Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
91

IMAGES OF DESIRE:
Creating Virtue and Value in an
Indonesian Islamic Lifestyle Magazine
Carla Jones



ABSTRACT

The recent and highly visible rise of Islamic consumer culture in con-
temporary urban Indonesia is a source of both pleasure and anxiety
for many Indonesians, figuring in debates about the appeal of a new
piety there in the past decade. At the center of these debates is the
image of the piously dressed woman. Simultaneously a consumer and
a sign of piety, modest yet attractive, she seems to blur assumptions
about the boundaries between image and substance, and in so doing
generates anxiety. A booming Islamic fashion industry and Islamic
fashion media traffic in this space, turning virtue into value and vice
versa by deploying the image of the pious feminine to incite consumer
desire while denying accusations that this is simply capitalism with
a religious face. Based on research and interviews with the editorial
staff of one Islamic fashion magazine, NooR, this article traces how
Indonesia’s rising Islamic fashion industry and lifestyle media have
placed women at the center of broader cultural debates about the
relationship between devotion and consumption.

I n the last decade, urban Indonesian public culture has become visibly
more Islamic in style. This marked shift, often dated to the period
following President Suharto’s resignation in 1998, is seen in a host of
arenas that can be broadly described as commodity spaces, such as tele-
vision programming, home décor, hajj travel, automobiles, and banking.
Perhaps no commodity is more associated with this shift than the visible
change in women’s dress. Pious Muslim dress, an explicitly plain (yet
expensive) and rare sight in the early 1990s, is now elaborate and ubiqui-
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES
Vol. 6, No. 3 (Fall 2010) © 2010

91

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

92 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

tous in urban Indonesia. This combination of decoration and ubiquity is

in conversation with broader debates about the rise of public piety in the
country, debates which posit that much of the public symbolism associ-
ated with piety is merely image (imej), rather than a reflection of deeper
material and spiritual transformation. Women and women’s dress fig-
ure centrally in these debates, suggesting that fashionably pious women
are pursuing an impure goal, that of being of attractive and fashionable,
rather than spiritual purity. As a result, contemporary female consumers
of Islamic fashion are liable to come under criticism for pursuing image
over depth, and for being technically modest yet nonetheless desirable.
At the center of this phenomenon are the new Islamic lifestyle
and fashion media directed at pious women and promoting the idea of
“spiritual beauty.” As commodities themselves, and as media for pro-
moting Islamic fashion, they are at the juncture of image and substance
in Indonesia, simultaneously making images while deflecting critiques
that pious femininity is an exercise in mere image-making. Through
translating virtue into value and value into virtue via the image of the
pious feminine, such magazines navigate the terrain of desire, faith, and
consumption. In this article, I trace the emergence of the twin industries
of Islamic fashion and fashion media through a case study of NooR, an
eight-year-old monthly magazine that is one of the most prestigious in
an increasingly competitive fashion media market. I argue that the con-
ditions that have made the magazine successful, and made steering it a
challenge, such as the broader cultural debate about image and desire,
were in part created through the Islamic fashion media’s promotion of
Islamic consumption. Two effects emerge from this process. First, the
Islamic fashion media maintain pious femininity as the focus of Indone-
sian anxieties about Islam, even as their editors are constrained by and
exploit those anxieties. Second, women who choose to wear fashionable
Islamic dress find it difficult to speak past the powerful symbolism of
that piety, and therefore they resort to the language of consumption to
explain that desirability and piety are not mutually exclusive. As neither
of these effects is ever closed, the anxieties are continually reproduced.
NATIONAL HISTORIES AND GLOBAL RELIGION

The rise in public proclamations of piety in Indonesia came at a time in

national and international history that made Islam an appealing social

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
93

and political identity. Suzanne Brenner (1996) has argued that a com-
bination of factors produced the particularly middle-class and youth
appeal of Islamic piety in the late 1980s and the early 1990s in Indone-
sia. Through a national stagnation in employment for college-educated
youth, combined with increasing international travel and education
abroad, many Indonesian young people, particularly college students,
came to see Indonesian Islam from the perspective of other Muslim so-
cieties, as a second-rate version of a more pure religion originating in the
Middle East. Although that smarted, it infused a view of the postcolonial
state of President Suharto (1965–98), which he dubbed the New Order,
as a morally corrupt inheritor of the nationalist legacy. This corruption
could be corrected through an appeal to a purer form of Islam, rather
than the form associated with their parents’ generation, which had been
diluted by Javanese influence. The allure of a transnational religious
community was central to the zeal of this period, one which was not
anti-national but rather curative for the nation. Brenner’s research re-
vealed the importance of national improvement, not rejection, for activ-
ists in this reformist period. Significantly, this period also saw the first
display of religious identity via modest dress among young women, as a
sign of personal transformation and in-group identity. Busana Muslim,
or Muslim dress, during this period was spare in style yet high in cost.
Because most such clothing was imported, women who recounted those
years to me consistently remarked on the difficulty of both finding and
affording the distinctively unpatterned, often pastel clothing. This might
seem ironic, given the fact that a key part of the moral critique directed
at the older generation focused on the expense of profligate consumer
display, but plain Islamic dress during this period was fundamentally
about using signs of Islam to point out the lack of morality in immodest
and conspicuous consumer statements.
The aspirations of the reform movement were limited by the Su-
harto regime’s strategic management of the emerging religiously based
political critique. As Robert Hefner (2000) has detailed, even as conven-
tional political parties were quashed during the 1980s and 1990s, making
religion one of the only arenas from which to launch a political critique,
Islamic organizations were also under considerable pressure to limit
their calls for democratic representation. Organizations such as Ikatan
Cendekiawan Muslim Indonesia, Nadhlatul Ulama, and Muhammadi-

