July 12 is National Hijab Day in Iran, a celebration that has been met by defiant. Protests by women driving head scarf less in their cars. At the same time, the American glossy Allure has featured, for the first time, a hijab-wearing model on its cover.

The Somali stunner Hamali Aden demonstrates just how beautiful and fashion-forward Islamic style can be. How did this versatile piece of fabric get so controversial?

Global hijab

As an anthropologist who studies women’s lives in the Middle East and Afghanistan. I have a particular interest in female dress. So I have closely followed Europe’s ongoing debates over the hijab worn by young Muslim women.

In France, where I live, even the terminology remains confused. The term voile (veil) covers everything from the modest hijab or headscarf, to robes like the burqa.

Muslim female coverings, in fact, vary widely in size and origin. Afghanistan and the Pashtun areas of Pakistan feature the burqa, generally blue in color. While the all-encompassing abaya is mandatory in the Gulf states, and the black niqab compulsory in Saudi Arabia.

Some version of the latter is increasingly worn by young Muslims and converts the world round who have adopted a strict, fundamentalist reading of Islamic texts.

All-In-One Item Hijab

These groups have adopted the all-in-one item called jilbab, which they have taken from Indonesia (where jilbab is a general term for hijab, or scarf, and is found there in various forms and colours).

Looser versions of this garment are also worn in former British colonies with considerable Muslim populations, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of India.

Cheerful, multicoloured hijabs are sported across the Middle East, although in Iran, the stern black tchador, which covers both body and head but (unlike the Sunni niqab) reveals the face and hands, is also common.

France has drowned out the diversity of these garments and their differing connotations with rigid legislation. And the public gets whipped into a frenzy over anything that could pass as Muslim clothing being a threat to the founding Republican principal of Laïcité, or secularism.

Last summer’s burkini outrage is emblematic of the confusion governing the issue in France. Lebanon has also now forbidden the swimwear on its beaches.

Emblem Of Hijab Repression?

Like all clothing, Muslim women’s garb has no singular or fixed meaning. In many countries, among them Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, it is emblematic of legally-condoned repression of women. In Malaysia, Iran and ISIS-dominated regions, a special vice squad controls how women dress. Where sharia norms prevail, women’s appearance is never above the scrutiny of state, or of men.

As a result, attention to make-up especially of the eyes and eyebrows and plastic surgery is heighten in these countries. And fashionistas in Tehran, of course, are famous for turning the mandatory clothing into a design statement.

But in much of Europe and some Muslim-dominated countries, such as Chechnya, Chad and Morocco, hijabs are not compulsory, and the full-face niqab may be outlaw, as it is in France.

The League of Human Rights and Amnesty International protested France’s 2014 ban, saying that the law infringed on human rights. These are the same human rights organizations that decreed, post-9/11, that the burqa was emblematic of the Taliban’s patriarchal repression of women. These two contradictory meanings uneasily coexist in the same article of clothing.

Towards A Globalized Islam Hijab

The unexpected surge of religious practice among young people in the Middle East and Europe may offer some answers to how this is possible, and why it’s happening.

With the failure, some six years ago, of the Arab Spring revolts and ongoing distrust of Western interference in the Middle East, Muslim millennials appear be turning increasingly to religion, says French sociologist Gilles Kepel in his latest essay, La Fracture.

For them, faith fills an ideological void and, though digital consumerism is widely accept, it helps young people express their contempt for hegemonic Western neoliberalism. This recalls historian Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End Of History and the Last Man, which presented two bleak options for the future of the world: nationalism and religious fundamentalism.

Religion has emerged salient, but perhaps not quite as much as Fukuyama foresaw it a quarter of a century ago. Instead, in an exemplary case of what Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm called invented tradition. Some forms of adherence to Islam have evolved into a uniform devoutness that excludes any reference to local culture. It is also increasingly political but includes a check on appearance.

The result is what Olivier Roy has dubbed Globalized Islam. A comparable process has even swept through parts of Europe and North America where pockets of strong ethnically-based communities have long existed. But the US, UK and Canada tend to be more tolerant of such visible ethnic and religious wear than republican France.

