Iraqi street fashion has been constrained since 2003, as insurgent forces specifically targeted women who did not wear hijab, and women who wanted to dress in trendier outfits normally covered head-to-toe with an abaya, as to not attract attention.

However, as the situation has stabilized, many women are embracing different styles. At the posh Hunt Club, western style clothing is considered normal. There was even a "Miss Hunt Club" style pageant, that brought forth all kinds of participants.

Contestant Samaa Sameer, 18, was eliminated before the final round, but she says the pageant was a good way to show her confidence. Her mother, who wears a headscarf, beamed.

Sameer says she can't wear trendy clothes everywhere in Baghdad, but at social clubs like this, it's just the thing. She says it may take at least five years before Western clothes for women are common on city streets.

Mohammed summarizes the change in attitude well, saying of his clients:

Iraqi women ought to be free to wear whatever they like. They should be free to choose hijab if they wish, or they ought to be able to express themselves with Western clothing.

In Baghdad, Hemlines Rise As Violence Falls [NPR]

The pictures in question were taken over the summer, and showed the pretending to kiss or lick "novelty phallus-shaped lollipops." Other images showed the girls in their underwear with dollar bills sticking out. The ACLU has become involved in the case, and they claim that since the incident occurred outside school, it should not effect their standing. •  A new study from Britain's Department of Health has found that new mothers feel most anxious around five months after giving birth. At this point, the excitement has supposedly worn off, and friends and relatives are supposedly no longer offering as much support, which leads many mothers to feel isolated and nervous. • Nutrition experts have complained that Kellogg's is falsely advertising that its Cocoa Krispies cereal can help "boost immunity." Currently, the Cocoa Krispies box reads: ""Now helps support your child's IMMUNITY," alluding to the addition of vitamins A, C and E. But Kelly Brownell from Yale University says, "by their logic, you can spray vitamins on a pile of leaves, and it will boost immunity." • Researchers recently found that 1/5 of smokers lie about smoking during pregnancy. The study, which looked at 3,475 women from Scotland, asked women to come clean about lighting up while pregnant and followed up with the revealing blood tests. •  The Cyprus Feline Society has identified two breeds of cat that they claim are "ancient breeds" and would like international recognition for them. The two breeds include the tall and elegant "Aphrodite," and short, broad-faced "Helen." •  A professor at Harvard has announced that next semester he plans a class based entirely on the HBO show The Wire. "I do not hesitate to say that it has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality, more than any other media event or scholarly publication," said sociology professor William J. Wilson at a recent panel discussion.  • A new study found that while marriage rates are lower for women on welfare, receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, once they exit the system they are as likely to marry as women who were never on welfare. • International cancer specialists will meet this week to figure out how to combat the increase of breast cancer in developing countries, where almost two-thirds of women aren't diagnosed until the cancer has spread through their bodies. Doctors say part of the problem is that in some areas women worry that men will leave them if they lose a breast. "It's not a trivial consideration," says Dr. Lawrence Shulman of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, who is working to begin cancer care in parts of Africa where "the women are often seen as really either vessels for producing children or as sex slaves." • A mother in New York is challenging a judge's decision to 34 percent increase in the number of Down Syndrome births between 1989 and 2005, 15 percent fewer babies were born during that time due to prenatal testing. Some are worried that the decline in Down Syndrome cases will lead to cuts in research funding and that more people aren't even considering raising a child with Down syndrome. • A Texas health clinic operator CareNow says it regrets telling a Muslim doctor applying for a job that she couldn't wear her hijab. The company called it a "misunderstanding" after the American-Islamic Relations wrote to CareNow, explaining federal law requires employers to reasonably accommodate religious practices of an employee. • Today Michelle Obama is launching a mentoring program in which she and female White House staffers will mentor 20 high school girls from the Washington, D.C. area. The girls will get to visit their mentors' offices and gather for a group dinner. • Despite Liz Lemon's well-known love of the German language, 30 Rock is not popular in Germany. Its premiere last night on the German channel ZDFNeo earned a 0.0 rating, meaning it was watched by fewer than 5,000 people. Blerg. •

