Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (54 page)

these two rhetorical strategies. In addition to the space of the mosque lessons where the women learn to acquire virtuous fear, tape..recorded sermons that use the takhwif style are also widely popular among the women I worked with.39 Another crucial space for the inculcation and realization of virtuous fear is the ritual act of prayer (�alat) , and, as I mentioned earlier, weeping in prayer is an expression of virtuous fear as much as a means of its acquisition. Fear is, there.. fore, not only something that motivates one to pray but is also a necessary as.. pect of the act itself, an "adverbial virtue" that imparts to the act of prayer the specifi quality through which it becomes consummate.40

Notably, the understanding that the emotion of fear motivates a person to act accords with the belief in certain cultural traditions that emotions are causative of action, an understanding that has been analyzed in considerable detail by some historians and anthropologists of emotion (James 1997; Lutz and White 1 986; Rosaldo 1980). What is signifi here, however, is that the emotion of fear not only propels one to act, but is also considered to be inte.. gral to action. Thus, fear is an element internal to the very structure of a pious act, and as such it is a condition for (to use J. L. Austin's terms) the "felici.. tous" performance of the act.41 In other words, what this understanding draws attention to is not so much how particular emotions as modes of action con.. stitute different kinds of social structure ( Abu.. Lughod 1986; Caton 1 990; Myers 1986), but more how particular emotions are constitutive of specifi ac.. tions and are the conditions by which those actions attain their excellence. The connection between the emotion of fear and practices of piety ( such as

prayer) is further borne out by the way they are semantically intertwined in the Arabic term
taq
which is used in the Quran for both "piety" and "fear

of God." In the Quran, the eschatological fear of God and the Day of Judg.. ment is held to be almost synonymous with true belief, and piety is at times al.. most indistinguishable from the capacity to fear (Izutsu 1966, 164-72 ) .42

39
For an extended analysis of the rhetorical practice of Islamic sermons in contemporary Egypt among male preachers and listeners, see Hirschkind 2001a, 2001 b.

40
"Adverbial virtue" is an expression used by political theorist Michael Oakeshott ( 1975) to describe a conception of virtue that emphasizes the manner or sensibility with which a virtue is undertaken, as compared to an emphasis on the ends and purposes for which a virtue is under� taken. A particular virtue can, of course, emphasize both aspects-as was the case with regnant understandings of virtue in the tradition I studied.

41
The English philosopher J. L. Austin calls a speech act "felicitous" when nothing "goes wrong" in its execution, that is, when the conditions that enable it to achieve its intended eff are met (Austin 1 994, 1 4-1 5).

4 2
It is for this reason that, depending upon the context, I have translated the term
taq
at times as "piety," and at other times as "virtuous fear" or "fear of God." For an analysis of the con� ceptual and linguistic relationship between piety and fear, see Izutsu's excellent discussion of the use of the terms
taq , khauf, khashya,
and
rahiba
( all of which are used interchangeably) in the Quran (1966, 195-200).

emulation and reflexivity

The mosque participants are often disparaged for their abidance by a behav.. iorist model of virtuous emotions wherein their emulation of exemplary stan.. dards stands in, their critics argue, for a more "sincere" and "personal connec..

tion" with God. Among these critics was a group of women I had come to know through my visits to a middle..class social club
(nadi)
in Cairo, where the group met to practice Quranic recitation. A number of them had experi..

mented with mosque lessons but had not pursued them because they felt that the di:fiyat were "distorting the teachings of Islam." They often told me that one of the problems with the mosque teachers and attendees was that they ex.. aggerated the role religious rituals play in a Muslim's life; this was a problem not because these rituals were unimportant, they said, but because the mosque

participants thought that the "mere performance of rites and rituals"
(mujar..

rad al
..
tuqU.S
wal
..
eibadit)
would make them pious. Amna, a medical student in her mid..twenties, gave the example of the mosque participants' practice of weeping publicly in prayer as something she found particularly objectionable:

I cannot stand to go to these mosques anymore for Friday prayers because I fi it offensive that so many people start to sob when the time for supplication [duea] comes. I am not saying that these women are not moved by real love for God.

How can I say that ? It is only He who knows what is in the heart. But I know from talking to many of these people that when they cry in prayer they do not really

feel it fr within; they do it because they think they will gain merits [l)

with God. Or they think that "Oh, Abu Bakr [the fi caliph and Muhammed's close Companion] did this,
so
should
1."
Where is sincerity of intent
[ikhlz4 al.. niyya]
here? You should cry not because you want recompense from God, or you want to follow the Companions blindly without thinking. You should cry for God because you really feel inside you what Abu Bakr felt, and cannot prevent yourself fr crying, whether you are alone or in public. And I am telling you, it
never
happens to
me
when I am in the company of others.