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

94 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

yah each found their leadership infiltrated with Suharto allies, which
reduced their ability to call for substantial political reform. At the same
time, Suharto, his family members, and other high-profile political lead-
ers took advantage of the atmosphere of Islamic piety, which led more
public officials to make the hajj each year, and their wives to increasingly
wear busana Muslim. In spite of these attempts at cooptation through
the 1990s, the appeal of public piety was not fully formed until after
the Suharto regime ended. Following Suharto’s resignation, a generally
liberated sense of freedom, found in the lifting of press censorship and
the proliferation of political parties, contributed to an atmosphere of
change that allowed some religious activists to argue that Islam was the
best space from which to generate personal and collective reform.1
These conditions saw the almost instant and exponential emergence
of a whole host of ways of being a pious Muslim in Indonesia. From Ra-
madan television specials, to popular music, to Qur’anic recitation clubs,
to Adzhan ringtones, to Islamic housing complexes, to beautifully ornate
dress, being Muslim very quickly became something that one could
consume and proclaim.2 The proliferation of mediated forms of religious
authority extends Jacques Derrida’s (1998) argument that there is no on-
tological difference between religion and media, suggesting that religious
subjectivity is deeply and mutually enabled through the “circulation of
aesthetic and ritual forms” (Hirschkind and Larkin 2008, 2; cf. de Vries
and Weber 2001; Salvatore 2001; Meyer and Moors 2006). In Indonesia
in particular, the reclamation of visual and public culture from the state
has centrally involved the “refiguration of... sensory subjectivity” (Spyer
2008, 16) by religious communities.
Amrih Widodo (2008) has described this boom, and especially the
Islamic mediascape in this moment, as generating a necessary question:
“Do they [Islamic writers] write for God or for money?”3 Widodo’s ques-
tion echoes a general anxiety about the increase in symbols of piety in
contemporary Indonesian public culture, implying that capitalist tran-
substantiation is a one-way process. This assumption posits that once
a thing or an idea is transformed into exchange value in the cultural
marketplace, it can no longer also be virtuous. Value and virtue cannot,
or ideally should not, coexist in the same form. When they do, they
invite scandal.
This anxiety both echoes and contradicts one of the foremost philo-

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
95

sophical analyses of the process of commodification, that of Karl Marx.

For Marx, commodification, or the creation of abstract exchange value
from material use value, entailed a somewhat religious process, one
that was “theological” and “magical” because it positioned consumers
to desire and acquire commodities for their claim to do more for them
than a clear-eyed analysis of the material properties of such commodities
would posit (1976, 163). Commodities murmur metaphysical promises.
Marx was critical of this effect of capitalism, almost wistfully wishing
that users of things could separate authentic social values from the
mystification hidden in the generation of exchange value. A similar, but
inverted, wistfulness lurks behind contemporary Indonesian anxieties
about commodified images of feminine piety. Rather than a perversion
of sober use-value, in this view commodification of piety is the perverse
transformation of an elevated abstraction, i.e. salvation, into the base
and inappropriate form of a commercial material object such as Islamic
fashion. Such commodities are promoted through the circulation of
images of pious women, images which are themselves abstractions but
which might lead consumers to less positive destinations than would
true religious values. When consumers themselves seem to suggest that
pious goods might simultaneously be both virtuous and valuable, the
anxiety this generates can be likened to the accusations of fetishism
that Webb Keane, in analyzing Protestant conversion on the Indonesian
island of Sumba, has called “scandal” (2007, 23, 204). Keane uses the
term to describe the violation of modernist boundaries between people
and things, a boundary crossed whenever humans appear to have been
commodified. I would argue that this sense of scandal is amplified when
the things involved are marked as religious and when the humans in-
volved are feminine.
Popular and elite Indonesian anxieties about the scandal of re-
ligion and commerce co-mingling crumble under the weight of real
people, however, and women, no matter how objectified, can also object
to these assumptions. Indeed, the sheer scale of the success of Islamic
commodities suggests that commodification does not pose a problem for
many Indonesians, for they are buying these goods marketed as pious.
Yet that very sales success coexists with anxiety about whether or not
one can believe the proclamations of faith which people who buy and
use such commodities seem to be making. Female editors and female

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

96 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

readers alike find themselves in this mix, justifying the proliferation of

images of piety as edifying. In this line of defense, the more Indonesian
women are exposed to images of pious women, the better. Rather than
commerce deceptively dressed up as piety, images of feminine piety have
the potential to effect a positive moral impact.
Pious consumption is, in this sense, inherently performative, both
for individual women and for elites making decisions about media.
Karen Strassler (2009) has argued that the New Order period and its
strict control of media created the conditions and the desire for popular
refashionings of public media forms, revealing the liveliness of recep-
tion and the fragile foundation of claims to authority. These conditions
also fed the appeal of Islamic authority and contributed to the debates
about pious performances, especially in the years immediately following
Suharto’s resignation. Expanding on Foucauldian conceptions of power,
Saba Mahmood (2005) has argued that performances of piety by women
in the mosque movement of 1990s Cairo should not be understood as
individual expressions of agentive intention but rather as enactments of
virtue in particular political contexts. As I have argued elsewhere (Jones
and Leshkowich 2003), dress performances are always subject not only
to individual refashioning, but to the political, economic, and cultural
fields in which dress practices occur, which means that they may fail,
succeed, or be diversely interpreted. In the context of a vibrant fashion
and media landscape in post-Suharto Indonesia, then, consumption is
not, nor has it ever been, a voluntary expression of pure agency—as if
that exists at all—but is dynamically constrained and inspired by the
conditions that make it appealing.

NOOR: ISLAMIC PIETY AS CONSUMER THRILL

Perhaps no figure better captures the ambivalence of the possibility of

value and virtue coexisting than the fashionably dressed pious Muslim
consumer. A woman who embraces both the promise of piety and the
thrill of being attractive, expressed through purchasing power, embod-
ies the tensions of these debates in urban Indonesia today. She is also
the target reader and buyer of an increasingly crowded and competitive
fashion media market (see Figure 1). Creating her, speaking to her, and
defending her are all part of creating a fictional, typical reader, which is

