Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (51 page)

Remember that if we cannot cry out of fear of the fi of hell, then we should certainly cry at the condition of our souls !

These remarks are striking for the ineluctable relationship Hajja Samira draws between the ability to fear God and capacities of moral discernment and action. In this formulation, the emotion of fear does not simply serve as a motivation for the pursuit of virtue and avoidance of vice, but has an episte.. mic value: it enables one to know and distinguish between what is good for oneself and for one's community and what is bad ( in accordance with God's program). Notably, according to Hajja Samira, the repeated act of committing sins intentionally and habitually has the cumulative effect of making one into the kind of person who has lost the capacity to fear God, a loss that in tum is understood as the ultimate sign of the inability to judge the status of one's moral condition. 33 For many Muslims, the ability to fear God is considered to be one of the critical registers by which one monitors and assesses the progress of the moral self toward virtuosity, and the absence of fear is regarded as the marker of an inadequately formed self. Hajja Samira, therefore, interprets the incapacity of Egyptian Muslims today to feel frightened of the retribution of God as both the
cause
and the
consequence
of a life lived deliberately without virtue.

The various elements of this economy of emotion and action were clarifi

to me further by one of the longtime attendees of Hajja Samira's lessons.

33
This logic is captured well in the Quranic phrase (often repeated by the mosque partici, pants) that describes those who commit sins habitually as doing "injustice to themselves"
(?:ala nafsahu).
Hence Hajj a Samira's statement that the condition of habitual sinners deserves the ut,

most pity because their real punishment is their defi and ill,formed characters for which they will not only pay in the Hereafter, but also in this world. For an excellent discussion of the con, cept of "doing injustice to oneself' as it occurs in the Quran, see lzutsu 1966, 164-72.

Umm Amal, a gentle woman in her late fi ties, had recently retired after hav.. ing worked as an administrator for the Egyptian airline most of her life. Hav.. ing raised two children single..handedly and through adversity, she had ac.. quired a forgiving and accommodating temperament that seemed quite the opposite of Hajja Samira, who was often strict and unrelenting in her criti- cisms of the impious behavior of Egyptian women. It came as a surprise to me, therefore, when Umm Amal defended Hajja Samira's emphasis on fear in her lessons, in particular her evocations of themes such as the tortures of hell and the pain of death. I asked Umm Amal what she meant when she said that she feared God, and how she thought it affected her ability to feel close to God. She responded: