Introduction

Modest fashion lines are prominent in high-street chains and luxury fashion brands, in magazines and advertising campaigns. A conflation considered strange, if not incompatible, when first launched, modest fashion is now entering the mainstream. Ethnic and Asian fashion styles that were popular in the 1990s can be seen as important precursors for the later visibility and mainstream retailing of modest fashion. For instance the short-lived trend of wearing saris over jeans, bindis, and henna, which also brought some critical debate around issues of ethics, transnationalism and aesthetics in sartorial choice, as a precursor to the cultural appropriation discourse more prevalent today. Usually attributed to fashion designed for minority faith groups from the Abrahamic faiths – Islam, Christianity and Judaism – modest fashion at its simplest is stylish design that provides bodily cover. Academic studies and the fashion industry have focused on Muslim modest fashion, and to a much lesser extent Hasidic Jewish and Mormon forms of style, with some discussion of non-religious markets (Lewis and Moors 2013; Lewis 2015; Tarlo 2010). The wider marketability of longer garment lengths and more relaxed tailoring is now evident in fashion from high street to luxury, with crossover mainstream appeal. Starting as a niche segment of the global fashion market thirty years ago, modest fashion has grown exponentially with key high-street stores such as H&M, Zara, Nike, Marks and Spencer and Uniqlo launching their own modest fashion lines. The first hijabi model on a British Vogue front cover, Halima Aden, along with luxury brands such as Dolce and Gabana, Versace, Chanel and Balenciaga releasing abayas (long robes) and headscarves, meanwhile show expansion at the higher end of the market. Given the visibility of Islamic modest fashion it is unsurprisingly reported as the fastest growing sector of fashion (ThomasReuters 2018/19, 2019/20). Industry buzz around the sub-sector has made headlines across the global fashion world and media, such as the reporting by Al Jazeera, the Islamic Fashion and Design Council and Vice that by 2023 Islamic fashion will reach $361 billion turnover.

Muslim spending power has been courted in the global fashion industry, through style and marketing, but also the seasonal targeting of religious holidays.

The rise of the Global Islamic Economy and Muslim women leaders in digital media and fashion has attracted recent attention. But how do these more celebratory stories align with, or interrupt, more familiar reports of Muslim women as less economically engaged, and the most likely to experience discrimination in many Western societies? Informed by over three years of fieldwork, this book offers an in-depth analysis of the everyday politics of labour and the roles of British Muslim women in the sub-sectors of fashion, media and visual arts.

British Muslim Women in the Cultural and Creative Industries sets out an innovative agenda for faith and religion in the lives of creative workers. Following the increasing visibility of digital and creative content on fashion and arts centring the voices of Muslim women, it reflects on the politics of identity and representation, and the ways in which Muslim faith and gender intersect, and are transformed by ethnicity, ‘race’ and racialisation, class and geography in working lives. Enriched by a historically contextualised, qualitative approach, everyday lived experiences of labour are explored through the narratives of different women. In many cases encounters with Islamophobia, sexism and racism are revealed. It further explores how faith, creativity and activism come together for Muslim women cultural producers.

Religion and faith have often been omitted altogether in equality and diversity work. Underscoring the point, Arts Council England commissioned a review into diversity and found that there is almost no data collected on religion and faith in culture and the arts in Britain. The importance of improved evidence and monitoring on religion extends to all areas of public life. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) collects compulsory data on ethnicity, gender and disability whereas religion as a category is treated as optional (House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee 2016/17: 14). A lack of available evidence can, somewhat perplexingly, be used as justification for inaction. For example, the paucity of data collected by HEFCE was given as the rationale behind why they were not looking at religion as a criterion for inclusion in higher education. This study on Muslim women considering the interrelations between education and employment, through creative arts and design in tertiary education and multiple sub-fields of the cultural and creative industries, makes an important inroad into addressing religion and faith in public life.