Many of the five million or so self-identified Muslims in France feel targeted by the country’s creeping paranoia. Which has split French society into those who associate anything Muslim with terrorism and those who vigilantly defend against Islamophobia.

The Rise Of Modest Fashion

France’s political hysteria may have reached its absurd peak when, in 2016. Women’s Rights Minister Laurence Rossignol proclaimed modest fashion as the new evil.

An outgrowth of what was once a discreet American niche market for Mormons and Orthodox Jewish women. The market providing appropriately moral clothing for Muslim women has been booming for the past six years or so, largely online.

Modest-fashion vendors benefit from Instagram accounts and fashion sites that dispense advice to the younger generation of Muslims. Which now includes a number of newly-converted shoppers.

As the upwardly mobile Muslim middle class grows in Indonesia, the Middle East, the UK and the US. These countries have seen a dynamic fashion trend among women who insist on being open about their religion.

Muslims Worldwide

According to a recent Thomson Reuters report, Muslims worldwide spent an estimated US$244 billion in 2015 on apparel. Surpassing the US$221 billion layout of Chinese fashionistas.

Modest fashion is not just about piety; it’s about looking great. Embracing modernity and showing that women can have multiple identities, including a religious one. Major brands, including haute couture labels like Dolce and Gabbana, are now producing clothing for this expanding market.

But fearful France has, of course, excluded itself from a share of this profitable trend. What some French people and many other observers fail to realise is that hijab can be an accessory. Women choose to wear it for their own reasons, from tradition to habit to feminist social challenge or sheer vanity.

They also have the option to change who they want to be, at the drop of a scarf. In doing so, they are able to accommodate their beliefs in active public participation with others. And is this not, in many ways, the very opposite of fundamentalism?

In the 1990s, the capital of Colombia’s mountainous Antioquia province. Medellin had one of the world’s highest-ever recorded murder rates: 380 homicides per 100,000 people. After national authorities wrested control of the city’s poorest communities from paramilitaries. Mayor Sergio Fajardo rolled out an entirely new approach to quelling violence. It was known as urban acupuncture.

A core tenet of this approach to social urbanism involved pinprick interventions in neighborhoods experiencing extreme poverty and chronic violence. Government and business invested in first-class community centers, schools and public transit, using parks. Gondolas and escalators to bring different parts of the city together. The results were stunning. Today, homicides in Medellin are around 20 per 100,000 and falling.

Around the same time, some 250 kilometers to the south, mayor Antanas Mockus was governing Colombia’s war-torn capital Bogotá. Starting in 1995, he increase the city’s police budget tenfold, introduced alternative sentencing for non-violent offenders. Create a new violence prevention department, refurbished rundown public spaces and vastly expanded health and education services for vulnerable citizens. By 2003, Bogota’s homicides had dropped from 59 per 100,000 to 25 per 100,000.

Homicide Epidemic Province

For over a decade, the Latin America’s homicide rate has been at least three times the global average. Why has the rest of the region failed to grasp these lessons?

Murder In Comparison Province

Latin America is where the most murders in the world happen. In 2016, at least 43 of the 50 most homicidal cities in the world led by San Salvador (El Salvador). Acapulco (Mexico) and San Pedro Sula (Honduras) were located in the region. Roughly four Latin Americans are killed every 15 minutes.

Things aren’t bad everywhere. Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay and, in particular. Chile (with its homicide rate of 2.7 per 100,000) are relatively safe. Even so, their combined average homicide rate of 6.5 per 100,000 is twice that of North America.

Meanwhile, Brazil (28.3 per 100,000), Colombia (21.9), El Salvador (91.2), Guatemala (27.3), Honduras (59.1), Mexico (17) and Venezuela (58) together account for one in every four homicides on earth.

Homicides By Country

There’s no single solution for preventing lethal violence. But data-driven interventions, like those pioneered by Colombian mayors two decades ago, are more likely to help Latin Americans than many current approaches, which range from near apathy in Venezuela to repressive policing in Brazil, El Salvador and Mexico.