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
97

1. Fashionable piety described in NooR as “so beautiful it makes you want to fly.”
Courtesy of NooR magazine.

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

98 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

standard practice in media marketing around the world. Yet this woman
also stands at the center of highly loaded public conversations, a figure
whose modesty should quell desire yet who seems unable to manage her
own desire for beauty and consumer goods. As a medium for desire,
she is both object and subject, making critiques about women’s dress
especially loaded. When conversations about the insincere use of signs
of Islamic piety occur, they very often start or stop with references to the
fashionably dressed Muslim woman who is accused of merely perform-
ing a consumer role of piety, of buying an identity rather than being
sincerely devout.4
Indonesia has a long history of vibrant media production, even
despite intense state censorship during the 32-year Suharto adminis-
tration. Print media for women in particular had been dominated by a
group of magazines headed by the ubiquitous Femina which enjoyed a
high profile and was trusted both by the Indonesian state and by readers
to take a mature, comfortable, educational tone even when discussing
topics deemed sensitive, such as marital communication or balancing
motherhood with career demands. Femina had and continues to have a
reputation for professionalism and “world class” production. The Asian
economic crisis was a key factor in the environment that allowed the
Islamic fashion media to develop. With the effect the crisis had in en-
couraging political dissent in the streets of Jakarta and other cities in
1998, which resulted in Suharto’s resignation; the eventual closure of
the infamous Ministry of Information, which had policed media expres-
sion; and the economic squeeze that diminished advertising revenue
and increased the cost of paper, the Indonesian magazine industry was
heavily transformed during the early 2000s. Notably, smaller magazines
often tended to have a shorter lifespan, while major magazines were
able to survive. The latter included Femina and its sister magazines as
well as the global franchise magazines that had entered Indonesia at the
beginning of the crisis, such as Bazaar, Her World, Cosmopolitan and,
notoriously, Playboy.
The editors of NooR created their lush, colorful, and somewhat ex-
pensive monthly magazine in 2003 in response to a void they perceived
in the media landscape.5 This void was both moral and market, one they
identified as having been created in part by the editors of Femina and
the arrival of global magazines. Readers of Femina frequently wrote

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
99

letters to the editor during the 1990s, borrowing authority from the
discourse of consumer choice to demand recognition by asking that
examples of Muslim dress be included in the journal’s fashion spreads
(Jones 2007). The exclusion of pious dress, they asserted, denied them
the pleasure and edification of being treated as consumers. Invisibility
in the fashion media, they suggested, echoed the more general disdain
women who chose to wear Muslim dress felt on the street, i.e. that they
were unfashionable, uncool, and undesirable. Their exclusion could be
rectified through mass mediated representation in which models in work
and leisure settings in both pious Muslim and more typical Indonesian
business-style dress would appear in the same frame, suggesting that ei-
ther style of dress was an equivalent, personal, consumer choice. Femina
responded to these letters by doing just that, commissioning fashion
spreads for approximately one issue in four that placed Muslim dress
on an equal footing with comparatively more exposed and explicitly
non-religious dress styles.
Although Femina did respond to these requests, the staff also felt
under pressure to compete with the globally franchised magazines
that generally recycled both photos and articles from their offices
headquartered in Paris or New York.6 Not only was such content more
cosmopolitan in orientation but it was often more racy than Femina’s
relatively conservative fare. According to Sri Artaria Alisjabhana, one
of two founding co-editors of NooR, Femina’s response to this pres-
sure was misguided. Instead of realizing that Indonesian readers are
unique and that it had an established reputation with its readership,
Femina’s editorial choices veered toward the more salacious and the
less “Indonesian” as it attempted to compete with more global content
(Alisjabhana 2008). Those decisions meant that the growing audience of
pious women readers who wanted media recognition was abandoned to
essentially one other publication, a more traditional Muslim family life
magazine called Ummi which, as Jetti Hadi (2008), the other founding
co-editor of NooR, explained, positions Islamic lifestyle as a derivation
of Middle Eastern culture. There was no magazine and therefore no
image-generating, mediated commodity to speak to and make visible
the unique figure of the globally oriented yet authentically Indonesian
pious Muslim female consumer. In so identifying her, NooR called her
into being.

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

100 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

NooR’s Indonesian orientation in no way suggests that the maga-

zine is provincial. To the contrary, much like the student activists
Brenner (1996) studied, NooR’s editorial staff see themselves as con-
nected to the world through international travel and internet research.
That world is complex, comprising the Islamic umat (umma) and the
global fashion scene, bringing both together for their readers. There
are few inspirational examples of this type of creative mediation in
the world, although the editors know of and admire other Islamic
lifestyle magazines from Europe and North America, specifically emel
(London), Muslim Girl (Toronto), and especially Azizah (Atlanta).
From articles dedicated to Qur’anic interpretation, to tourism to other
Islamic countries, to reports from current non-Islamic fashion shows,
NooR assumes that its readers care about the world of faith and fashion
beyond Indonesia. Its “Indonesian” orientation refers to a commitment
to caring for one’s husband and children and prioritizing family and
faith above other concerns. Indeed, during the first year of publica-
tion, the magazine was sold exclusively in domestic settings, at private,
upscale Qur’anic study sessions in Jakarta’s elite neighborhoods. On
the assumption that the sort of woman who would be interested in
NooR would probably never alight from her chauffeured car to buy it
at a streetside kiosk, as most newsstand sales occur in Indonesia, this
choice made the magazine seem exclusive and contributed to its early
word-of-mouth praise.
In short, the founding editors had a strong vision for the magazine
based on the assumption that to publicly express an Islamic identity
is a purely personal choice, and that once made, that decision should
be supported and encouraged. NooR was there to provide that support
through the argument that while globalization might threaten Indo-
nesian tradition, Indonesians themselves have a priceless, historically
proven, globally valued resource for dealing with that threat, in the
form of the holy Qur’an. No contemporary problem a reader might face
would be too great for a Qur’anic solution. This mission has remained
at the core of the magazine’s official description. Editor Jetti Hadi trav-
els Indonesia regularly to offer workshops on this concept for readers,
arguing that although a thousand-year-old text might seem out of date
for the challenges Indonesian women face, when consulted seriously, it
can provide answers.

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
101

IMAGES OF DESIRE

This powerful commitment to education and Islamic guidance operates

in an equally powerful media marketplace. NooR is not the only maga-
zine angling for reader loyalty. It shares newsstand space with four other
large-circulation Islamic women’s magazines (Paras, Ummi, Muslimah,
and Alia),7 while several similar publications have launched and failed.
And like any magazine, religious or not, it faces the demands of attract-
ing advertising revenue and increasing readership. As a result, NooR
traffics in images. Essentially, that is what fashion magazines do: from
commissioning photography, to selling imagery to aspirational readers,
to soliciting image-based advertising pages, imagery is central to the ap-
peal of a fashion magazine. Unlike magazines such as the British emel,
in which fashion photography is constrained by Islamic prohibition
against human representation which forces editors to crop out models’
faces, NooR’s staff sees itself as relatively more free and potentially more
able to participate in making Indonesia a center of the Islamic fashion
world.8 This role held out a related promise, that the Muslim fashion
industry could help Indonesia achieve what it never quite seemed to
do under secular developmentalism, i.e. link Indonesia’s low-wage,
outsourced global garment industry to real national growth. The steady
supply of inexpensive labor and the demands of heavy beading and
elaborate work on many of the newest styles of Islamic fashion provide
what the editorial staff imagine could be the conditions for uplift, both
moral and economic.
Yet the fundamental fact that magazines traffic in images ultimately
steered NooR in a direction the founding editors had not originally in-
tended, that of fashion magazine. While their orienting vision focused
on the power of Qur’anic interpretation for the twenty-first-century In-
donesian woman, the editors were quickly confronted, in their first few
issues, with the fact that their readers and advertisers were fascinated
with the thrill and pleasure of creating an entirely new fashion universe,
complete with designers dedicated to Islamic dress, accessories, styling,
salons, and, importantly, buyers. Comparable magazines in Europe or
North America have struggled to put fashion and Islam comfortably
in the same sentence, in part because of the profoundly stigmatized
associations of political and racial identity with immigrant Islam in