APPENDIX: INTERVIEW TABLE

Introduction

There are records of Muslims in Britain revealing a history that extends over hundreds of years. Scholarship has tended to focus on the period after the Second World War when larger numbers of Muslims settled in Britain. However, there is a much longer and important history of Muslims visiting, living and working in Britain. This social history is connected with the story of empire. The East India Company, founded in 1600, became a powerful agent of British imperialism from the early eighteenth century. Some agents from the East India Company and their families chose to return to Britain, with Indian servants and ayahs (nannies), of whom many were Muslim (Gilliat-Ray 2010). Indian sailors, or ‘lascars’, often press-ganged into the East India Company, jumped ship and settled in Britain, with communities in the nineteenth century forming in maritime ports, such as Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, Hull and South Shields (Gilliat-Ray 2010: 41; Lawless 1997). Larger numbers settled in the capital city of London. The figures are not insignificant: 10,000–12,000 lascars were recorded in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century (Ansari 2004: 35). Muslim labourers, such as Yemeni steelworkers, also came to Britain as part of the movement of people under the British Empire at this time (Ansari 2004; Gilliat-Ray 2010; Halliday 1992a; Lawless 1997). Muslim seafarers arrived from India, Yemen, Somalia, Malaysia and Egypt. Among early Muslim settlers in Britain, who were usually male, there were marked differences of language, ethnicity and interpretation of Islam.

In part the history of Muslims in Britain is stratified by class and labour. There is a rich and respectful history of trade and learning with the so-called Islamic world, including documentation of high profile and popular Muslim visitors in the eighteenth century, with evidence of wealthy elites studying at universities, working as teachers and as traders (Gilliat-Ray 2010: 32). In particular, Manchester, Birmingham and Bradford attracted Arab and Moroccan traders, with evidence of around a dozen Moroccan families and 150 Middle Eastern merchant houses in Manchester by 1830 (Halliday 1992b). These traders and their families preserved language, religious identities and cultural norms. For poorer migrants, pressure on local employment following the First World War, with a decline in the coal trade and rising unemployment for seamen, as well as soldiers returning from war, is likely to have fuelled racial tensions.

The subject of Muslim women and employment has attracted considerable attention as statistically participation is lower than the UK average; elsewhere in European countries the story of economic marginalisation is similar. In this book I have taken a longer historical view to contextualise in-depth qualitative research in order to better understand the changing roles of British Muslim women in work. There is some evidence of Muslim women entering the labour market in Britain as ayahs (or nannies) from the early eighteenth century and working in factories and through flexible specialisation, such as home-working on garment sewing, after the Second World War. Stories of Muslim women in work, however, have been obfuscated by a focus on men as the primary economic subject, and the very fact some of this work was ‘hidden’ in the home (and devalued as ‘women's work’), combined with the overlooking of religion as an important index of identity and inclusion. As Avtah Brah (1993) has argued, traditional gendered division of labour has never fully explained relationships with work, nor have culturalist understandings of women as domestically bound. Muslim women's engagement in the labour market needs to also be understood as racialised and in relation to region and location. Home-working reflected what work was available for women, alongside what could flexibly be organised around childcare, with concentrations in migrant South Asian com-munities as much about word-of-mouth networking rather than culture and patriarchalism per se (Brah 1993). In this book I have considered gendered and racialised dimensions within the transitions of cultural labour, and how they interrelate with the privileging of religious or Muslim identities especially evident with younger generations.

Tracing stories of educational aspiration and increasing workforce labour by British Muslim women in many ways mirrors wider structural and attitudinal shifts to women in work in Britain over the twentieth and twenty-first century. More women entered further and higher education and pursued waged labour for longer periods over the life course. Certain continuities exist, too, in the kinds of sector worked in, such as textiles and garment-making. Although the framing of the new economy in the knowledge-based and creative industries has transformed how we talk about work, expectations of the sense of purpose it will bestow on our lives, the type of jobs available, and how and where they are performed.

