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Islamic dress. Women from Pakistan, on their way to jobs in the Gulf, floated by in their deliciously comfortable salivar kameez —silky tunics drifting low over billowing pants with long shawls of matching fabric tossed loosely over their heads. Saudi women trod carefully behind their husbands, peering from behind gauzy face veils and 360-degree black cloaks that made them look, as Guy de Maupassant once wrote, “like death out for a walk.” Afghani women also wore 360-degree coverings, called chadris —colorful crinkly shrouds with an oblong of embroidered latticework over the eyes. Women from Dubai wore stiff, birdlike masks of black and gold that beaked over the nose but left their luminous, treacle-colored eyes exposed. Some Palestinians and Egyptians wore dull-colored, floor-length button-through coats and white head-scarves; others wore bright calf-length skirts with matching scarves held in place by headbands of seed pearls.
    The oddest interpretation of Islamic dress I encountered was in the arid expanse of the Algerian Sahara, where the nomadic tribes known as Tuareg hold to the tradition that it is men who should veil their faces after puberty, while women go barefaced. As soon as they are old enough to shave their beards and keep the Ramadan fast, the men must cover all but their eyes in a veil made of yards of indigo cloth. “We warriors veil our faces so that the enemy may not know what is in our minds, peace or war, but women have nothing to hide,” is how one Tuareg man explained the custom. The Tuareg are Muslims, but their interpretation of the faith gives women considerable sexual freedom before marriage and allows close platonic friendships with men after they wed. A Tuareg proverb says: “Men and women toward each other are for the eyes, and for the heart, and not only for the bed.” Other Muslims find Tuareg customs close to heresy. In fact, the word “Tuareg” comes from the Arabic for “The Abandoned of God.”
    Where women wore the veil, there was money to be made in Islamic fashion. Cairo had the Salam Shopping Center for Veiled Women, a three-floor clothing emporium that stocked nothing but Islamically correct outfits. Most of the store was devoted to what the management thought of as “training hijab”—color-coordinated long skirts and scarves, long jackets studded with rhinestones and bulging with oversized shoulder pads—that covered the Islamic minimum. Ideally, explained one manager, customers who started wearing such clothes, would gradually become more enlightened and graduate to dowdier colors and longer, more shapeless garments, ending up completely swathed in black cloaks, gloves and face veils. But these plain outfits, which cost around ten dollars, were hard to find amid the racks of more profitable “high-fashion” hijab, where the cost for an Islamically correct evening outfit could run to three or four times a civil servant’s monthly salary.
    In Beirut, in the basement of the Great Prophet Mosque, Hezbollah established an Islamic-fashion factory to cash in on the growing worldwide demand for hijab. “My Islam isn’t a bunch of fighters. It’s a revolution of culture, of ideas,” enthused the factory manager, a rotund woman who introduced herself as Hajjia Zahra. Flipping through a German couture catalog, she showed me how the latest styles in pockets, zips and sleeves could be grafted onto the long, figure-hiding dresses the factory turned out by the hundreds. Around us, bolts of cloth soared to the ceiling. She explained that the bright bales, the reds and yellows, would be used for Hezbollah’s hot-selling line of children’s clothes. The muted browns, grays and mossy greens were for the women’s fashions. “These are calm colors,” she explained. “Part of the philosophy of Islamic dress is for a woman to project an aura of calm and tranquillity.”
    Hijab was the most obvious sign of the Islamic revival that had swept up Sahar and so many other young