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

102 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

these regions. By contrast, because NooR was based in Muslim-majority

Indonesia, the environment was quite different. Indonesian readers were
enthusiastic about the possibility of seeing themselves as both pious and
attractive, giving the magazine early success, and Indonesian designers
soon caught on.
Describing the intense advertising scene of 1980s consumer culture
in the US, media scholar Stuart Ewen (1999) has argued that the com-
modification of images, and the marketing of commodities via images,
turned contemporary culture into a landscape of surfaces. The religious
nature of celebrity, he argues, creates an economy in which the more
one’s image circulates, the more one’s celebrity value increases (93),
producing the alienating effects of capitalist exchange. That increase
in value is the opposite of what Walter Benjamin (1968) famously de-
scribed as the loss of “aura” or the authentic essence of a great image,
which occurs when images are mechanically reproduced and endlessly
circulated. Both arguments, however, belie the assumption that image
and matter are fundamentally opposite, and that consumption, and
consumption of images, can never satisfy the desires they inspire but
can only result in destructive alienation. More recently, the anthro-
pologist William Mazzarella (2003), studying the advertising industry
of late-1990s Bombay and also using Walter Benjamin, has argued that
the murky space between image as ephemeral and image as substance is
in constant flux, making consumer participation in that space thrilling
and hence generating the pleasure of consuming, whether that consump-
tion is of images or commodities. Yet I would argue that none of these
interpretations makes sense without considering the vital role of gender,
and the feminine, in making both images and commodities appealing,
because those consumer spaces, the buyers, and the images used to incite
transactions are all feminized. As Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough
(1996) have argued for European capitalist history, consumer culture has
fundamentally relied on an easy blurring of the female body as object of
desire to create consumer desire, associating femininity with both image
and object, and stigmatizing consumption as feminine lack of control
in the process.
Fashion magazines rely on all these dynamics: the promise of sat-
isfaction, the pleasure of participation, and the murky space between
image and matter. Yet Islamic fashion magazines occupy a unique posi-

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
103

tion at the crux of the relationship between the image and the sacred
nature of celebrity, while their religious identification distinguishes them
from ordinary fashion magazines. When, in its first year of publication,
NooR found itself in the middle of a growing fashion industry, it simul-
taneously found itself in the center of a broader process, one in which
religious substance was transformed into aesthetic style. This process re-
quired images and incited consumption in the pursuit of personal image
management, linking consumption to personal expression, aspiration,
and the promise of actualization.
Whereas Indonesian fashion designers, whose own success had
been linked to the cultural politics of national development (Jones 2003)
in the 1980s and 1990s, had eschewed Islamic dress for its dowdiness
and its association with the non-elite, by the early 2000s, they began
producing secondary lines for the busana Muslim market. These lines
follow different seasonal calendars, with major shows and releases
typically timed for the month preceding Ramadan, which means that
fashion shows occur in different calendar months from one year to the
next. And while European designers might take Orientalist inspiration
from travels abroad, adding touches of exoticism to their collections,
Indonesian Islamic fashion designers use such references to impute au-
thenticity and cosmopolitaneity (“I just came back from Dubai and this
embroidery is all the rage”), to a certain extent reinforcing the idea that
true Islam is Middle Eastern.
Magazines such as NooR have been absolutely central to the growth
of the Islamic fashion industry in Indonesia, through sponsoring design-
ers’ shows, reporting on them, and importantly, publishing photographs
of their work. Much of the ad space in NooR is bought by fashion houses
or producers of related accessories such as halal (religiously permissible)
makeup, or children’s clothing lines. The editorial staff seems ambivalent
about this, proud of the way in which what was once a minority style
has flourished in the past decade, yet concerned that the proliferation of
Islamic dress as fashion might distract readers from pursuing the high-
est ideals of true piety. Two comments from one editor are illustrative.
On the one hand, she proudly informed me that the Austrian crystal
company Swarovski now considers Indonesia a major market because
of the spectacular beading on the highest-end designer lines of busana
Muslim. Indonesia, as a consuming nation, is now legible in the eyes

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

104 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

of a reputable, historic, pedigreed, European company, thanks largely

to the growth of the Islamic fashion industry. Swarovski now sponsors
major fashion events in Jakarta and provides private showings of new
crystal designs to Islamic fashion editors. On the other hand, according
to this editor, the notion of halal, ethical consumption is missing from
this hopeful narrative in which Islamic fashion stimulates Indonesia’s
transnational legibility and national development. Unlike editors at
emel (see Lewis, this issue) who argue that Islam provides the ethical
resource for conscious consumption, and who link the green of Islam to
the green of the eco-style movement, few if any Indonesian consumers
of pious fashion consider working conditions for those who manufacture
the goods they purchase. Instead, the emphasis on natural ingredients
in halal makeup, for example, is linked to the Prophet’s prescient advice,
guiding women away from synthetic ingredients and preservatives that
are ultimately destructive to the skin and personal health, rather than to
the product’s effects on the environment or fellow humans.9

THE PROBLEM OF IMEJ AND THE SOLUTION

OF SPIRITUAL BEAUTY

It would be easy and tempting to read a particular interpretation from

the history I have just sketched, one that in fact partly informs popular
anxiety about Islamic fashion and the assertion that public piety in
contemporary Indonesia is merely imej, or the pursuit of piety through
surface rather than depth. That interpretation would argue that com-
modified forms of devotion do not represent a new Islamic subjectivity,
but rather the objectification of Islam. This popular interpretation shares
space with a frankly cynical secular view which denies that users of pious
goods might experience genuine devotion in that use. Such interpreta-
tions imply scandal, an illicit and improper use of the sacred. They also
rely on a notion of Islam as singular, which Talal Asad (1986, 14) has
argued fails to recognize that Islam, like any discursive tradition, is and
always has been a shifting complex of beliefs, politics, and histories,
some of which have become powerful precisely through disavowing this
complexity. The illusion of a singular Islam can overlap with the motiva-
tions of ulema, those charged with verifying the accuracy of claims about
what is and what is not Islamic. Neither perspective allows space for the

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
105

consuming masses to avert the scandal of mistaking image for piety.