Introduction

Over the course of this book I have explored the roles of Muslim women in creative fields and how issues of identity are shaping working lives. In this chapter I give more space to the discussion of discrimination, oppression and hatred experienced by many of the women I researched with. Social identities are multifaceted therefore reported lines of discrimination were multiple and complex. Although matters of identity are interrelational, for some these sorts of marginalising experiences were mostly relating to gender, for others issues of ethnicity, race and culture were prime, whereas elsewhere discrimination was viewed as clearly a matter of prejudice against Islam and as Islamophobia. In relation to discussions around negotiating multiple indexes of prejudice and othering, Muslim identity was located variously at: multiple scales (the city, national, transnational, diasporic or in terms of the global ‘ummah’); in relation to denomination (for instance Sunni, Sunni-Salafi, Shia, Sufi); or cultural and heritage area (with broad references to South Asian, Arab, British and so forth). I begin by outlining some of the women's reflections on negotiating working lives punctuated by a far-right Islamophobic event. I then discuss everyday encounters with intolerance and othering. In the following sections I move on to discuss digital films, a Muslim festival and writing group to reflect upon the various and multiple ways that the women in the study responded to hate with their own kinds of creative activism.

Mountz and Hyndman (2006) write how intimate forms of discrimination and racism are tied to global networks of exchange. The global geopolitical events of the rise of political Islam, terrorist attacks and Western imperialism in foreign and home policy, fuelled Islamophobia in Britain, with hijabi women most targeted (Alexander 2017; Najib and Hopkins 2019). In tandem, patriarchal attitudes and behaviours, including restricting women's mobilities, are afforded greater legitimacy through Islamophobia – anti-Muslim racism – where there are rational concerns about hostility and violence in public spaces (Alexander 2017; Najib and Hopkins 2019). Understanding the spatialising logic of Islamophobia in relationship to women's labour transitions might usefully be advanced through feminist thinking. External threats can encourage working from home.

Introduction

The reputation of British art school is indelibly linked to the early 1990s rise of the Young British Artists and the ‘Cool Britannia’ slogan popularised by Saatchi and adopted briefly by the New Labour government. Known for provocation, hedonism and sexuality, with raucous partying and hard drinking, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and to a lesser extent the artistic and social behaviour of Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread, Gavin Turk and the Chapman Brothers, pushed boundaries in the art scene and society writ large. Most associated with Goldsmiths arts college, the YBAs, as they were latterly termed, were trained in a narrow pool of chiefly London-based art schools including Chelsea, the Slade, the Royal College of Arts and Glasgow (While 2003; Grenfell and Hardy 2003). Already attracting attention from international art markets, the defining art exhibition Sensation cemented their subversive reputation. Touring to Berlin, Sydney and Tokyo, Sensation was cancelled in New York due to threats of financial sanctions by Rudy Giuliani, then mayor – only adding to their notoriety (Grenfell and Hardy 2003: 20). Mapping the wild success of the YBAs, Grenfell and Hardy (2003: 30) identified the close networks of institutions and stakeholders involved. Mostly based in London, and distinguished by youthfulness and shared nationality, the YBAs presented as narrowly white, with the exception of Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare. Following on from the racial and aesthetic politics of the BLK Art Group, a collective of young black artists formed in Wolverhampton, and British counterpoint to the wider Black Power Movement, the dominant ‘white space’ of the YBAs movement attracted derision (http:// www.blkartgroup.info/index.html). Writing in Third Text, Kobena Mercer (1999) is scathing of an attitude and symbolic language that communicated a ‘don't care localism’ playing on outmoded stereotypes of Britishness and a ‘withdrawing and retreating from difference into an identity politics of its own’ (Mercer 1990: 55). For Mercer, the YBAs were less characterised by innovation and edginess, and more by retrogressiveness, at least politically, representing ‘come back to what you know’ (55).

In this chapter I outline a history of the British art school and its links to colonialism in order to contextualise discourse and debate around a politics of difference for Muslim women art students and emerging artists.

