to Modern

Times (2000). 12 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Emerson and Holquist (1981). 13 Hollander, Seeing through Clothes (2003), pp.123–4.


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Figure 1: Map of the Sultanate of Oman (Graphic: A. Roehrdanz).

Musandam and Dhofar and the use of patterning and colour in al-Batinah, al-Dhahirah and

Ash Sharqiyah will also be referred to in this discussion.14, 15, 16

In Oman, much of society still observes the segregation of sexes in social spaces, thus

making it impossible for the two male authors to take part in the asr> coffee meetings where

14 Roche, and Roche, “Interwoven: Identity and Dress”, pp. 109–133. 15 Roche, Roche, and Al Saidi, “Interwoven: Women’s Dress”, pp. 133–144. 16 Roche, Roche, and Al Saidi, Interweavings: Omani Women’s Verbal and Material

Culture, available online at www.interweavings.com (2012).

Stehlin-Alzadjali and Cross’ (2010) The Traditional Women’s Dress of Oman and the Centre

for Omani Dress in Muscat, Oman are also useful sources of information on this topic.


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data-collection took place.17 The lead data collector was a non-Omani, non-Arabic speaker

and non-Muslim, who was considered an outsider by the communities she visited. As such, all

the information shared with her must be considered as information shared via an outsider-

insider participation framework.18 Though the findings presented here have been validated by

speaking with numerous groups of women from these regions our findings reflect only a part

of the language of dress in Oman, and only that which the women interviewed chose to share.

It is also of note that almost all women over thirty years of age were either unwilling or

unable to share their age with us, indicating that they were approximately forty, fifty or sixty.

All women photographed gave their informed consent to the publication of these images.

3 Findings

3.1 Veiling practices in the Sultanate of Oman: the burqa and the sheila.

Across the Sultanate the vast majority of Omani women, regardless of region, age or tribe,

wear a black abaya, a loose hanging black outer garment, when in public. Variations of these

are seen across the Arab Gulf states such as Qatar19 and the United Arab Emirates.20 The r>as

abaya common across these states is a double square of black cloth stitched together and

wrapped around the body as a cloak, and sometimes includes a drawstring or clips to gather

and fasten the garment at the neckline.21 Though frequently seen on women from all age

groups in the rural villages of al-Batinha, al-Wusta, Ash Sharqiyah and Musandam, the r>as

abaya is much less commonly seen on younger women in larger villages like Sohar and

Barka, or in the capital Muscat. Younger women across the Sultanate that we interviewed in

17 Asr> is the period after the asr> call to prayer at about three o’clock and before the

mahgreb prayer at sunset. This is the time when women throughout Oman traditionally gather

in groups to share time and stories over cups of coffee and tea on mats laid out in front of

their houses. 18 Rosaldo, “Grief and a Head-hunter’s Rage”, in Violence in war and peace, ed. Scheper-

Hughes and Bourgois (2004), pp.150–56. 19 Lindholm, “Invisible No More: The Embellished Abaya in Qatar”, Textile Society of

America Symposium Proceedings, available online at www.digitalcommons.unl.edu (2012). 20 Bristol-Rhys, Emirati Women: Generation of Change (2010). 21 Al Wahabi, Qatari Costume (2003).


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their late teens and early twenties expressed a preference for modern forms of the abaya

mass-produced in a variety of natural and synthetic fabrics. There are two basic forms of the

store-bought abaya: the first with tailored arms fitting to the wrist, a neckline frequently

featuring patterned embellishment through beading or embroidery (see zari below); and, the

second, a square cut abaya which hangs like a formless cloak from the shoulder and provides

a silhouette less suggestive of the wearer’s figure but may still include embellishment. (The

latter form of the abaya seemed particularly popular with women in their twenties from the

southern region of Dhofar.) Women aged from eighteen to sixty-two in the city of Muscat

brought examples of designer brand versions of the black abaya from renowned international

fashion companies, such as Christian Dior and Gucci, including glittering embellishments.

