Tudong

Before the 1970s, interpretations of hijab varied amongst women in Malaysia and Indonesia, the most notable form being the selendang, a patterned shawl-like scarf loosely draped around the shoulders or around the head, usually not covering the front of the hair or the ears. Before the late 1970s, the headscarf in general, even the selendang, was something that was reserved for special occasions, such as during funerals or kenduris. Some offices and banks would put up notices that prohibited women with headscarves because headscarves were thought to make a woman look like a criminal.[2] Wearing the headscarf was rare and often shunned; some women appeared on the front pages of newspapers for wearing it. At the time there was also resentment, most notably in Singapore, between Malay Muslims and Muslims of Arab and especially Yemeni origins, as they were viewed as exploiting Malays.[2] This resentment resulted in Malay communities shunning traditions considered “Arab” and “foreign” in nature, such as the headscarf.

The tudong emerged during the mid-to-late 1970s among reformist female Muslim university students studying in campuses in the Middle East, and also to a lesser extent in the United States, England, and Australia, as a result of Ali Shariati’s “authenticity movement” and with the emergence of modern hijab styles being worn by Iranian university students.[3] The tudong was intended to reaffirm these students’ identity as pious Muslims, to reject Western fashion in the same way that Iranian women increasingly were, and to foster a sense of solidarity among themselves. This new form of Islamic dress would begin to also appear at Southeast Asian university campuses in the 1970s and was known as dakwah fashion (fesyen dakwah).[3] After the Iranian Revolution (1978-1979) took place, the Islamic revival was brought to the centre of the Muslim world. The revolution captured the imagination of not only those from the Middle East but many Malaysian Muslims, where the tudong first emerged before later arriving in Indonesia.

The tudong's arrival into the mainstream public space began in the early 1980s after the Iranian Revolution, taking inspiration from the chador by law imposed on Iranian women. Some of the female Muslim students who decided to cover themselves from head to toe were being expelled from their universities for refusing to reveal their faces for identification. By the mid-1980s, within six years of the Iranian Revolution and the Islamic revival in Malaysia, tudong-clad women were becoming the majority in institutions of higher learning, and in the civil service.[4] By the end of the 1980s, the tudong had visibly replaced the selendang as the form of headscarf most commonly worn by women in Malaysia, spreading from university campuses to schools, workplaces and eventually to the kampongs.

By the 1990s, the tudong had also been exported to Indonesia, where it became mainstream, the result of the two countries sharing Malay-language media and Arabic oil money (known as “Petro-Islam”) funded towards Islam in the two countries.