Analyzing a related concern in artistic production, Kenneth George
(2009) has recently argued that scholarship on Islamic art has failed to
attend to the problem of the production of pious art. While the category
of “Islamic art” is classified as calligraphic rather than representational,
calligraphy creates its own challenges, especially if it is used with-
out attention to meaning or correct inscription, as George illustrates
through his analysis of the scandal that followed Karl Lagerfeld’s use
of a Qur’anic quotation on a bustier in his 1994 collection. Indonesian
clerics, and later, ulema in other countries including France and Britain,
took the designer to task for using sacred text without recognizing its
meaning and in the service of stimulating sexual desire with the exposed
form of the woman (Claudia Schiffer) who modeled his strapless top on
the catwalk. In this sense, the problem of production in Islamic repre-
sentations is especially potent when it brings together the substance of
the word of God and the image of the female form. The editorial staff
of NooR, who one might think would only stand to gain from being at
the center of Indonesia’s Islamic fashion boom, in fact find themselves
negotiating similar terrain carefully, yet with pride. The magazine relies
on the ease of circulation of the image of the pious feminine, but this
ease implies another one, that of being too desirable, too accessible, too
easily consumed, too comfortable straddling the line between image
and human being. And that risk is much greater for the feminine than
for the masculine in this discourse. Indeed, famous Indonesian ustadz
(preachers) are far more likely than women to have their images circulate
without risk to their reputations.10
One tactic for operating in the fraught space where virtue and value
would coalesce, while avoiding the scandal of confusing image with sub-
stance, is to generate an alternative discourse in which “spiritual beauty”
is deeper and more compelling than its projected opposite, secular
beauty. So appealing is this line of thinking that NooR has collaborated
with a leading designer of busana Muslim, Itang Yunasz, to produce a
book on the subject. Spiritual Beauty explicitly frames piety as an inner
state that compels outer modesty but does not prevent also creating a
beautiful exterior. “True beauty is not just a physical matter, but is found
inside in inner beauty. Yet, when that inner beauty is surrounded by
beautiful designs, it can radiate even more, Insya Allah” (Yunasz 2005,

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

106 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

11).11 Spiritual beauty promises to realign image and substance in a mor-

ally true order that allows value to endure through virtue and reminds
pious women that creating an attractive image of oneself can be both
hard work and pleasurable.
Given this problem of production, circulation, and consumption
of the image of the pious feminine, editorial staff at the magazine have
gone to impressive lengths to differentiate between the pious feminine
as commodifed female and the piety of real women, distinguished as
originating in an inner life and moving to outward, attractive expres-
sion. If women are a charged space on and through which debates about
the moral state of Indonesian public culture are taking place, then the
solution to that problem is twofold: to humanize pious women through
examples women consuming Islamic fashion, and to produce the maga-
zine in a manner consistent with Qur’anic teachings about modesty and
propriety.
For the first several years, Noor’s editorial staff pursued these goals
through a variety of methods. For example, the magazine’s cover girls
were rarely professional models who by definition commodify their bod-
ies for visual consumption. Instead, they were accomplished white-collar
professionals who had chosen to wear Muslim dress. Each was described
in a prominently placed profile of her background, career, and family
status. As Sri Artaria Alisjabhana explained, such women could serve
as inspiring role models for readers, showing that one could be covered,
professionally active, and attractive. This would imply that professional
models are not suitable role models for pious readers.
Professional models—who might only don a headscarf for a cover
shoot and leave the studio in tight-fitting or more exposed clothes—are
part of a category of publicly visible women in Indonesian media and
entertainment frequently glossed as selebriti, peragawati, dan artis, or
celebrities, models, and artists (typically singers). This class of performer
is notable for its combination of female form and public desire. Actresses
in soap operas, spokeswomen for high-profile commodities, and gener-
ally ubiquitous figures in Indonesian mass media, such women are con-
sidered beautiful yet separate from respectable middle-class life. While
their images circulate almost promiscuously in the media landscape,
appearing practically everywhere at once, the tabloid media gossip and
report on their social world as if it were free of ordinary social mores.

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
107

As women who wear more exposed styles of clothing than is standard

in polite company or professional life, female celebrities are imagined
to engage in an alternate universe where sex is casual, alcohol is con-
sumed, and smoking is common. The proliferation of their images in the
public sphere allows audiences to imagine a similar and, significantly,
scandalous corporeal promiscuity in the private sphere, whether that is
true or not.12
NooR implemented its original plan to use non-professional cover
models along with a policy of using female stylists and photographers
whenever possible, preferably women who respected or who chose to
adopt Islamic dress themselves. The theory was that that technicians
who understood the aspirations and limits that Islamic dress represented
would be able to make up, light, and pose a model in ways that would
not offend her, e.g. through contact with or objectification by strange
men, and who might even emphasize the angles most attractive for a
woman wearing a headscarf. Male grips handling heavy lighting gear
and being physically assertive could be off-putting for amateur models,
especially if they were novices in the world of commercial photography.
The overall setting could be traumatizing to a sensitive woman, as one
editor explained to me.13
In spite of their good intentions, these policies did not last. Most
non-professional models were uncomfortable posing, unskilled in think-
ing of their body as an image, even though such thinking is part of or-
dinary feminine cultivation. Their discomfort was apparent and it took
repeated efforts to get a usable image. A photo shoot that should have
taken an hour or two took a whole day or more, costing the magazine
more in time and fees than they had budgeted. It was especially difficult
to find female photographers and stylists with pious sensibilities. Com-
mercial photography is dominated by men; booking a female team is a
challenge. Ultimately, NooR had to resort to professional models and
photo crews, which is also how most Islamic fashion shows operate. It is
not uncommon to see models in tank tops and short denim skirts weave
their way through a crowd of well-to-do, piously dressed women as they
exit a five-star hotel lobby after working an Islamic fashion show.
This reliance on non-pious models and production teams to create
the aura of fashionable Islamic dress feeds a suspicion that the public
display of Islamic identity may be nothing more than a fashion statement.

