Although clothing was one of the most debated and contested issues in early Republican Turkey, direct state intervention to people’s clothing through legislation was in fact very limited. Together with the Hat of Law of 1925, the Law Prohibiting the Wearing of Certain Garments, usually referred as the Dress Law of 1934, composed the legal framework of the dress change the Kemalist regime attempted to achieve. With the consolidation of the authoritarian single-party regime in the 1930s, a series of changes was introduced especially targeting cultural and social modernization. The Dress Law of 1934 was a part of this wave of reforms through which visual expressions of modernity, such as clothing, gained a particular significance reflecting the “progress” brought about by the Kemalist regime. The law prohibited the wearing of religious attire by the clerics of all religions except in places of worship and during religious ceremonies. Members of the clergy were to adopt “modern” clothing outside of service, religious symbols and garment would be removed, and thus a new profile of Turkish citizen would be established in the public sphere. This requirement was defended as a requirement of the principle of secularism as well as a prerequisite for preserving equality among the citizens. This paper analyzes the debate regarding the Dress Law of 1934. It discusses how, in the context of this law, dress became an issue of modernity and European-style clothing was promoted as a signifier of a secular national identity. The paper also explores the ways in which this process coincided with, and in many ways served, the Kemalist project of homogenizing the public sphere and redrawing its boundaries as a uniform, irreligious and national space. Reactions coming from different religious communities, such as the Greek Orthodox Church, are also analyzed, with a particular emphasis on the ways the mid-level Muslim clerics responded to this change in the provinces. Thus, rather than the discourse adopted by the Kemalist regime, the implementation process of the law and different ways of adaptation to the imposed norms will be the main focus.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I brought an end to Ottoman identity with its many symbols, classic and reinvented traditions. This paper examines the refashioning of clothing, not in the new Turkish republic, but amongst Kurdish nationalists, former loyal Ottoman subjects, who now sought to advance Kurdish national claims and identity in the post-Ottoman era. I focus in particular on a group of urban educated Kurdish elites who went into exile in Syria and Lebanon under the French mandate following the foundation of Kemalist regime in Turkey. Sons of old Kurdish elite families, such as Jaladet and Kamuran Bedirkhan or Akram and Qadri Jamilpashazade had been and considered themselves part of an Ottoman intelligentsia. However, the breakup of the Empire and the rise of the ethnic Turkish nationalism in Turkey left them no choice but to adopt a Kurdish nationalist stance. In exile, they initiated a cultural renaissance movement under the auspices of the French mandate authorities in the 1930s and 1940s. Their cultural activities included publishing books and periodicals in Kurdish and French, and aimed at awakening national sentiments among the Kurdish masses, along with introducing the Kurdish question to the Western world. In their writings, clothing appeared an important theme for distinguishing Kurds from other nations. Thus, by analyzing the writings of the former Ottoman Kurdish elites before and after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, I show how clothing continued to be a signifier of their identities, first Ottomanism and then Kurdish nationalism. More specifically my presentation explains how the meaning of classic Ottoman articles of clothing, and especially the fez, changed over time for the Kurdish nationalists, how they responded to the Kemalist clothing reform, which was imposed upon the Kurds of Turkey, and how they promoted traditional Kurdish clothing as a unique national dress.

In December 1927, the Iranian Majles (parliament) issued a dress code for Iranian male citizens. The new male attire was to include a Western suit and the Pahlavi hat, shaped like the French Kepi. The dress law's implementation was to take place by March 1929, and offenders were to be fined or even jailed. The dress law demonstrates the conflation of state power with elite hegemony during Reza Shah's period. My paper analyzes how the dress law and its implementation assisted in buttressing the hegemony of Western-educated elite men's model of masculinity. Simultaneously, the administrative and coercive measures taken to implement the dress law consolidated power relations between state and citizen. The assertion of state power also bolstered the power of Western-educated elite men, many of whom were members of the state bureaucracy. These men shared in the state's power as well as benefited from their position as bearers of the state-condoned model of masculinity: the dress law was to nationalize, modernize and westernize Iranian male citizens, making them more like men of the Western-educated elite. The dress law fixed the position of Western-educated elite men as a standard against which other men were measured. Patriotism, hygiene and informed westernization were all employed to promote the change of dress and to introduce new notions of appearance and the body into hegemonic masculinity. Westernized appearance was not merely enforced by law, it became a prerequisite of proper manliness. The cultural hegemony of Western-educated elite men was accentuated by the dress law, as they had earlier on appropriated Western practices and norms as part of their cultural capital. Many of these men were used to wearing European clothes and familiar with the manners and practices dictated by such garments, most notably by European hats. Thus, while sartorial changes undoubtedly confused and were resisted by men of the traditionalist strata of society, men of the Western-educated elite had much less to adapt to, and could slip more comfortably into the new masculine identity promoted by the regime. My paper employs newspaper articles and literary texts to demonstrate how the dress law positioned westernized elite masculinity as hegemonic, thus maintaining the political, social and cultural hegemony of western-educated elite men.

This paper examines the importance of dress to the construction of Egyptian identity in the interwar period, a period of central importance to the formation of Egyptian national culture. Unlike Turkey and Iran, Egypt did not enact legislation mandating wearing the suit and tarboush, forms of dress that had become associated with progress and the self-consciously modern, middle-strata efendiyya. However, as the twentieth century progressed, the stigma attached to the gown and turban of the religious scholar increased significantly, with growing numbers of students at al-Azhar wanting not only to transfer to civil schools, but also to take on the dress and title of the efendiyya. For instance, Taha Husayn writes in the second volume of his memoir about wanting to to join the “lay world of the tarboush” because he was “sick to death of the turban and all that it implied.” The symbolic importance of dress in interwar Egypt is further demonstrated by the 1926 student strike at Cairo’s Dar al-‘Ulum teacher-training. Dar al-‘Ulum students were officially classed as shaykhs and expected to wear religious dress, but in the first quarter of the twentieth century an increasing number of them had started using the title efendi and wearing the suit and tarboush similar to graduates of other higher civil schools. The strike was brought on by a government ban on graduates of Dar al-‘Ulum from doing this, supposedly because of confusion related to having the same person listed as a shaykh in some documents and an efendi in others. The strike eventually resulted in a government decree which officially changed the dress of the school. Interestingly, however, around the same time as the strike, graduates of other civil schools petitioned to switch from the tarboush to western-style hat. The centrality of efendi dress to Egyptian national identity is shown further by the ability of early Islamists, such as Hasan al-Banna, to establish themselves as religious leaders while wearing suits and tarboushes, combined with religiously-inspired beard. The paper closes with an investigation of early forms of neo-Islamic and hybrid (religious-civil) dress among Egyptian Islamists. This paper extends Birgit Meyer’s work on aesthetics to show how dress can assist individuals to establish membership or leadership of a social or religious group. It is based on analysis of an extensive range of Arabic-language memoirs and periodicals, amassed as part of a book-length work on the place of Islam in Egyptian national culture.