Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (4 page)

2
In addition to attending religious lessons at a number of mosques catering to women of vari.. ous socioeconomic backgrounds, I undertook participant observation among the teachers and at.. tendees of mosque lessons, in the context of their daily lives. Th was supplemented by a year.. long study with a shaikh fr the Islamic University of al..Azhar on issues of Islamic jurispru and religious practice.

scendent will ( and thus, in many instances, to male authority) as its coveted goaL3

The women's mosque movement is part of the larger Islamic Revival or Is.. lamic Awakening (al.. Sabwa al..Islamiyya) that has swept the Muslim \vorld, including Egypt, since at least the 1970s. "Islamic Revival" is a term that refers not only to the activities of state.-oriented political groups but more broadly to a religious ethos or sensibility that has developed within contemporary Muslim societies. This sensibility has a palpable public presence in Egypt, manifest in the vast proliferation of neighborhood mosques and other institutions of Islamic learn and social welfare, in a dramatic increase in attendance at mosques by both women and men, and in marked displays of religious sociabil.. ity. Examples of the latter include the adoption of the veil
(�ijab
), a brisk con.. sumption and production of religious media and literature, and a growing circle of intellectuals who write and comment upon contemporary affairs in the pop.. ular press from a self- Islamic point of view. Neighborhood mosques have come to serve as the organizational center for many of these activities, from the dissemination of religious knowledge and instruction, to the provision of a range of medical and \velfare services to poor Egyptians.
4
This Islamization of the sociocultural landscape of Egyptian society is in large part the work of the piety movement, of which the women's movement is an integral part, and whose activities are organized under the umbrella term
daewa
(a term whose historical development I trace in chapter 2).5

The women's mosque movement, as part of the Islamic Revival, emerged twenty..fi e or thirty years ago when women started to organize weekly reli- gious lessons-fi at their homes and then within mosques-to read the Quran, the
�ad:u
(the authoritative record of the Prophet's exemplary speech and actions), and associated exegetical and edifi literature. By the time I began my fi ldwork in 1995 , this movement had become so popular that

1
This is in contrast, for example, to a movement among women in the Islamic republic of Iran that has had as its goal the reinterpretation of sacred texts to derive a more equitable model of rela, tions between Muslim women and men; see Afshar 1998; Mir,Hosseini 1999; Najmabadi 1991, 1998.
4
According to available sources, the total number of mosques in Egypt grew from roughly 28,000 reported in 1975 to 50,000 in 1985 (Zeghal 1996, 1 74); by 1995 there were 120,000 mosques in Egypt (al,Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies 1996, 65 ). Of the 50,000 mosques tabulated in the year 1985 , only 7,000 were established by the government (Gaffney

1991, 47 ).

5
There are three important strands that comprise the Islamic Revival: state,oriented political groups and parties, militant Islamists (whose presence has declined during the 1990s), and a net, work of socioreligious nonprofi organizations that provide charitable services to the poor and perform the work of proselytization. In this book, I will use the terms "the dacwa movement" and "the piety movement" interchangeably to refer to this network of socioreligious organizations of which the mosque movement is an important subset.

there were hardly any neighborhoods in this city of eleven million inhabitants that did not off some form of religious lessons for women.6 According to par, ticipants, the mosque movement had emerged in response to the perception that religious knowledge, as a means of organizing daily conduct, had become increasingly marginalized under modem structures of secular govern The movement's participants usually describe the impact of this trend on Egyptian

society as "secularization"
( ealmana
or
ealmaniyya)
or "westernization" (
tagha ..

rub ,
a historical process which they argue has reduced Islamic knowledge ( both as a mode of conduct and a set of principles) to an abstract system of be, liefs that has no direct bearing on the practicalities of daily living. In response, the women's mosque movement seeks to educate ordinary Muslims in those virtues, ethical capacities, and forms of reasoning that participants perceive to have become either unavailable or irrelevant to the lives of ordinary Muslims. Practically, this means instructing Muslims not only in the proper perfor.. mance of religious duties and acts of worship but, more importantly, in how to organize their daily conduct in accord with principles of Islamic piety and vir.. tuous behavior.

Despite its focus on issues of piety, it would be wrong to characterize the women's mosque movement as an abandonment of politics. On the contrary, the form of piety the movement seeks to realize is predicated upon, and trans, formative of, many aspects of social life.7 While I will discuss in chapters 2 and 4 the different ways in which the activism of the mosque movement chal, lenges our normative liberal conceptions of politics, here I want to point out the scope of the transformation that the women's mosque movement and the larger piety (dacwa) movement have effected within Egyptian society. This includes changes in styles of dress and speech, standards regarding what is deemed proper entertainment for adults and children, pattern of fi ial and household management, the provision of care for the poor, and the terms by which public debate is conducted. Indeed, as the Egyptian govern has come to recognize the impact that the mosque movement in particular, and the piety movement in general, have had on the sociocultural ethos of Egyp.. tian public and political life, it has increasingly subjected these movements to state regulation and scrutiny ( see chapter 2).

The pious subjects of the mosque movement occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals em..

