Nurhaizatul Jamil

The global modest fashion industry has expanded exponentially, with a projected market value of $402 billion by 2024. While modest dressing indexes the embodiment of pious ethics, Muslim apparel brands, like others, outsource manufacturing to the Global South ‘ contributing to labor exploitation and environmental toxicity. Despite these contradictions, research on Muslim women’s fashion practices has elided the implications of an industry causing irreversible ecological damage. This project asks: How could a re-reading of Islamic ethics in relation to theories of multi-species relationality extend environmental studies scholarship? What does it mean to expand discourses on Muslim women’s pious cultivation beyond willful practices of the self to encompass ecological care? How does extricating the layers of modest apparel production reveal the uneven relations and infrastructures that determine the forms of lives that are allowed to thrive, and those headed toward destruction? The questions this project interrogates represent interventions into the following fields of inquiry: fashion and pious consumption; environmental studies; Islamic ethics. Bridging together Black, Indigineous, and Discard Studies approaches to environmentalism with Islamic ethics scholarship, this multi-sited ethnographic project proposes a re-conceptualization of pious subject-formation that encompasses care for the ecology as part of multi-species relationality.