Introduction

Since the turn of the twenty-first century Muslim lifestyle media has expanded rapidly. Within the sub-genre especially prominent are Muslim women producing content for other Muslim women. Muslim women bloggers – so-called ‘hijabi bloggers’ – attract large global followings. For instance, Huda Kattan, an American born to Iraqi parents, now based in Dubai, has 45.5 million Instagram followers @HudaBeauty, which Vogue Arabia contextualises as ‘nearly 15 times the population of Dubai’ (https://en.vogue.me/culture /huda-kattan-10-facts-about-her/). The Islamic marketplace reveals geographical diversity with hubs of activity based in countries such as Indonesia, Quwait, the United Arab Emirates, the US, Canada, Australia, The Netherlands and the UK. Working from these countries and others, Muslim women bloggers are optimising their reach by communicating across multiple media platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Muslim lifestyle media creates digital spaces of exchange and is associated with consumer capitalism. As I discuss in this chapter there are also less explored dimensions around access to informal education that can transcend local or national contexts. Often a stated intention of Muslim lifestyle media is strengthening supra-national identification with what is sometimes termed the global Muslima, or Muslim female community. Online minority spaces for identification and belonging are found to be especially attractive in hostile local environments where subjects might experience multiple forms of social and economic exclusion in the lived everyday (see Warren 2018, 2019). The Islamic marketplace, modest fashion and hijabi blogging have received academic attention in relation to identity formation and belonging, but there are very few qualitative studies into the everyday performance of media work. The critical roles of Muslim women in performing media and digital labour has not been widely explored, nor has the strategic work of mobilising representations of Muslim women that are positive and inclusive of intra-Muslim difference (for an exception see Lewis 2015). The lack of attention to Muslim women's labour power is perhaps surprising given the growth in popular and scholarly interest in issues of gender, Islam and sectarianism, access to education and labour and its gendered, racialised and faith dimensions, the role of digital media in social organising, and the continued rise of the Islamic cultural industries. Original empirical insights in this chapter explore the lived experiences of female producers within the burgeoning arena of Muslim lifestyle media and its imbrications with ‘mainstream’ media.

Introduction

The Global Islamic Economy was estimated to be $2.2 trillion in 2018 (ThomasReuters 2019/20). Driven in large part by the consumerism of young Muslims, by category the Muslim spend is detailed at: $1.17 trillion for food and beverages; followed by $283 billion for modest clothing and apparel; $220 billion for media and recreation; and $64 billion for halal cosmetics (ThomasReuters 2019/20: 4). Modest fashion purchased by Muslim women alone was estimated at $270 billion globally in 2017, with a forecast of growth to $360 billion by 2023 (ThomasReuters 2019/20: 63). The story of the Islamic cultural industries is an outlier in discourse on cultural labour for at least two reasons: the commercial and entrepreneurial aspect of much of the cultural production; and the disputed role of religion within cultural production, and more particularly, Islam in Britain and other Western countries.

The influence of the Islamic cultural industries is already visible in modest fashion on the high street, in luxury and e-commerce. Mainstream brand and retailer interest in the Islamic marketplace has grown with high-street stores such as H&M, Uniqlo, and Marks and Spencer launching modest fashion lines, rather than capsule Ramadan collections, along with luxury brands including Dolce and Gabana, and Burberry. French fashion house Balmain was bought by Qatar's Mahoola investment fund whose portfolio also included a 25 per cent share in Italian house Valentino. Meanwhile in Istanbul the first women-only hijabi shopping centre recently opened. What is driving this development and growth? In part it has been attributed to a passion for designer labels especially in wealthy Middle Eastern Muslim majority countries. Yet the more significant driver is the young, large and fast-growing Muslim population worldwide. This is an upwards trajectory given the global Muslim population is expected to rise from 1.7 billion in 2014 to 2.2 billion by 2030 (26.4 percent), and by 2030 up to 29 per cent of the global young population (15–29 years) will be Muslim (Pew Research Forum on Religion and Public Life 2011). Islam has the youngest population of any of the world's largest religions. And, far from being peripheral in significance, Britain is regarded as one of the global leaders in halal media and fashion, ranked fifth in the world.