Sources say Jamie McCourt is looking for investors to help her buy her husband out. Her lawyer said she's, "disappointed and saddened by her termination. As co-owner of the Dodgers, she will address this and all other issues in the courtroom." • Russian lesbians Irina Shipitko, 32, and Irina Fedotova-Fet, 30, got married today in Toronto after their two requests for a marriage license in Moscow were denied in May. Russia doesn't allow gay marriage, but does honor international unions, so they will try to use other Russian laws to validate their marriage. If they are denied, they plan on filing a complaint with the European Human Rights Commission. • Women and teenagers living on the India-Bangladesh border have been given kits that test for arsenic and information about natural signs of contamination by Kansas State University researchers who are trying to understand why arsenic is seeping into the region's groundwater. "We are targeting the women and children 13 to 15 years old because they are the most available people, more so than the men of the family," says geologist Saugata Datta. "These women are not formally educated, but when it comes to this type of suffering, they have a huge voice and they can really articulate the message very clearly to their neighbors and their own families." • A group of British MPs says men's magazines or "lad mags" with explicit cover images may need to be placed in plastic bags rather than just put on the top shelf to keep children from seeing them. They also suggested that in the future, the magazines could carry a 15+ or 18+ rating system similar to movies. • 97-year-old Roberta Wright McCain, John McCain's mother, has been admitted to a Portuguese hospital after falling in the street last night in Lisbon. She had traveled to Lisbon alone and was found in the street a few hours after checking into her hotel. The hospital released a statement saying she's "in observation, undergoing various medical tests, and in a stable clinical condition." • Though many female marines want to fight on the front lines in Afghanistan, the closest they can get is serving in "female engagement teams." Wearing hijabs under their helmets, they follow infantrymen into villages to talk with Afghan women. • Scientists are debating whether a something unrelated to genetics can be causing obese mothers to program their children to be overweight in the womb. Some research suggests that an obese woman losing weight before pregnancy can make her children less likely to be heavy, even if fat-promoting genes run in the family. However, researchers do not know what biological mechanism could have caused the results, and the medical community is still divided on the issue. • Odds Costume Rentals, which has supplied clothes for TV shows and movies like Law & Order and Road to Perdition for 22 years, filed for bankruptcy this week. Owner Jeanette Oleska says costumes shops can't stay in business because many productions are getting their costumes free from designers and clothing companies looking for promotion. "The people at the top say, ‘We can just get these jeans from the Gap and these sneakers from Nike, and we've got a whole free outfit here. Why do we need to rent anything?'" Oleksa said. • Alice Ramsey, who became the first woman to drive across the country in 1909, will be among the first women inducted into the National Transportation Women's Hall of Fame, which will be housed in the Buffalo Transportation/Pierce-Arrow Museum in New York. • Amelia Earhart's scarf will be flown into space on the shuttle Atlantis by Randy Bresnik, the grandson of her personal photographer. "We are flying Amelia Earhart's favorite scarf that she unfortunately did not take with her on her final mission," said Bresnik "Fortunately, she also decided not to take her photographer with her otherwise I might not be here today." After the space mission in November, the scarf will be placed in the Museum of Women Pilots.

Luckily for everyone's sanity, she -unlike Danielle Crittenden at the Huffington Post - isn't doing it to try to make some large statement about women's oppression or to show off her own ignorance. She and her co-workers are doing it as part of a large documentary and book project, "to discuss American identity, Muslim identity, and find out how well this country upholds its ideals in a post-September 11 world." Woldt, in fact, is wearing it to try to see if Americans are as racist as we think we are.

The project itself sounds really interesting, from interviews with a variety of Muslim-Americans from all walks of life with roots in many different countries. So, I hate to bash the project as a whole or suggest that someone like Woldt shouldn't be doing it. But the one problem with playing dress-up in traditional Muslim garb as an obviously-white woman to expose prejudice is that prejudice against Muslims and assumptions about Muslim women are also deeply rooted in race.

Woldt isn't going to get looks or questions the same way an Arabic Muslim woman or an African Muslim woman would because she's white and, with that, comes a basic assumption that she's choosing to wear a garment for reasons that are her own. I mean, no one is going around arguing that the U.S. government needs to free Hasidic Jewish women from the confines of their wigs and modest clothing, right? No one is trying to get Mennonite or Amish women to free themselves from patriarchal religious structures that have them clothed in bonnets and long pioneer-woman type dresses (in some cases). No one is trying to get nuns to ditch their habits or their vows of chastity. And, yet, there is a very basic assumption that, for the (mostly) brown women who wear hijabs, abayas or niqabs for religious reasons, that they must be freed from the yokes of their oppressors — even in this country. Because, of course, if they knew they could choose, of course they wouldn't.

Which is, of course, not to say that some women aren't forced to dress more modestly than they might otherwise choose. It doesn't mean that no women are harassed - here or abroad - for their clothing choices, be they modest or immodest. But what is does mean is that you can stick me in an abaya and send me down South and far fewer people would look askance at me because I'm a white woman wearing it - and because people will assume that it's my choice and not someone else's.

Muslim In America: A 'Voyage Of Discovery' [CNN]
Related: The Veil Does Not a Prison Make [Muslimah Media Watch]

Read more info about the incident and harassment that Muslim women face in America at the ACLU blog.

[via ACLU Blog Of Rights]

Lisa Valentine, who is also known by her Muslim name, Miedah, was arrested at the Douglasville Municipal Court, where she was accompanying her nephew to settle a traffic violation. When she arrived at the courtroom she was stopped at the metal detector and told she would have to remove her headscarf to enter the courtroom:

Valentine’s husband, Omar Hall, said she was accompanying her nephew to address a traffic citation Tuesday when she was stopped at the metal detector and told she would not be allowed to enter the courtroom with a head scarf.

Hall said Valentine, an insurance underwriter, told the bailiff that she had been in courtrooms before with a scarf on; that removing it would be a religious violation. She became frustrated, then turned to leave and uttered an expletive, Hall said.

