Ashly Higgens, a former student of mine and a reader of PI.Org website, sent me this hysterical photo from DC's "High Heel Drag Race."  It seems to put the proper note to the absurdity of the anti-niqab discussion.  Niqab is as American as you can get when it gets to be campy drag wear.  Fellow Muslims, we have  arrived!

   

Irving Karchmar and I had the opportunity to speak with and buy some of these beautiful scarves from Rabia Keesha-Rousta to profit the Pakistani women and families who make them.  I ordered several scarves (nearly all represented here) and sent in a review to a list-serve about the gorgeous fabics I received.  First read Rabia's letter about her work

Nakia, our Fashion Mujahid takes a look at Shukr's new fall line. Pointing out that cutting clothes just a little wider doesn't quite make it fashion, especially for women with curves. The Fashion Mujahid points out what styles look good on what shapes and what colors are right for your complexion.

Sexual Ethics and Islam is finally in my hot little hands, so get yourself to a bookstore and get it NOW. I'll try to post a review soon.

In case you've been hiding under a rock for the past three weeks, Inside the Gender Jihad is in stores now as well, so pick them both up and save yourself a second trip.  

Speaking of jihad, more on the Fashion Jihad later, and I mean it. 

Now, I've got to get reading!

*mwah* 

While in the library doing research, I got that familiar sense of frustration. I get it while clothes shopping or looking for cute progressive guys to flirt with. It's the frustration of knowing exactly what I want, and having no success in finding it. Clothes shopping experiences are a special kind of torture for me, as I'm trying to cover my body while attempting a modicum of personal style. Don't get me started on finding a Muslim guy who doesn't want to see me burned at the stake. Suffice to say, 'taint no easy task.

  In my reasearch, this lack of already published relevant work is almost a good thing, because it's a sign that the project I'm working on needs to be done, that I'll be creating something substanially different from what's currently available. I've plowed through texts both arcane and painfully shallow, where what I'm working on will create some sort of happy medium, a bridge between the impossibly theoretical doorstops and the fluffernutter I'm usually handed by guys who think a young American woman couldn't possibly be doing serious work. 

A friend wrote me privately after reading the blog on false modesty below. She had gone to the WNTW website and was disturbed by their sale of one's "assets." Now listen, it is about the principles of shape and style, not following their instructions on how much boob to show. The principles can be borrowed without fear!

So my friend is tall like me and weighs a little more than me and has bigger girlfriends due to pregnancy. Make sure you have a good bra sister! I suspect she is a size 18 American.

She is at a loss for work clothes and dress casual. She needs very simple, very straightforward, nothing wacky, nothing out on a limb, even slightly. I'm taking everything from Eddie Bauer, Lane Bryant, and Target to make the point that this stuff is accessible, is reasonably inexpensive (especially on sale, sign up for e-mails), is moderate, is modest, and is attractive. She specifically asked about pants, so I am not bringing skirts into the mix here. She mentioned she did not want to iron the clothes and she wanted it to be comfortable. I hope this is a good foundational set of clothes, many possibilities, all attractive, all modest:

2 bits of News from my private blog on this site:

1. I've just reprinted my blog "The Con of Moderate Islam" for our friends the Carnival Clowns. Here is a teaser selection from the full piece:

"Answering calls to speak moderately on demand does nothing but play into non-Muslim privilege and its foundational assumptions that we, as Muslims, are essentially incapable of basic human ethical faculties such as self-consciousness, self-examination, self-critique, and independent agency. Non-Muslims demand us to prove that we are not inherently criminal, in the same repulsive manner that African Americans are required to defend their own humanity 'despite the clear statistics on Black crime rates.' In the end, we make them the arbiters of the adequacy of our 'moderation' and we cannot win."

2. I've realized I can speak about subjects inappropriate for this main blog. So I have started to write about getting older, getting beautiful, wiser about myself and all that. At the moment, I'm talking about fashion. If you want some girlfriend talk on the site (albeit, older wiser girlfriend talk), please visit me there. Let's talk eyeshadow! The first post is up, more today God willing.

I want to send a thank you note to the show "What Not to Wear." Actually, I did. I wrote them way back when and thanked them for teaching me that I could wear clothes that flatter my figure and my character. I am 5-10 and weigh 170ish of well-distributed womanhood. I am the product of peasant genes on both sides of my family. I look like one of those women who could pull a plow all day long, give birth to her baby in the field, tuck the newborn in her dress to suckle, and keep plowing because she can just sense that the rain is coming soon and she's got to get the seeds in….you know that kind of woman. This is not a woman who wears certain kinds of women's clothes well. After I grew out of Punk, I never knew what to wear. I was dowdy. Then when I became a Muslim, I added long and baggy to dowdy. Long skirts, long shirts, comfortable shoes. Drab. Why? Partly because I just didn't know how to dress, partly because I just didn't know what dressing modestly meant, and partly because I had no sense of myself as a woman.

You know, I didn't think about the possibilities of having a reader's blog within the site.  Does this mean I have a place to make frivolous comments public?  Or maybe I can talk about something I wouldn't normally on the site as a whole.  Yeah, I'm going to do that here!  Okay, then, here it goes:   I think I'm going to use this blog to talk about how I have been sorting out being a single 42 year old "seriously-goofy-conservative-progressive" Muslim woman who dates and likes fashion and make-up.  I reserve the right to post about other things, such as wrestling and my "deep thoughts" posts that bore everyone silly but make me happy to think them through aloud.

I hope I don't expose Progressive Islam's true colors by saying this, but don't you think SHUKR has cornered the modern, hip, modest, AND educated Muslim/a look to a "T"? Much the same way Banana Republic for a while had that whole business casual metro sexual man purse market on lock-down.

Since fashion is one of those ultra-examples of semiotic you-to-can-become-the-sign-itself-with-these-jeans, i thought this might tie in some how. 

Not to mention that woman's outfit here is to die for, and dare I say, hot as hell.