Fashioning Sufi: body politics of androgynous sacred aesthetics

Abstract

Revered as the ‘Queen of Qawwali’ and ‘Queen of Sufi music’, sixty-seven-year-old Abida Parveen is a spiritual phenomenon who transcends gender while performing. She is known for her signature fashion style of buttoned-up masculine-cut kurta (tunic) with matching shalwar (loose trousers) and an ajrak (block-printed) shawl. Her aesthetic circulates within transnational and national fashion media and popular cultural spaces through descriptors such as androgynous, masculine, modest, indigenous and sacred. As a highly respected figure with widely circulating performances on both the national and international stages, as well through multiple media circuits, including television, social/digital media and broadcast concerts, Parveen's undeniable fame and her transgressive entry into an otherwise male-dominated music genre raises important questions about gender, embodiment, spirituality and the sacred. In analysing Parveen's body and dress in performance, I centre her sartorial style as sites of spirituality and affect to ask: what does it mean for Parveen to transcend gender through a performance of androgynous Sufism and mobilise it as an entry way into spiritual iconism? What imaginations around spirituality and the sacred become available through Parveen's sartorial practices? How does Parveen's style offer an alternative route to Muslim spirituality? Taking up Parveen's embodied coagulation between fashion and the sacred reveals an absence in feminist fashion studies on which subjects and styles are viewed as important, relevant, resistant or transgressive and thus worthy of theorisation. As a feminist scholar interested in the relationship between gender, power and self/representation, I see Parveen as a key global cultural and spiritual figure who necessitates transnational feminist analysis. This article is situated at the intersections of fashion and cultural studies, feminist, queer and trans spiritualities and South Asia studies.

The Potential Values of Riyadhoh Improving the Quality of Learning of Students

“…The essence of the Sufi's journey is a consciously conditioned communication and dialogue between his spirit and Allah through the medium of alienation and contemplation. To make the Sufi reach this level of consciousness, he must try to maximize his inner and outer life by taking several levels of suluk (al-riyadhoh station) and various psychological conditions (al-ahwal) (Shroff, 2022).…”

“…So that a Sufi cannot move from one maqam to another except after fulfilling the conditions of that maqam. A person in one stage (riyadhoh) is expected to be able to improve the Riyadhoh in which he lives before moving to the next riyadhoh (Shroff, 2022).…”

Introduction: theorising fashion media

“…In centring live performance, Shroff's article also raises the issue of embodiment, a theme that anchors most of our articles in this issue. For Shroff, Parveen's dressed body in performance does important work, as it binds together cloth and flesh to, as she writes, 'offer a queer understanding of desire, performance and sacred becoming' (Shroff, 2022). This formulation of the body becoming through media pushes helpfully at established understandings of fashion mediation as it presumes an agentic body and not one that is merely acted upon by a damaging fashion industry (Coleman, 2008(Coleman, , 2009.…”

“…The interaction between body, garment and medium has been of particular interest for fashion scholars such as Joanne Entwistle (2000Entwistle ( , 2001, who theorises dress as an 'embodied practice', and also for scholars of queer theory and transgender studies, whose work deconstructs binary understandings of gender, identity and identification by theorising performance, fantasy, pleasure and affect (Fuss, 1992;Muñoz, 1999;Rand, 2017). Drawing on Lucia Ruggerone's work, which links clothing, embodiment and affect in a shift from 'what the body is' to a focus on 'what the body can do, namely what it can become through encounters with other bodies endowed with their own set of affective (material and immaterial) capabilities' (Ruggerone, 2016: 579; emphasis in original), Shroff describes Abida Parveen's approach to dress as an 'embodied practice of affective clothing' (Shroff, 2022), thereby engaging a theme shared among several articles in this collection: the ways in which fashion and clothing enable a resistance to and undermining of gender binaries, both in fantasy and in practice.…”