6
Th attendance at these gatherings ranged fr ten to fi hundred women, depending on the popularity of the teacher.

7
Unlike some other religious traditions (such as English Puritanism) wherein "piety" refers primarily to inward spiritual states, the mosque participants' use of the Arabic term
taqwa
( which may be translated as "piety,) suggests both an inward orientation or disposition and a manner of practical conduct. See my discussion of the term
taq
in chapter
4.

bedded within a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status. Movements such as these have come to be associated with terms such as fundamentalism, the subjugation of women, social conservatism, reac.. tionary atavism, cultural backwardness, and so on-associations that, in the aftermath of September
11 ,
are often treated as "facts" that do not require fur.. ther analysis. While it would be a worthy task to dissect the reductionism that such associations enact on an enormously complex phenomenon, this is not my purpose in this book. Nor is it my aim to recover a "redeemable element" within the Islamist movement by recuperating its latent liberatory potentials so as to make the movement more palatable to liberal sensibilities. Instead, in this book I seek to analyze the conceptions of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this nonliberal movement, in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it.
8

My goal, however, is not just to provide an ethnographic account of the Is .. Iamie Revival. It is also to make this material speak back to the normative lib .. eral assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable-such as the belief that all human beings have an innate desire for freedom, that we all somehow seek to assert our autonomy when allowed to do so, that human agency primarily consists of acts that challenge social norms and not those that uphold them, and so on. Thus, my ethnographic tracings will sustain a running argument with and against key analytical con.. cepts in liberal thought, as these concepts have come to inform various strains of feminist theory through which movements such as the one I am interested in are analyzed. As will be evident, many of the concepts I discuss under the register of feminist theory in fact enjoy common currency across a wide range of disciplines, in part because liberal assumptions about what consti. tutes human nature and agency have become integral to our humanist intel.. lectual traditions.

AG ENCY AN D RES I STANCE

As I suggested at the outset, women's active support for socioreligious move.. ments that sustain principles of female subordination poses a dilemma for feminist analysts. On the one hand, women are seen to assert their presence in previously male.-defi spheres while, on the other hand, the very idioms

8
For studies that capture the complex character of Islamist movements, and the wide variety of activities that are often lumped under the fundamentalist label, see Abedi and Fischer 1990; Bowen 1993 ; Esposito 1992; Hefner 2000; Hirschkind 2001a, 200 1b, 2004; Peletz 2002; Salvatore

1997; Starrett 1998.

they use to enter these arenas are grounded in discourses that have historically secured their subordination to male authority. In other words, women's subor.. dination to feminine virtues, such as shyness, modesty, and humility, appears to be the necessary condition for their enhanced public role in religious and political life. While it would not have been unusual in the 1960s to account for women's participation in such movements in terms of false consciousness or the intern n of patriarchal norms through socialization, there has been
an
increasing discomfort with explanations of this kind. Drawing on work in the humanities and the social sciences since the 1 970s that has fo.. cused on the operations of human agency within structures of subordination, feminists have sought to understand how women resist the dominant male or.. der by subverting the hegemonic meanings of cultural practices and redeploy.. ing them for their "own interests and agendas." A central question explored within this scholarship has been: how do women contribute to reproducing their own domination, and how do they resist or subvert it ? Scholars working within this framework have thus tended to analyze religious traditions in terms of the conceptual and practical resources they off to women, and the possibilities for redirecting and recoding these resources in accord with women's "own interests and agendas"-a recoding that stands as the site of women's agency.9

When the focus on locating women's agency fi emerged, it played a cru.. cial role in complicating and expanding debates about gender in non..Western societies beyond the simplistic registers of submission and patriarchy. In par.. ticular, the focus on women's agency provided a crucial corrective to scholar.. ship on the M iddle East that for decades had portrayed Arab and Muslim women as passive and submissive beings shackled by structures of male au.. thority.
10
Feminist scholarship performed the worthy task of restoring the absent voice of women to analyses of Middle Eastern societies, portraying women as active agents whose lives are far richer and more complex than past narratives had suggested ( Abu.- 1986; Altorki 1986; Atiya 1982;

S. Davis 1983 ; Dwyer 1978; Early 1993 ; Fern a 1985 ; Wikan 1991 ). This em.. phasis on women's agency within gender studies paralleled, to a certain ex.. tent, discussions of the peasantry in New Left scholarship, a body of work that also sought to restore a humanist agency ( often expressed metonymically as a "voice") to the peasant in the historiography of agrarian societies-a project articulated against classical Marxist formulations that had assigned the peas.. antry a non.- lace in the making of modern history (Hobsbawm 1980; James

9
Examples from the Muslim context include Boddy 1989; Hale 1987; Hegland 1998; MacLeod 1991; Torah 1 996. For a similar argument made in the context of Christian evangelical movements, see Brusco 1995; Stacey 1991.

10
For a review of this scholarship on the Middle East, see Abu.- 1990a.

Scott 1985). The Subaltern Studies Project is the most recent example of this scholarship ( see, for example, Guha and Spivak 1988).11

The ongoing importance of feminist scholarship on women's agency cannot be emphasized enough, especially when one remembers that Western popular media continues to portray Muslim women as incomparably bound by the un. breakable chains of religious and patriarchal oppression. This acknowledg.. ment notwithstanding, it is critical to examine the assumptions and elisions that attend this focus on agency, especially the ways in which these assump- tions constitute a barrier to the exploration of movements such as the one I am dealing with here. In what follows, I will explore how the notion of human agency most often invoked by feminist scholars-one that locates agency in the political and moral autonomy of the subject-has been brought to bear upon the study of women involved in patriarchal religious traditions such as Islam. Later, in the second half of this chapter, I will suggest alternative ways of thinking about agency, especially as it relates to embodied capacities and means of subject formation.