When compared with the views of the mosque participants, comments such as these suggest a very different understanding of the relationship between public behavior and interiority, and of the role exemplary models should play in shaping the pious self. Amna's skepticism about the public display of emo.. tions registers a detachment between the inner life of a self and its outward expressions wherein the experience of the former cannot be adequately cap.. tured in the latter, and where its true force can only be felt within the val.. orized space of personal self..refl Amna questions the mosque partici.. pants' sincerity precisely because they place undue weight on performative behavior and social conventions as a measure of their religiosity; indeed, if the

proper location of religion and emotions is the inner life of the individual, as Amna seems to suggest, then it follows that one's sincerity in these two do- mains cannot be measured in one's outward performances. In contrast, for the women I worked with, outward behavioral forms were not only expressions of their interiorized religiosity but also a necessary means of acquiring it.43

The difference between these two views turns upon contrastive under- standings of the relationship between bodily behavior and the pious self: for Amna, performative behavior may signify a pious self but does not necessarily form it. For the women I worked with, bodily acts (like weeping in prayer), when performed repeatedly, both in public and private, endowed the self with certain qualities: bodily behavior was therefore not so much a sign of interior- ity as it was a means of acquiring its potentiality. I use the term "potentiality" here in its Aristotelian meaning, in which it does not suggest a generic faculty or power, but is linked to the abilities one acquires through specifi kinds of training and knowledge.44 This usage of "potentiality" implies that in order to be good at something one undergoes a teleological program of volitional training that presupposes an exemplary path to knowledge-knowledge that one comes to acquire through assiduous schooling and practice.

Another crucial diff rence between Amna's understanding of performative behavior and that of the mosque movement participants lies in their concep- tion of the role authoritative role models (such as Abu Bakr who is legendary for his ability to cry profusely during prayers) play in the shaping of the virtu- ous self. Note how emphatic Amna is about the kind of refl that should inform one's emulation of Abu Bakr's behavior: one cries not simply because Abu Bakr cried, but because through reflection upon Abu Bakr's conduct one fi those spaces within oneself that identify with his ability to cry. In other words, according to Amna, Abu Bakr's conduct should not be unthinkingly reproduced but should serve as the ground upon which refl about the "true I" proceeds. In contrast, for the wornen I worked with, an exemplary

43
It should be clear by now that my argument is not concern with whether this was the atti .. tude of all the mosque participants. Rather I am interested in explicating the ideals inherent in diff discourses on piety among the mosque participants and their critics. In this sense, I am not interested so much in what a given person "really did" versus "what she said she should do" but in the diff ideals of behavior, with their attendant notions of authority and personhood, that the mosque movement is popularizing in Egypt today.

44
Giorgio Agamben, in commenting upon this concept of potentiality in Aristotle, says, "The potentiality that interests him [Aristotle] is one that belongs to someone who , for exam.. ple, has knowledge or an ability. In this sense, we say of the architect that he or she has the
po- tential
to build, of the poet that he or she has the
potential
to write poems. It is clear that this
exis ting
potentiality diff rs from the
generic
potentiality of the child. The child, Aristotle says, is potential in the sense that he must suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learn.. ing" (1 999, 1 79).

model was not where one discovered the "true I" but was a means to
transcend
the "I" that is invested in ephemeral pleasures and pursuits. Moreover, in con.. trast to Amna, many of the mosque participants believed that to emulate Abu Bakr's habit of weeping during prayers was not wrong precisely because it was through this mimetic reproduction that one eventually came to acquire the moral character of the exemplar. Note that self..refl plays a diff rent role in this conception in that it is aimed toward molding the "I" to approximate an authoritative model whose immanent form is the necessary means to the substance the "I" is to become. In other words, bodily form in this view does not simply represent the interiority ( as it does for women like Amna), but serves as the "developable means" (T. Asad 1993) through which certain kinds of ethical and moral capacities are attained.

POLIT1 CS AN D CO NVENTI ONS

In order to interrogate the political implications of these distinct economies of moral action, let me focus for a moment on the relationship between the interiority and exteriority of the subject that informed the pedagogical model of the pietists I worked with. As I have described, the mosque participants did not regard authorized models ofbehavior as an extern social imposition that constrained the individual. Rather, they viewed socially prescribed forms of conduct as the potentialities, the "scaffolding," if you will, through which the self is realized. It is precisely this self-- illed obedience to religiously prescribed social conventions-what is often criticized as blind and uncritical emula- tion-that elicits the critique that such movements only serve to reproduce the existing patriarchal order and to prevent women from distinguishing their "own desires and aspirations" from those that are "socially dictated." For some scholars of gender, women of the kind I worked with are often seen as depriv.. ing themselves of the ability to enact an ethics of freedom, one founded on their capacity to distinguish their own ( true) desires from (extern ) religious and cultural demands.

Such a criticism turn upon an imaginary of freedom, one deeply indebted

to liberal political theory, in which an individual is considered free on
-
the condition that she act autonomously: that her actions be the result of her own