Valentine was arrested and sentenced to 10 days in jail, although she was released later that evening. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "the reason for her release wasn't immediately clear." (We have an idea: Something about "absurd arrest"?)

Judge Keith Rollins, the man who sentenced her to jail, also threw out a Muslim woman for wearing a hijab in his courtroom last week. Rollins's reasoning is that there is ban on headgear in the courtroom and that he should be allowed to maintain "decorum" in his courtroom.

(Obviously, this is an easy argument to make, but would he have thrown out people from his courtroom who came to the courthouse with headcoverings for different religious reasons? Would he have thrown out cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy wearing hats or scarves to cover their heads?)

A poll on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution website asks readers if Muslim women should be allowed to wear hijabs in courtrooms and the results so far are extremely close with 47% in favor of Muslim women not wearing hijabs in courtrooms. (At "press time", i.e., the time this post was finished, there were a little over 3,000 respondents.) Wonder how the poll numbers will react as the day proceeds?

Muslim's Scarf Leads To Arrest At Courthouse [AJC]

The hijab is a highly charged topic in France, where it's been the subject of debates about the role of religion and secularism in French society. In the artist's own words, "I’m an advertising hijabist. In other words, I cover all advertising with a black veil, which is a dark symbol, a reference on pop culture, and a way to hide elegantly advertising. It is also a study on territories and identities." While little is known about the artist - including her sex or religious affiliation — like the anonymous British street artist Banksy, Princess Hijab has been embraced by the art world, and her work will be displayed in a number of upcoming exhibitions. [Muslimah Media Watch]

While these sites present Muslim women with readily available modest yet chic clothing options from high street retailers, without exception they address the hijab: styles like the "Spanish", "simple braid" and the "Flower Wrap" are discussed and demonstrated; forums discuss the best wraps for athletics or for wear under a a baseball cap. Writes one commenter on hijabstyle, "For me, spanish hijab is more convenient when I need to look 'westernised' :) Like in the airport security, or dealing with non-muslim people whose judging can affect my life (like oral exams and so on)... And I'm 50-50 mix, my mom is not a muslim, so her family and she likes it better that way :)."

These outlets, one presumes, are liberating not merely for the modern Muslim women living in Western societies, but also for those, like Iranian women, who are constrained by law to "modesty" and want to express their creativity through dress. Of course, this playful attitude towards the hijab has aroused some ambivalence. Speaking of the new "trend" in hijab chic, Muslimah Media Watch blogger Faith writes, "For one thing, isn't the one of the objectives of hijab to take the focus off of outer appearances? One of the most common arguments given by hijab apologists is that the hijab prevents women from only being judged by how they look. It allows women to be judged for who they truly are. If headscarves are suddenly made into the latest fashion trend, doesn't it suddenly lose that purpose? Hasn't it become the latest commodity that women must have? As Muslims, should we support that?" Further, she objects to the head scarf as a tangible harbinger of "modesty." "Is the wearing of the khimar (which is the actual headscarf) the sole indicator of modesty? What about women who do not wear the hijab, both Muslim and non-Muslim? Are they immodest? Isn't modesty also related to our attitude? What about hijabis or other "modestly" dressed women who have horrible attitudes and look down upon anyone who doesn't agree with their line of thinking on how women should dress or act? Arrogance isn't modesty at all."

While this is obviously a highly personal and thorny issue, a friend, Sumerah, told me that she appreciates any trend, however superficial, that serves to 'normalize' the Muslim image in contemporary American society. "We're portrayed as so sinister now," she wrote, "that anything that shows us to be normal people is a positive, however sad that might sound." Oh, and the 'look for Fall?' "Those complex folds are seriously labor-intensive," she wrote. "Who has the energy?"

The hijab goes high fashion [Guardian]
IslamOnline's Modesty Chic [Muslimah Media Watch]

They called the thing a "habit" for a reason. We all have them: I buy all my clothes at American Apparel despite a general unease with the institution's values; if I could I'd go back to wearing a Catholic school uniform despite unease with the institution's values. The biggest community of hijab-wearers I ever met worked with me at the phone sex call center, where I would regularly watch one habitually fiddle with her scarves as she regaled clients with detailed descriptions of her denim miniskirt and red lace thong and horny San Fernando Valley cheerleading squad's locker room antics.

Obviously, one cannot bear witness to such a spectacle and emerge without entertaining thought: "God I love this country." Which is, seven years on in this dumb Terror War, what makes this headscarf thing so infuriating: where K-Mart is free to peddle track pants that advertise abstinence from sex on their asses and the Secretary of State can don boots that look swiped from an S&M dungeon and pop culture celebrates bearded cross dressers…what does anyone give a shit about headscarves for? Where the perpetuation of conformity and envy is still the primary role of fashion, a lot more civilians will die at the hands of those who covet their Nikes than those who hate their "freedom" to wear them.

Muslims Barred From Picture At Obama Event [Politico]
How I Nearly Lost My Business After Refusing To Hire A Muslim Hair Stylist Who Wouldn't Show Her Hair [Daily Mail]