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

108 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

The very trafficking in images of piety through the bodies of professional

models keeps the possibility of piety as mere imej just below the surface,
always almost revealed. The model who covers in her offstage life is rare.
She is the figure who redeems the life of the model through an unusually
authentic performance of pious display on the runway. I have attended
fashion shows where fellow attendees whispered to me that a particular
model, known for wearing Muslim dress in her daily life, is obviously
more gifted in displaying the beauty of her garment because she under-
stands the disciplinary demands of wearing pious clothing.
There is perhaps no better way to redeem the inappropriate life
of a model or a celebrity who has allowed unlimited circulation of the
image of her body, than to adopt pious Islamic dress. This is becom-
ing a common trajectory for many former models and actresses whose
stories are chronicled in both religious and secular media. Their narra-
tives frequently focus on an awakening, often around marriage, as the
woman feels increasingly uncomfortable, even undressed, and the crisis
is resolved when she chooses to cover her head, if only in a makeshift
way, and feels immediate, almost palpable relief. Her adoption of pious
dress is usually associated with her retreat from the entertainment world
she formerly inhabited (which is why covered, active models are rare),
but that does not mean she is out of public view. Instead, such women
are highly visible on television and in the print media, describing their
decision to adopt Islamic dress and taking up new roles in the grow-
ing Islamic entertainment field. In this way, a woman’s pious identity
mitigates and even inoculates against her continued visibility. Lila
Abu-Lughod (1995), in describing a similar phenomenon among retired
actresses in Egypt, has argued that their narrations of moving into piety
and out of regret for the entertainment business rest on the assumption
that piety is available to any woman, a path one simply chooses. Yet that
assumption belies the class privilege of seclusion enjoyed by former stars
who can afford to maintain the domestic boundaries necessary for pur-
suing piety, a privilege that working-class women—many of whom form
the audience base for these celebrities—do not enjoy. This description
captures, at least in part, the narrative of the transformed celebrity in
Indonesian public life. The main difference is that Indonesian celebrities
often do not retreat to a life of domestic seclusion, and they frequently
continue to work.

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
109

Perhaps no figure better exemplies the life journey from celebrity

star to pious celebrity than Inneke Koesherawati, spokesmodel for the
halal makeup company Wardah (see Figure 2).14 Described as a former
actress, Koesherawati in fact still regularly acts in Indonesian Islamic
soap operas, many of which focus on the drama, pain, and ultimately,
peaceful beauty of living in a polygynous marriage.15 Koesherawati’s
departure from secular entertainment coincided with her decision to
begin wearing Islamic dress, linking being uncovered to the sins of the
entertainment industry. Her case is unique, because the sort of films in
which she appeared prior to her decision to cover ranged from conven-
tional domestic dramas to soft-core pornography, a genre in which the
thrill of the visual form of the female body is most obviously scandal-
ous. Koesherawati frequently describes her decision to adopt the jilbab
(headscarf) as increasing her ability to circulate publicly: “Before I wore
a jilbab, I had this feeling inside myself of having done wrong. Now, it is
much easier for me to mingle with others.”16
The problem of the image of femininity remains no less a problem
in its pious aspect, and the image of the converted celebrity is alluring
precisely because of its promise to bring apparently contradictory states
into harmony, that is, the scandal of feminine commodification and
the purification of Islam. This promise itself rests on the illusion that
the converted celebrity is purifying, through her dress, the prior com-
modification of herself, and transforming that self into the virtuous
form of the covered woman. The underlying logic of this promise once
more resurrects the idea that virtue and value cannot coexist in the same
form. Yet the popular image of Koesherawati’s adoption of public piety
circulates in media much the way her prior image did, widely and for
exchange value. In fact, I would argue that while her current popularity
is due at least in part to the dramatic nature of her pious transformation,
it is also due to the fact that she convincingly promotes the pleasure of
being even more beautiful than the woman who does not wear Islamic
dress. Her appeal is broad; college students, designers, and magazine
editors frequently state that her facial shape is so well suited to the jilbab
that she looks far more attractive wearing it than she did without it. This
narrative suggests that by covering, Koesherawati finally reconciled her
selves, bringing her character into harmony with her natural beauty.
Her popularity has not only endured but increased through the circula-

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

110 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

2. Ad for Wardah Cosmetics, a halal makeup company, using the image of Inneke
Koesherawati. Courtesy of NooR magazine.

tion of her image as a covered woman, revealing that the converted star
is simultaneously a sign of capitalist excess and religious restraint and
suggesting that these qualities are not mutually exclusive. Readers of

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
111

magazines like NooR, in admiring her pious form, actively participate

in generating the alchemy of virtue and value, thereby creating the very
pleasure that makes consuming as rewarding as it is alienating.

CONCLUSION

Rising neoliberal consumer capitalism, promising self-actualization

through shopping, and simultaneously rising Islamic identity, with far
more long-term promises, have coalesced in the form of a commodified
identity exemplified by feminine piety. The very commodification of
the image of the fashionably, modestly dressed pious woman, the icon
of Islamic identity in contemporary Indonesia, also raises the specter
of the inauthentic or the deluded. These concerns underlie critiques of
fashionable piety and parallel much older European critiques of capital-
ism. Whereas Marx deplored the religious way in which material objects
took on abstract qualities in their transformation into commodities, an
inverse process animates conversations about the rise of Islamic fashion
and women’s enjoyment of that fashion in contemporary Indonesia. That
process is the reverse transubstantiation of an exalted abstraction, i.e.
the potentially redemptive role of religion in individual and national
life, into a commodity that can be exchanged for value. Mediating and
facilitating that transformation is the image of the pious feminine, a
woman both pious and objectified, simultaneously and unproblemati-
cally signifying both virtue and value.
Much of what I have described in this article maps onto capitalist
economies in other national settings, and onto other contexts in which
Islamic fashion has become high-profile, industrialized, mass-produced,
and incorporated into fashion cycles. In some of those contexts, pre-
dominantly in majority-Muslim countries, the relationship between
piety and fashion is fraught, but in a different way than in settings
where Islam is a minority identity. As Gökarıksel and Secor (2009)
show for the veiling-fashion industry in Turkey, the veiled woman is
frequently at the center of debates about nationalism, taste, modernity,
and capitalism. This niche industry seems to easily deploy references to
a host of political and religious styles, all while managing production in
conditions of increasing standardization and outsourcing. The debates in
Turkey in some ways echo concerns in Indonesia, which could be related