Several women in their sixties from rural fishing villages of the al-Batinah coast and those

of a similar age in Musandam referred to a time when the black abaya was not so common. In

both regions, women recounted that until the mid-1970s it was common for women of all

ages to visit each other in coastal villages without wearing the abaya over their dishdasha. A

number of explanations were offered for the very recent dominance of the abaya in Oman.

One group from al-Batinah attributed the adoption of the abaya to a royal edict for all Omani

women shortly after Sultan Qaboos took office in 1970 (which was not confirmed in this

research). Two women of an undisclosed age (possibly in their seventies) from Musandam

insisted that for many years during the 1970s Gujurati merchants only sold black cloth in

Omani market places and women reluctantly adopted the black abaya out of necessity. This

explanation seems insufficient to account for the ubiquity of the abaya throughout the Gulf

States and Yemen today. Another group of women from Muscat, all in their sixties, explained

that the abaya gained popularity in part due to Omani women’s desire to differentiate

themselves from the increasing number of non-Muslim domestic workers from India who

began working in Oman from the 1970s onwards. They claimed that the abaya increasingly

became understood as the most suitable garment to reflect Islamic values of modesty, a faith

that distinguished them from the majority of domestic workers. The emergence of the abaya

in Oman has occurred in parallel with the resurgent popularity of the hijab in Eygpt, a

phenomenon which has previously been discussed as a resistance of Western cultural values22

22 Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution (2011).


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and as a re-assertion of Islamic values regarding female modesty and piety.23 When

questioned about the link between the abaya and Islamic notions of piety, the majority of

Omani women questioned, from a range of ages and regions, stated that all good Muslim

women were modest in dress, but the wearing of an abaya or not was ultimately a matter of

personal choice. Some women from the rural communities of al-Wusta noted that

embellishments or wearing a form-fitting abaya was un-Islamic, but this view was generally

uncommon throughout the Sultanate.

The black abaya is worn in combination with a variety of veils throughout Oman. Veiling

practices vary greatly from region to region, amongst tribes within any one region, and across

generations within the same tribe. When asked about the reasons for wearing a veil, many

participants referred to Islamic notions of modesty or more specific concerns about being seen

as respectable within their communities. “In Musandam, it would be impossible to leave the

house without the hijab. Maybe in Muscat that is possible, but here no way!” stated one

young woman in her early twenties. Women of all ages, from eighteen to in their late

seventies, who were interviewed in this study agreed that it was inconceivable to leave home

without covering, though if a larger number of participants were interviewed in the capital

region, results may differ.

There were noticeable differences in respondents’ attitudes to face covering practices. For

example women in their twenties and thirties preferred the sheer black cloth called the niqab

to the burqa, the latter proving more popular with women in their fifties and sixties in both

the interior villages and smaller coastal communities.

23 Mahmoud, Politics of Piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject (2012).


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Figure 2 and 3: Bedouin burqas from al-Wusta and Ash Sharqiyah (Photograph Erin Roche).

Figures 2 and 3 show two varieties of the face covering known as the burqa, each

recognisable as Bedouin style to women throughout the Sultanate. For Bedouin women, the

distinct morphology of each ensemble further serves to indicate which region they are from,

the more southerly Governorate of al-Wusta (Figure 2) or the eastern Governorate of Ash

Sharqiyah (Figure 3)24. The woman in Figure 2 is wearing a full-face covering spined cloth

burqa that stretches behind her ears and is held in place with polyester cording tied at the

back of her head, running down her back and ending past the shoulder blades. It is worn with

an accompanying headscarf consisting of two layers of black fabric, the megnah closest to the

head and the outer, more transparent uorah. This ensemble is typical of al-Wusta Bedouin, in

no other region do women cover this much of the face or use solid black fabric in their

burqas. In other regions of Oman, such as al-Batinah, burqas were traditionally colored with

indigo. Now, cheaper copper-coloured synthetic dye is popularly used to imitate the shine of

burnished indigo-dyed cloth.