Though different, Medellin and Bogota’s homicide reduction strategies shared key features. Both set hard targets, generated high-quality data for analysis, reformed police and the justice sector, mended social ties in fragmented communities and confiscated illegal weapons.

They also benefited from informal pacts with heavily armed factions, not unlike the controversial 2012 gang truce that led to a temporary peace in El Salvador.

Crime Doesn’t Pay Province

Rather than replicate these experiences, Latin American governments have responded to rising violence by sinking more money into police forces, prosecutors and prisons.

Today, the region annually invests between US$55 and US$70 billion in public security, says the Inter-American Development Bank, and criminal violence costs the equivalent of 3.5% of total regional GDP in lost productivity, insurance premiums and security provision (both public and private). That adds up to US$261 billion a year or US$300 per person.

Even so, only 20 of every 100 murders in Latin America results in conviction the global rate is 43 in 100. In Caracas or San Salvador, 10% of cases are cleared, versus New York’s 68% and Tokyo’s 98%. Meanwhile, prisons are bursting at the seams.

Many factors contribute to Latin America’s homicide problem, among them the war on drugs, abundant unlicensed firearms, persistently unequal gender relations and, in Mexico and Central America, thousands of marginalised, uprooted, and sometimes convicted US deportees.

A growing body of scholarship on homicide in the region should help policymakers identify the most important drivers to craft better anti-violence programs.

Evidence Of A Strong Correlation

Inequality is high on that list. Latin America is home to ten of the world’s 15 most unequal countries, and while the relationship between inequality and violent crime is not causal, there is evidence of a strong correlation.

Concentrated poverty plays a role. For example, World Bank scholars recently found that an increase teen pregnancies in Latin America is associated with 0.5 to 0.6 additional murders per 100,000 people. Meanwhile, in Medellín, a 1% rise in permanent income generated a 0.4% reduction in homicides.

The region is highly banish, with roughly 85% of people living in cities. And this has an important role in Latin America’s levels of violence. Across the globe, homicidal violence tends to be hyper-concentrate in peripheral urban areas experiencing chronic disadvantage.

Cities, especially fast-growing ones, offer certain intrinsic opportunities for criminal activity anonymity, for instance. Prospective victims and dilapidated infrastructure), compounded by economic neglect and scarce basic services.

Higher Density Province

Cities also have a higher density of actual and would-be offenders unemployment young men. About 13% of Latin America’s 108 million 15-to-24-year-olds are unemployment. Which has encouraged a small number of them to commit aspirational crime.

Data suggests that Latin America’s murderers are, by and large, young. Out of work, out of school and out of options. In Brazil, studies show that a 1% rise in unemployment rates for men results in a 2.1% spike in homicides.

The region’s weak security and justice institutions only worsen this violence epidemic. Some Venezuelan prisons are literally under the control of gangs. While in Brazil, jails have become death traps, and police kill with impunity. Meanwhile, Mexican citizens profoundly distrust their government.

Such frailties plague nations across the region, and are exploit by gang bosses and political elites alike. This allows violence, impunity, patronage and corruption to flourish.

The two largest agencies responsible for the language. We use to discover books in libraries in North America the Library of Congress in the United States. And Library and Archives Canada are changing how they refer to Indigenous Peoples.

Recently, the Library of Congress announced that by September 2022. A project would be underway to revise terms that refer to Indigenous Peoples.

Beginning in 2019, Library and Archives Canada made changes within Canadian subject headings. Starting with replacing outdated terminology with Indigenous peoples and First Nations. And adding terms that specify Métis and other specific nations and peoples.

It is important to acknowledge what these library changes can and cannot do, and the need for consultation. With and guidance from Indigenous communities and Indigenous library workers. This is a departure from business as usual for maintaining these systems.

Libraries Indexing

Both Library of Congress and Library and Archives Canada manage the term lists used in public and academic libraries throughout both countries.

When a book is published, library workers use lists of approved terms to indicate the subject or topic of the book. These terms determine how the book can be found in a library search and may even be printed on the copyright page of the book itself. The catalogue record then gets copied to each library that holds a copy of the book.

