In this project, I aim to highlight the importance of women’s hair, bringing new focus to everyday intimate lifeworlds, processes of social transformation, and new religious identities in Egypt, Sudan, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. I will thus have a significant impact on the global headscarf debate.

While an abundance of literature and research exists on the headscarf, hair itself remains a neglected theme, despite being central to issues of identity, beauty and sexuality. The ways that women wear their hair, think about it, and feel about it are the subject of much contestation. Hair is both a mundane and a disputed issue for many women. As such, it is a conflictual field that spans the negotiation of power relations, gender hierarchies, sexual politics, religious norms and consumer trends. The meanings assigned to hair vary with age, social milieu, gender, religious belief, political conviction and social setting. Hair is an emotional, intimate matter and a political, religious and social symbol. It is subject to modification, surveillance and commentary across ritual contexts, commercial spaces, and religious interpretations. Hair can give women unique options for agency. Changing one’s appearance can have a transformative effect on one’s self.

The study of hair thus allows for key insights into the multitude of “inner” and “outer” experiences that women face. It makes sense of women’s individual trajectories and changing public roles. Appearance is central to debates about women’s fashionable self-creation, processes of individualisation, and (non-)religiosities. What do we learn when we study women’s (in-)abilities to show or (not) show hair? What does the (in-)ability to conceal one’s hair mean in different contexts? I thus propose to study the intricate entanglement of the body, the psyche and the gendered self within changing social landscapes by combining research approaches rooted in Islamic studies and social anthropology.