24 Al-Wusta is a sparsely populated governorate, consisting of a desert expanse, salt dunes

and isolated beaches with temperatures typically above thirty degrees centigrade and

seasonally above forty-five degrees Celsius; whereas Ash Sharqiyah has larger coastal towns

hemmed in by a mountain range that runs into desert steppe.


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The Bedouin women we met from al-Wusta governorate, both young and old, kept their

burqas on at home, even in the company of their immediate family, with women from

neighbouring homes, and - some even when they slept. At a mourning celebration we visited,

a middle-aged son told us that he saw the face of his mother during the preparations for her

burial, the first time he had seen her face since his childhood. This practice was unique to al-

Wusta and communities in neighbouring regions were neither familiar nor in favour of this

practice when it was raised in discussion.

Our interview with six women also indicated that women of inner Ash Sharqiyah saw

burqas as a communication of marital status and tribal affiliation. Figure 3 shows a woman

wearing a spined burqa which stops below the nose. Across the interior of Ash Sharqiyah

only married women wear this style. Unmarried women will typically wear the sheila (head-

scarf) instead or the increasingly popular niqab, a hanging sheer black cloth which leaves

only a slit open for the eyes. Coastal women from larger settlements, such as Muscat and

Barka, were at times ambivalent about the importance of the burqa, explaining that wearing it

was a matter of personal choice not strongly linked to regional identity or marital status.

Bakhtin stressed that in order to communicate one always must "appropriate the words of

others and populate them with one's own intention".25 He argued that this is a fundamental

pre-condition of all communication, and Figure 4 provides a very clear illustration of this in

practice. These women were photographed at an afternoon coffee meeting in the interior town

of Mudaybi. They are wearing brightly coloured sheilas or headscarves instead of black

sheilas typically worn with burqas by the Bedouin women of al-Wusta. The sheilas have bold

colour prints with patterns, which are markedly different to the block colour used by Bedouin

women of Ash Sharqiyah (see Figure 3).26 These Mudaybi women explained that brightly

coloured sheilas are imported from the island of Zanzibar in Tanzania.27 The women refer to

25 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (1981), p.428. 26 Roche, and Roche, “Interwoven: Identity and Dress”, pp. 109–133.

The paper covers in particular variation in pattern and colour of fabric used in regions of

Oman. 27 Oman shares strong historical ties with Zanzibar; it was the major slave-trading hub of

the Indian Ocean, around which the Omani naval empire centred, including territories in

modern day Cormoran Island, Kenya, and Pakistan. At one stage Zanzibar served as the


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their sheilas alternatively as kanga, which is also the Swahili name for these scarves used on

Zanzibar.28 Zanzibari kangas are not understood as signifiers of Zanzibari identity, nor as an

expression of nostalgia for the East African Omani Empire. None of the women we met could

read or showed interest in the Swahili writing printed in the Roman alphabet on the hems of

the sheila fabric. Rather, these women explained that colourful sheilas were unique to the

tribes of their region, worn by the women of the Ash Sharqiyah towns and certainly not by the

Bedouin of the interior.

Figure 4: Coloured patterned sheila of women from Mudaybi (Photograph Erin Roche).

As much as the styles of burqas in Figures 2 and 3 inform locals about the regional and tribal

identity of the women, the choice not to wear burqas in Figure 4 also communicates

information about identity. The women shown in 4 are from settled communities in Ash

Sharqiyah, for these women the colourful sheilas have connotations of modernity and the

material wealth, which they associate with sedentary as opposed to nomadic lifestyle.

capital of Oman and a vital part of the monsoonal trading routes. The cultural connection to

Zanzibar is still visually evident in the appropriations of these east African scarves, 28 There, kangas are produced in sets of two pieces, one is traditionally worn as skirt and

the other as a matching headscarf, the women of Sur do not wear them as skirts.