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

112 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

to the economic model on which Islamic fashion is being produced,

circulated, and consumed.
The promise of both earthly reward and eternal redemption
through the satisfaction of consumption could be interpreted as a
standard effect of capitalist contexts. Yet two exceptions pertain to this
anaylsis, as true as it may be. First, it potentially forecloses the reading
that capitalism is never simply an economic system, but rather only
functions as a faith-based economy with values of its own. In this sense,
not only exchange values, but more explicitly transcendent values, are
created and exchanged, allowing religion not only to endure in spite of
commercial transaction, but to become utterly fundamental to if not
harmonious with it. If pious consumption is to be recognized as a sincere
expression of religiosity, then its logical corollary, the religious nature of
consumption, must also be recognized. Second, Indonesia holds a unique
position in any transnational analysis of Islamic capitalism because its
strength in population never compensates for its weak global status in
the Islamic world. This conundrum both motivates the aspirations of a
globally-oriented religious elite in Indonesia and founds its unease.
Figures such as Inneke Koesherawati and fashion concepts such
as “spiritual beauty” operate in the space of anxiety that underlies the
contemporary Islamic lifestyle boom in urban Indonesia. The transfor-
mation of secular consumption into religious achievement promises
inoculation against the charge of merging the morally distinct spheres
of image and substance. By using images to disavow image, the Islamic
fashion industry claims to be engaged in a more worthy undertaking
than the secular fashion industry. Yet by working in this way, in this
space, magazines such as NooR keep pious femininity at the center of
Indonesian anxieties about Islam, even as those anxieties constrain
editorial decisions. Editorial staff therefore have to deal with a social
problem that simultaneously benefits and challenges them. And because
this challenge is never fully met, and the effect of trafficking in the space
between virtue and value never closes, the anxieties endure.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article has benefited from the input of a number of interlocutors, in-
cluding miriam cooke, Kenneth George, Banu Gökarıksel, Diane James,

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
113

Reina Lewis, and Ellen McLarney, as well as two very generous and en-
gaged anonymous reviewers. Many of these conversations occurred over
a wonderful weekend at Duke University during the Marketing Muslim
Women Conference in April 2008. Most of all, however, this article has
benefited from the kindness and access granted me by the staff of NooR
magazine, to whom I am grateful.
NOTES
1. Not all Indonesians agreed that religion was the best or the only path for
national transformation, but this moment did see the establishment of new Islamic
political parties and social organizations. Individual Indonesians also found Islam
an appealing private remedy in a moment of national social upheaval. The rise of
public piety has not been welcomed by all citizens, however, and some found in
the dissolution of state management of the press and political organizations an
opportunity to establish secular social justice movements, including those based
on Marxist philosophy which had been outlawed under the Suharto regime. No
Islamic political party has won a majority in a national election in the dozen years
since Suharto’s resignation.
2. For research on some of these related phenomena, see Gade 2004, Fealy and
White 2008, Hoesterey 2008, and Rudnyckyj 2009.
3. Widodo analyzes the enormously popular book (2004) and film (2008),
Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of love), as examples of a massive Indonesian Islamic
popular literature industry. Ayat-Ayat Cinta’s narrative was explicitly global, follow-
ing the educational and romantic adventures of an Indonesian student studying at
Al-Azhar University in Cairo. The film was released in March 2008 and promoted
within Indonesia as the Islamic response to the blasphemous Dutch film released
at the same time, Fitnah. The idea that Indonesia might be the source of the global
Islamic response to an offense against Islam, in the singular, generated real pride.
4. For more on these anxieties and accusations in Indonesia, see Lindquist
2004 and Smith-Hefner 2007. Such accusations are not limited to Indonesia, or to
Islam. See Levertov 2008 for related gossip that Orthodox Jewish women in Jeru-
salem dress severely to get attention.
5. NooR’s newsstand price has increased very little over the years, meaning that
during its first few years, it was substantially more expensive than other women’s
magazines. As of March 2010, its cover price was 30,000 Indonesian Rupiah (USD
$3.00); cf. IR 20,000 for comparable monthly Muslim magazines such as Paras or
Alia. The weekly Femina costs IR 15,000.
6. These globally franchised magazines were able to survive the Asian eco-
nomic crisis of the late 1990s in part because of their international distribution and
wealth, but also because of the nature of the economic crisis, which made foreign
currencies far more valuable than the Indonesian Rupiah, in effect exponentially
multiplying their competitive financial advantage.
7. NooR’s circulation is currently 20–30,000 issues per month.

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

114 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

8. Anxieties about Islamic fashion in Indonesia do not seem to have traveled

along with the dress itself, as Indonesia is indeed becoming a site for international
admiration from many other majority-Muslim countries. Malaysian tourists fre-
quent some of the better known Islamic stores and designers, seeking a more pat-
terned and creative alternative to the plainer styles available in Malaysia. Similarly,
Indonesian pious fashion has gained a reputation in Iran for being simultaneously
attractive yet modest. This is ironic given Indonesia’s reputation in both these
countries on matters religious; it is consistently considered a less authentic and less
pure site of Islamic practice.
9. Richard Wilk (2006, 15) argues that a key strategy of contemporary adver-
tising and marketing is to focus on a particular commodity’s benefits in improved
health rather than its functional properties or pleasure potential.
10. The recent fall from grace of media cleric Abdullah Gymnastiar suggests
that there are limits to masculine celebrity as well. Gymnastiar, also known as Aa
Gym, was only one of the most recent, popular ustadz, but he is best known for his
impressive industry of related commodities such as self-help books, TV shows, and
recordings, not to mention clothing and bottled water. His loss of popularity is per-
haps not surprising as part of a commodity cycle, but has been widely interpreted
as the result of his bold decision to take a second wife, after years of proclaiming
his devotion to his first wife which had generated the wide support he enjoyed from
housewives. For more, see Hoesterey 2008.
11. Spiritual Beauty (Yunasz 2005) is titled in English, with text in both Baha-
sa Indonesia and English. The quote is my own translation from the Indonesian.
12. Anxieties about public morality are so focused on the female form that
a small coalition of some conservative ulema and groups such as Front Pembela
Islam finally succeeded, after ten years of trying, in passing a “pornography” bill
through the House of Representatives in October 2008, despite widespread public
disapproval. The bill defines pornography as “man-made sexual materials in the
form of drawings, sketches, illustrations, photographs, text, voice, sound, moving
pictures, animation, cartoons, poetry, conversations and gestures” (Gelling 2008).
Playboy magazine, although very different in its Indonesian and North American
iterations, was a key symbol in debates over the bill.
13. Bonnie Adrian (2003) nicely details the masculine environment of photo
sessions in her analysis of the bridal photography industry in Taipei. Many of her
observations hold true for fashion photography in Jakarta, including the erotic
undercurrent in the relationship between photographer and model and the phallic
nature of the camera itself.
14. Perhaps the best known and admired such figure is Okky Asokawati who
is known as a “former model” and for having one of the most attractive and diverse
wardrobes of Islamic fashion in Jakarta. She has authored of a series of books on
headscarf styling and is a frequent commentator on femininity and beauty, both
religious and non-religious.
15. Suzanne Brenner (2006) has analyzed the almost fetishistic focus on
polygyny in debates about Islamic lifestyle and gender equality in post-reform
Indonesia.

