Headscarves as Politics: Gender, Islam and Shifting Discourses of Social Justice in the Balkans

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In Bulgaria, the so-called emancipation of Muslim women was a particularly urgent goal and a litmus test for the triumph of scientific socialism over what was considered the feudal backwardness of Islam. For over four decades, all of the coercive powers of the centralized state were funneled into suppressing local Islamic traditions and radically reimagining gender norms among the country’s sizeable Muslim minority. After the collapse of communism in 1989, Bulgaria’s Muslims were free to embrace their
religious and ethnic identities, but found their communities bitterly divided with regard to any potentialIslamic revival. There were those who maintained allegiance to the secular communist project, those who wished to revive local Muslim traditions from before the communist era, and those who chose to embrace a new form of universalist ‘orthodox’ Islam being imported into the Balkans through the work of international Islamic charities. Many of these debates revolve around the re-inscription of more
conservative gender roles for women, and an ongoing debate over the Islamic headscarf has become a potent symbol of this conflict. This talk examines the local meanings of the headscarf as a political and religious symbol and the complicated array of factors informing the selective embrace of ‘orthodox’Islam in Bulgaria today.

Kristen Ghodsee is an Associate Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Duke University Press, 2005)and Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe: Gender, Ethnicity and the Transformation of Islam in Postsocialist Bulgaria (Princeton University Press 2009).