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3.2 Embroidery in the Sultanate of Oman: trouser cuffs

Colourful embroidery practices are found across Oman. Figure 5 shows detailed bashtah or

trouser cuff embroidery made by Bedouin from Ash Sharqiyah. When taken in isolation from

the rest of the dress ensemble, bashtah embroidery does not specifically communicate a

regional or tribal identity. The Bedouin of the interior desert regions of A’Dakhiliya, Ash

Sharqiyah and Al-Wusta are stylistically very influential across the Sultanate and their

products can be found in suqs such as the Ibra women’s market, an important meeting place

of coastal and interior people and even women from outside Ash Sharqiyah.

Figure 5: Detail of bashtah trouser cuff embroidery from the Ash Sharqiyah region

(Photograph Erin Roche).

When Bedouin women walk the bashtah is not visible. It can only be seen when the wearer

sits cross-legged on the floor with the dishdasha slightly raised, which is precisely the

position women sit in at the daily asr> coffee ritual gatherings.

Figure 6: Woman wearing bashtah trouser cuff embroidery in Jalaan, Ash Sharqiyah

(Photograph Erin Roche).


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In Figure 6 we see another embroidery style found in Ash Sharqiyah, it is unique to the

coastal Bedouin of the area around Jalaan. It is constructed using more delicate needlework

than that of the popular bashtah of the interior, typically stitched using silver thread called

zari. Though it has been suggested that this technique is an appropriation of French

embroidery techniques brought to Ash Sharqiyah coastal towns through contact with the

Indian Ocean French Colonies (e.g. Comoro Islands and Djibouti),29 it is more likely that

many of these embroidery techniques have been imported from India. Maritime trading has

been a mainstay of the costal Omani communities for generations, with cloth and embroidery

being imported from Gujurat. Zari and badla are terms are used widely throughout India.30

As in neighbouring states such as Qatar,31 commercial tailors in Oman are often from the

Indian sub-continent. We interviewed 6 tailors for this study, all Bangladeshi nationals, who

confirmed that zari in Omani clothing was predominately bought in the United Arab Emirates

imported from Indian cities such as Chennai or Mysore and added to trousers by Indian,

Bangladeshi or Nepali tailors (see Figure 9). In order to be commercially viable they employ

their Indian techniques to create patterns that reflect Omani tastes.

Musandami women often referred to their embroidery style as badla. Many of the samples

we saw indicates that women have appropriated signature features commonly found in

neighbouring Iran across the Straits of Hormuz (see Figure 7).32 These badla were created by

29 Sherif, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Oceans: Cosmopolitan, Commerce and Islam

(2010).

Sheriff writes that up until 1905 approximately a third of the sailing vessels in Sur harbour

flew the French Flag because they had wives or housing in nearby French colonies, such as

the Comoro Islands or Djibouti. 30 Norris, “Shedding Skins: The Materiality of Divestment in India”, Journal of Material

Culture 9 (2004), pp. 59–71. 31 Lindholm, “Invisible No More: The Embellished Abaya in Qatar”, Textile Society of

America Symposium Proceedings, available at www.digitalcommons.unl.edu (2012). 32 Musandam forms the northernmost tip of Oman and is geographically separated from the

rest of Oman by a section of the United Arab Emirates. The distance between costal Iran and

Khasab, the capital of Musandam is only about sixty kilometres, separated by the Strait of

Hormuz, The tip of the peninsula is closer in distance to the coast of Iran than the Omani

mainland by road.


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weaving flat plastic thread, about 1.5 mm wide, known as seam. This style of embellishment

once typically incorporated strands of shaved silver thread in its patterns. The detail and

weight reflected the wearer’s socio-economic standing, with more affluent families being able

to afford more silver than subsistence farmers and fishers. According to the five Omani

women from lower socio-economic status fishing villages that we spoke to, all reporting to be

in their sixties, the practice of using real silver disappeared during the 1970s as neighbouring

Sharjah and Khasab markets have filled with an increasing array of imported (often synthetic

and more affordable) consumer goods. Today’s interpretation is still considered decadent and

somewhat expensive because of the investment in time it takes to create such detail.

