The Hijab in Bangladesh: Understanding Identity Negotiation, Religiosity, and Autonomy among Urban Muslim Women in Dhaka

Bangladesh has seen a steady rise of political Islam and Islamic revivalism since 1975 (Huq 2021, 259). The most significant changes in public behavior, dialogue, values, and attire have occurred post-9/11, with Islamic veiling among women becoming a ubiquitous marker of the population’s “hardening” Islamic identities and values (Rozario 2006, 368; Siddiqi 2006, 11). This paper aims to investigate how sociocultural norms and family dynamics influence educated, upper class, urban women in Dhaka to adopt the Islamic veil or hijab. Through depth or life history interviews with two generations of Bangladeshi Muslim women – one group between 20-35 years of age, and the older group comprising of their mothers or other similarly-aged maternal figures from the younger subjects’ families - I will investigate the ways in which the women exercise their autonomy and engage in identity construction and negotiation, with a focus on the role of religion, colonial prejudices, and power relations within the family that shape their identities. The women’s narratives reveal the hijab is leveraged as a tool to navigate and resist postcolonial and patriarchal power structures. Families are a crucial vector for instilling religiosity, which the younger participants continue to nurture into their adulthood to give rise to a new form of religiosity that alters their structural and cultural location within Bangladeshi society