Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (45 page)

16
According to Victor Turn "Powerfu drives and emotions associated with human physiol.

ogy, especially the physiology of reproduction, are divested in the ritual process of their antisocial quality and attached to components of the normative order, energizing the latter with a borrowed vitality, and thus making the
D
urkheimian 'obligatory' desirable" (1969, 5 2-53 ).

17
See Scheff, who draws upon Turn work to argue that ritual is the "distanced reenactment

of situations which evoke collectively held emotional stress" such as fear, grief, anger, and embar
..
rassment (1977, 489).
None of the seventeen scholars responding
to
Scheff's argument in
Current
Anthropology
take issue with his proposition that ritual facilitates the catharsis of universally valid emotions and produces a distance between the performers and their feelings (1977, 490-500).

drives are channeled into conventional patterns of expression, or where they are temporarily suspended so that a conventional social script may be enacted. Common to both these positions is the understanding that ritual activity is where emotional spontaneity comes to be controlled.
18

At fi blush, it may seem that Mona's understanding of the role emotions play within a ritual performance is consistent with the view that formal con.. ventional behavior forecloses the possibility of the expression of spontaneous emotions ( as, for example, when she advises the young woman to suppress her anger). Yet there are many ways in which Mona's understanding of prayer be.. lies the neat separation of spontaneous emotions from disciplined behavior that anthropologists have taken for granted. A close examination of Mona's advice to the young woman reveals that the enactment of conventional ges.. tures and behaviors devolves upon the
spontaneous
expression of
well..rehearsed
emotions and individual intentions, thereby directing attention to how one learn to express "spontaneously" the "right attitudes." For women like Mona, ritual ( that is , conventional, formal action) is understood as the space par ex.. cellence for making their desires act spontaneously in accord with pious Is.. lamic conventions.

This was brought home to me further in the considerable attention the mosque attendees paid to the act of crying during prayer as a mark of one's de.. votion to God. The ultimate sign of �alat performed with consummate excel.. lence ( that is, with khushft) is the act of weeping during the course of prayer, especially at the time of supplication
(duea�) .
Yet this was not something that came naturally to the mosque participants, and they often discussed various ways of inducing this emotion in themselves while performing the prayers. One of the widely circulated booklets among the mosque groups, entitled "How Can You Feel Humility and Submission [khushii in Prayer?" provides various

18
Much of this discussion assumes a particular model of the relation between the inner life of individuals and their outward expressions, a model predicated on a Cartesian understanding of the self as it was developed in early modern and Romantic thought in Europe. As a theatrical mode of self�presentation emerged as a legitimate and necessary form of commercial sociability in eighteenth�century Europe, Romantic thinkers, for example, came to see this development in terms of the need for a necessary detachment between the inner life of individuals and their social performances. Historian E. J. Hundert discusses this attitude in the work of Rousseau, who drew a clear separation between an inner self and its social performances, saying that "expressions of in� ner life resisted all attempts to encode it as a feature of social practices theatrically conceived,

precisely because such a life was [regarded as] singular and self,defining" (1 997, 82). Hundert quotes Rousseau from
The Confessions:
"I know my own heart.
.
. . I am made unlike anyone I have ever met. I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world.
I
may be no better, but at least I am different"
(
1997, 82 )
.
This view of the unique privatized subject whose essence cannot be captured in the social conventions of a given society seems to resonate with

the conception of ritual action as necessarily devoid of "authentic, individualized" emotions.

techniques that help develop one's capacity to cry spontaneously during �alat (Maharib 1 991). These entail various exercises of the body and the imagina- tion geared toward exciting one's emotions, evoking the pious tendern that khushit entails and that should ideally lead to weeping. Many of the women I knew advised one another to envision that they were being physically held be- tween the hands of God during prayer in order to induce khushit, or to visual-

ize crossing the legendary bridge
(al
..
�irat),
narrow as a sharp blade, that all

Muslims will be required to walk in the Hereafter but that only the pious will be able to traverse successfully, avoiding the fi of hell that lie beneath. Other women talked about imagining the immensity of God's power and their own insignifi .19 As I will discuss later in the chapter, the principle underlying these exercises is that repeated invocations of weeping, with the right inten.. tion, habituate the cardinal virtue of fear of God ( taqwa)
to
the point that it infuses all of one's actions, of which ritual obligations are an important part. Virtuous fear becomes, in other words, a part of one's "natural" disposition such that one does not have to simulate it but it issues forth spontaneously.