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
115

16. “Inneke Koesherawati Perhatikan Penampilan” (IK pays attention

to her appearance), Kapanlagi.com, February 18, 2007, http://www.kapanlagi.
com/h/0000158531.html (accessed December 2, 2008). Kapanlagi (literally, “then
when?”) is one of a number of celebrity-focused gossip websites in Indonesia.

REFERENCES

Abu-Lughod, Lila
1995 Movie Stars and Islamic Moralism in Egypt. Social Text 42 (Spring):
53–67.
Adrian, Bonnie
2003 Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal
Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Alisjabhana, Sri Artaria
2008 Interview with the author, Jakarta, August 19.
Asad, Talal
1986 The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Occasional Papers, Center for
Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, DC.
Benjamin, Walter
1968 Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, Inc.
Brenner, Suzanne
1996 Reconstructing Self and Society: Javanese Muslim Women and “the
Veil.” American Ethnologist 23:4 (Fall): 673–97.
2006 Democracy, Polygamy, and Women in Post-Reformasi Indonesia. Social
Analysis 50:1 (Spring): 164–70.
De Grazia, Victoria, and Ellen Furlough, eds.
1996 The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
De Vries, Hent, and Samuel Weber, eds.
2001 Religion and Media. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques
1998 Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of
Reason Alone. In Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo. Cam
bridge, UK: Polity Press.
Ewen, Stuart
1999 All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture.
Rev. edn. New York: Basic Books.
Fealy, Greg, and Sally White, eds.
2008 Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia. Singapore:
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Gade, Anna
2004 Perfection Makes Practice: Learning, Emotion, and the Recited Qur’an in
Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

116 
JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EAST WOMEN’S STUDIES 6:3

Gelling, Peter
2008 Indonesia Passes Broad Anti-Pornography Bill. International Herald
Tribune, Asia-Pacific Edition, October 30. New York Times, October 30.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/world/asia/30iht-indo.1.17378031.
html?_r=1 (accessed March 7, 2010).
George, Kenneth
2009 Ethics, Iconoclasm, and Qur’anic Art in Indonesia. Cultural Anthropol-
ogy 24 (4): 589–621.
Gökarıksel, Banu, and Anna Secor
2009 New Transnational Geographies of Islamism, Capitalism and
Subjectivity: The Veiling-Fashion Industry in Turkey. Area 41 (1): 6–18.
Hadi, Jetti
2008 Interview with the author, Jakarta, August 19.
Hefner, Robert
2000 Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Hirschkind, Charles, and Brian Larkin
2008 Introduction: Media and the Political Forms of Religion. Social Text 26
(3): 1–9.
Hoesterey, James
2008 Marketing Morality: The Rise, Fall and Rebranding of Aa Gym. In
Expressing Islam: Religious Life and Politics in Indonesia, ed. Greg Fealy and
Sally White. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Jones, Carla
2003 Dress for Sukses: Fashioning Femininity and Nationality in Urban
Indonesia. In Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress, ed.
Sandra Niessen, Ann Marie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones. Oxford, UK:
Berg.
2007 Faith and Fashion in Urban Indonesia. Fashion Theory 11:211–31.
Jones, Carla, and Ann Marie Leshkowich
2003 Introduction: The Globalization of Asian Dress: Re-Orienting Fashion
or Re-Orientalizing Asia? In Re-Orienting Fashion: The Globalization of
Asian Dress, ed. Sandra Niessen, Ann Marie Leshkowich, and Carla Jones.
Oxford, UK: Berg.
Keane, Webb
2007 Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Levertov, Michal
2008 Unveiled: The Israeli Women in “Burkas.” Jewish Chronicle, January 31.
http://website.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=57786&ATypeId=1&search=tru
e2&srchstr=levertov&srchtxt=0&srchhead=1&srchauthor=0&srchsandp=0
&scsrch=0 (accessed March 10, 2010).
Lindquist, Johan
2004 Veils and Ecstasy: Negotiating Shame in the Indonesian Borderlands.
Ethnos 69 (4): 487–508.

Published by Duke University Press

 Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

CARLA JONES 
117

Mahmood, Saba
2005 Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Marx, Karl
1976 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes.
London: Penguin.
Mazzarella, William
2003 Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Meyer, Birgit, and Annelies Moors, eds.
2006 Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Rudnyckyj, Daromir
2009 Spiritual Economies: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary
Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 24 (1): 104–41.
Salvatore, Armando, ed.
2001 Muslim Traditions and Modern Techniques of Power. Münster: Lit.
Smith-Hefner, Nancy
2007 Javanese Women and the Veil in Post-Suharto Indonesia. Journal of
Asian Studies 66:2 (May): 389–420.
Spyer, Patricia
2008 Blind Faith: Painting Christianity in Postconflict Ambon. Social Text
26 (3): 11–37.
Strassler, Karen
2009 The Face of Money: Currency, Crisis, and Remediation in Post-Suharto
Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 24 (1): 68–103.
Widodo, Amrih
2008 Writing for God: Piety and Consumption in Popular Islam. Inside
Indonesia 93 (August-October). http://insideindonesia.org/content/
view/1121/47/ (accessed March 10, 2010).
Wilk, Richard
2006 Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System.
Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Yunasz, Itang
2005 Spiritual Beauty. Jakarta: Dian Rakyat Press.

Published by Duke University Press