Younger Omani women in the villages we spoke to explained they did not know how to

stitch badla, and that stitching was something done by a few talented grandmothers. Younger

women preferred to buy many of their items directly from tailors. We were introduced to

three Iranian women who had recently married into Omani families, they explained that the

stitching reminded them of home. They explained that they copied patterns from memory.

During this conversation, a pair of young Omani women went to fetch floral badla examples

which the young Iranian women confirmed were reminiscent of southern Iranian style in

appearance but had been made with different stitching techniques – most probably by local

Indian tailors.33

33 Badla is known as khus-duzi in southern Iran, but it is more commonly made in western

India (Gujarat) and again exported to the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. See Roche, Roche

and Al Saidi (2012) for more examples of Iranian influenced embroidery in Musandam.


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Figure 7: Badla with seam. Figure 8: Badla and floral embellishments (Photograph Erin

Roche).

The badla in Figure 8 is a popular contemporary style in Musandam. The women we spoke to

wearing these floral designs had them produced by local tailors.34 Both the younger and older

women from the Omani families confidently stated that the floral patterning was unique to

Musandam and would not be found elsewhere in Oman. Whether or not this is the case, it is

clear that this patterning adopted from southern-Iran is understood as a signifier of regional

identity.

34It is of note that this cultural exchange exists not only in terms of the language of dress.

One of the languages spoken in northernmost area of the Governorate of Musandam is

Kumzari a Southwest Iranic language. [Anonby, “Update on Luri: How many languages?”

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 13 (2003), pp. 171–197.]


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Figure 9: Local Bangladeshi tailor Salem Suwesh in A’Suwahirah, al-Batinah.

4 Conclusion

As argued at the outset of this paper, the dominant western media image of Arab Muslim

women is of a figure wearing the black abaya, an image which some scholars have argued

reduces the rich variety of Islamic women’s dress to what is assumed to be an expression of

marginalised submission.35, 36 In the above short overview, we have provided a glimpse of the

rich variety in the dress practices of Arab women, showing that even within one governorate

of one Arab nation a heteroglossic dress code exists: varieties in terms of cut, colour and

patterning which function within the communities of Oman to signify a range of meanings

relating to marital status, mode of existence (sedentary vs. nomadic) and regional identity.

The examples of embroidery discussed here show the creativity of the Omani women who

shared their ideas with our research team, in their appropriations and reimagining of Indian,

Iranian and Zanzibari fashion and techniques. During our interviews with mixed-aged groups

of women across the Sultanate, it emerged that women in their fifties and sixties preferred the

burqa to the niqab, whereas younger unmarried women more often wore and expressed a

35 Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America

(2011). 36 Mahmoud, Politics of Piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject (2012).


18

preference for the niqab. This preference for the burqa face covering appeared to be stronger

amongst married Bedouin women of the interior and in rural villages (as opposed to larger

settlements such as Barka and Muscat. With a larger sample of interviews, it would be

possible to document more confidently whether there is a generational trend whereby the

burqa is being slowly replaced by the niqab, or whether the burqa is primarily the reserve of

elder women. These nuances are currently being explored by the authors in a larger study.

The authors recommend that further studies in the field are undertaken, to give voice to

women of the region on issues relating to dress, enabling them to share their thoughts and

understandings of their own dress practices with a global readership, directing the Western

gaze to look beyond the abaya and the hijab to the vibrant creativity of Omani women’s dress

practices.

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Appendix: N-gram Corpus Linguistics Analysis of Islamic Dress Terms

Figure 10: Frequency of occurrence of unigrams hijab, burqa, abaya and chador in English publications.

Figure 11:Frequency of occurrence of unigrams Burka, Hidschab, Abaya and Tschador in German publications.

Figure 12: Frequency of occurrence of unigrams burqa, abaya, hijab and niqab in French publications.

Figure 13: Frequency of occurrence of unigrams burka, hijab, hiyab and niqab in Spanish publications.

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