The primary theme in Nine Parts of Desire is the role and status of women in Islamic societies. Throughout, Geraldine Brooks is especially interested in exploring the tensions between contemporary ideas about personal autonomy and the pull of more conservative religious ideology, focusing on how these tensions are often embodied in clothing practices and the ideal of submission for women.  

Central to this exploration is the hijab. Brooks explains that it is not merely a piece of clothing but a symbol laden with cultural and religious significance. Brooks argues that Islamic dress represents the tensions between autonomy and cultural structures in some Islamic societies:

[U]nder all the talk about hijab freeing women from commercial or sexual exploitation, all the discussion of hijab’s potency as a political and revolutionary symbol of selfhood, was the body: the dangerous female body that somehow, in Muslim society, had been made to carry the heavy burden of male honor (32, emphasis added).

Brooks regards the hijab as reflecting patriarchal societal norms about “male honor,” with the female body’s concealment representing the importance of regulating female sexuality and bodily autonomy to preserve gender segregation and ideals of Islamic femininity in shaping women’s roles.