Introduction

There is a prominent phrase in the hadith used by the Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم which is oft quoted in relation to the arts: ‘Allah is Beautiful and He likes beauty’ (Mukhtasar Sahih Muslim 2000, vol. 1: 65). Religious faith coexists with secularity in the lifeworld of Muslim artists, art-making and the contemporary art world. However, there are historic and contested issues of categorisation around what has commonly been termed Islamic art, and the continued politics of representation that shapes distinctions made between Islamic religious art and ‘international’ contemporary art. Informed by the voices of Muslim women artists, this chapter seeks to trouble these distinctions. I explore how the marginalisation of religion within art discourse has led to a narrowing of notions of modernity, unchecked barriers to the art establishment, and perpetuated a nativist notion of ‘authenticity’ for minority artists and their artwork. I discuss the breadth of how notions of Muslimness and Islamic principles in art travel to and are circulated in different art spaces and contexts, and the continued politics of knowledge production around how artists and artworks are represented within the Western art world.

A defining feature of Islamic art, as it is commonly termed, is the repetition of patterns and order. In mirroring nature, patterns such as calligraphy, geometry and arabesque (or stylised floral patterns) are intended to follow universal mathematical principles, and to resonate aesthetically with Muslim, other religious or non-religious people alike. Most associated with compass or straight edge work in two- or three-dimensional form, Islamic art is traditionally decorative or functional. In the history of Western art, craft practices have often been viewed pejoratively for their perceived associations with repetition rather than originality, domestic labour and household objects. In the Qur’an and hadith there is no direct reference to ‘art’; no word in Arabic or Persian exists for art in the Western sense. Outside of value distinctions made between design and art, most discussed in contemporary discourse, and arguably misunderstood, are tensions in the treatment of form and makers within the Qur’an and hadith. In the Qur’an there is no direct condemnation of image-making (of animals or human form). However, there are negative references to image-making as sinful documented in the hadith. These references are made to representations of animate life in paintings, sculpture and textiles (hangings and cushions).

Introduction

Jakob and van Heur (2015) argue that, compared with the attention afforded the cultural policies and initiatives galvanising the creative sector, less is known about the role played across this field by intermediaries. While this absence is addressed across this volume (see also Perry et al, 2015), even less understood are the objects of intermediaries and their activities. By way of illustration, O’Connor (2004: 40) describes intermediation as a mode of translation ‘between the language of policy makers and that of the cultural producers’. How then, do individuals and communities that are earmarked for inculcation into the values of the cultural ecology understand the results of this translation? While there is a rich tradition of audience and visitor studies (see Tung Au et al, 2017; Hay, 2018), the specific ways in which individuals are situated by intermediation practices, policy imperatives, discourses and imaginaries as cultural consumers, participants and sometimes producers (see Chapter four) merits closer attention.

The Cultural intermediation project that impels this collection sought to investigate the connection between policies and people in terms of the variety of their roles across the cultural ecology, through explorations of sites in Salford (see Chapter thirteen) and Birmingham (here and Chapter four). Drawing on this research, this chapter investigates the relationship with the cultural ecology of people living in the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham.

Balsall Heath suggested itself as a site of investigation because of its demographic diversity, levels of deprivation, recent history of intercommunity dissonance and the relative visibility of its cultural assets. On this last note, Balsall Heath has been an object of cultural policy initiatives in which the neighbourhood saw a rise in available arts programmes which sought to engage disadvantaged and ‘hard-to-reach’ communities whether defined in terms of education, employment or cultural activity (for a summary, see Jancovich and Bianchini, 2013).

In proceeding, this chapter first outlines the particular socioeconomic character of this area in the context of a wider set of issues and policy impulses. It then discusses the method of walking interviews that was employed to engage with residents, of how residents guided researchers around local sites and scenes that are meaningful to them.