Outdated terminology such as Indians of North America has remained in these term lists despite changing use in society and no longer matches the language used in the books themselves. The management of these terms lists last made international news when politicians interfered in a change from illegal aliens to undocumented immigrants.

Revisions To Systems Libraries

The heading Indians of North America has been part of these lists since the Library of Congress Subject Headings were first standardized and shared with libraries more than a century ago https://107.152.46.170:6699/.

Library researchers and librarians hope revisions to existing systems will reduce some of the friction of using the library for Indigenous and decolonizing research. This friction relates both to materials being categorize strangely, and how the use of older terms like Indians of North America could negatively affect some members of Indigenous communities, even while there are a diversity of views that exist in Indigenous communities about identity labels.

1,000 Terms Under Review

Since 2015, the Manitoba Archival Information Network has shared a list of more than 1,000 terms relating to Indigenous Peoples with suggestions for more accurate and respectful language. Many of the recommended changes use the term Indigenous peoples, which exists in the term lists already.

Right now, adding a geographic term to the end, as in Indigenous peoples Asia is a permitted heading, except in the case of the Americas. At present, terms like Indigenous peoples United States and First Nations (North America) redirect to Indians of North America.

The same is the case for terms that redirect to Indians of South America. Library and Archives Canada continues to roll out changes like a shift from Canadian poetry English Inuit authors to Inuit poetry English.

Indigenous Knowledge Organization Libraries

Beyond revamping misleading terminology, library science scholars and Indigenous knowledge holders like Sandy Little tree, with colleagues are examining how to advance Indigenous knowledge organization practices in library systems.

Research conducted by my team of librarians and students shows that authors prefer their books to be labelled in Indigenous-centered approaches or reconciliation approaches. For example, Xwi7xwa Library is a branch of University of British Columbia’s academic library entirely dedicated to Indigenous materials. Indexing is adapted from a system developed by Kahnawake librarian Brian Deer in the ‘70s for the National Indian Brotherhood, now the Assembly of First Nations.

The the Greater Victoria Public Library has introduced locally developed interim Indigenous subject headings that use more current terminology.

Interviews With Authors Libraries

Over the past two years, my team and I interview 38 authors whose books were label. In libraries with terms like Indians of North America.

Those authors told us these terms didn’t match the language in their books. Nor what is acceptable in their professional communities. They shared how these terms created difficulty in findings works by or about Indigenous Peoples.

They explained how people using library search functions would have to use terms. Disagreed with and wouldn’t use in their classes and writing. Ambiguous terms like Indian cooking and Indian activism create confusion as to whether an item pertains to Indigenous Peoples in North America or India.

As authors in our study suggested, the continued use of these terms imposes a colonial worldview. On books that are often resisting, challenging or exposing the harms of colonialism.

Slow To Change

Library systems tend to be slow to change because they prioritize consistency. Yet the Canadian and American systems undergo constant revision to add new terms and, less often, to replace old terms.

Since there are more than 1,000 terms relating to Indigenous Peoples in library lists. Revisions to this topic will be monumental. In a typical month, around 200 new headings are add to the Library of Congress Subject Headings, across all topics.

Terminology for Indigenous Peoples from this continent varies as communities themselves are numerous and diverse. At the same time terms like Indians persist in law in Canada and the United States.

Colonial Borders

Changes of these terms, through consultation with and guidance. From Indigenous communities and Indigenous library workers. Can bring our library systems into alignment with language used in common conversation and academic research.

They cannot invalidate the terms that people use to refer to themselves. A library term list is for shared, government-supported systems to enable discovery and access and does not determine self-expression.

Even in that context, changing terms for Indigenous Peoples is unlikely to change. The awkwardness of how these lists currently use Canadian and American colonial borders.

For the time being, works about Coast Salish botany or art. For example may still end up label redundantly. With Indigenous peoples British Columbia and Indigenous peoples Washington (State). Continued research will be need as libraries consider how to update their practices.