Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (71 page)

Personally, it was this certainty that came to dissolve before my eyes as I be.. came enmeshed within the thick texture of the lives of the mosque partici.. pants, women whose practices I had found objectionable, to put it mildly, at the outset of my fi ldwork. I had approached the study of this movement with a sense of foreknowledge of what I was going to encounter, of how I was going to explain these women's "intransigent behavior" in regard to the ideals of freedom, equality, and autonomy that I myself have held so dear. Over time, I found these ideals could no longer serve as arbiters of the lives I was studying because the sentiments, commitments, and sensibilities that ground these women's existence could not be contained within the stringent molds of these ideals. My prejudices against their forms of life (or, for that matter, theirs against mine) could not be reconciled and assimilated within "a cosmopolitan horizon" (Mehta 1 999, 22); the unseemliness of differences could not be syn.. thesized. Nor did I fi myself capable of factoring this difference into my old calculus of what in their behavior had more "feminist potential" and what was hopelessly irr ble. This language of assessment, I realized, is not neutral but depends upon notions of progressive and backward, superior and inferior, higher and lower-a set of oppositions frequently connected with a com.. pelling desire to erase the second modifi even if it means implicitly forming alliances with coercive modes of power.

In this absence of familiar milestones, I came to reckon that if the old fern..

1n1st practice of "solidarity" had any valence whatsoever, it could not be grounded in the ur.- of feminism, progressivism, liberalism, or Is.. lamism, but could only ensue within the uncertain, at times opaque, condi.. tions of intimate and uncomfortable encounters in all their eventuality. I say this not to resurrect a redemptive narrative of anthropological reckoning or universal humanism that claims the power to break through the thicket of prejudices and find a common human essence . To do so would be to reduce yet again all that remains irreconcilable into the trope of a shared humanity and its assumed teleological futurity. Rather what I mean to gesture at is a mode of encountering the Other which does not assume that in the process of cultur.. ally translating other lifeworlds one's own certainty about how the world should proceed can remain stable. This attitude requires the virtue of humil.. ity: a sense that one does not always know
wha
one opposes and that a politi.. cal vision at times has to admit its own fi itude in order to even comprehend what it has sought to oppose.

As must be apparent to the sensitive reader, I have avoided the strategy of rendering the Other through its traces and absences-a strategy pursued by postcolonial writers sensitive to the violence a hegemonic discourse commits when it tries to assimilate the Other to a language of translatability.5 On this view, to render unfamiliar lifeworlds into
c
'1nceptual or communicable form is to domesticate that which exceeds hegemonic protocols of intelligibility. I have avoided this strategy of narrativization because I fear that it engenders a certain recursivity that ends up privileging the hegemonic terms of discourse

by failing to engage-an
d
be engaged by-the systemacity and reason of the

unfamiliar, the strange, or the intransigent. Furthermore, to the extent that the tilt of the current political climate is such that all forms of Islamism (from its more militant to its more quiescent) are seen as the products of a roving ir.. rationality, I feel a certain responsibility to render to reason that which has been banished from its domain. Perhaps more importantly, it is through this process of dwelling in the modes of reasoning endemic to a tradition that I once judged abhorrent, by immersing myself within the thick texture of its sensibilities and attachments, that I have been able to dislocate the certitude of my own projections and even begin to comprehend why Islamism, at least in one of its renditions, exerts such a force in people's lives. This attempt at comprehension offers the slim hope in this embattled and imperious climate, one in which feminist politics runs the danger of being reduced to a rhetorical display of the placard of Islam's abuses, that analysis as a mode of conversa.. tion, rather than mastery, can yield a vision of coexistence that does not re.. quire making others lifeworlds extinct or provisional.

'i
See, for example, Bhabha 1 996; Chakrabarty 2000; Spivak 1987.

BlAN PAGE

Glossary of Co mmonly Used Arab ic Te rms

Adab.
-
Etiquette.

�" lmana
or
calmaniyya.
-
Secularization.

�" lmaniyyin.
-
Secularists.

al-- �" al al--�ali}J
- Good deeds.

Amr bil
ma('ruf
wal..- �"an al-- unkar. -
To enjoin someone in the doing of good or right, and the forbidding of evil or wrong.

�" ura. -
Linguistically means "weakness," "faultiness ," "unseemliness," "imperfec, tion," "disfi ement," and "genitalia"; also used in Islamic juristic discourse to sig, nify women.

Bidca. -
In Islamic doctrine, this refers to unwarranted innovations, beliefs or, prac, tices for which there was no precedent at the time of the Prophet and that are there, fore best avoided.

Da �"iya
(plural:
da �" yat). -
Preacher/religious teacher; one who undertakes
da�"wa.

Dars
(plural:
durus ).
- Lesson; in the context of the mosque movement, this term

refers to
a
religious lesson.

Da �"wa. -
Literally means "call, invitation, appeal, or summons"; in the twentieth century, the term has come to be associated with prosleytization activity among Muslims and non,Muslims alike. In the last fi years, it refers primarily to those ac, tivities that urge fellow Muslims to greater piety.

Fac}iti -
Islamic virtues.

Fatwa.
(plural:
fatawi)
- Nonbinding religious opinion. Ghafia - Carelessness, negligence.

Ijad
(plural:
al) h). -
The authoritative record of the Prophet's exemplary speech and actions.

Ijad �a�T� ; �ad dazf. -
A sound Prophetic tradition; a weak Prophetic tradition.

Ijajja. -
Literally means a woman who has performed the pilgrimage to Mecca ( the
�jj),
but it is also used in Egyptian colloquial Arabic to respectfully address an older woman.

G L O S S A R Y O F C O M M O N LY U S E D A R A B I C T E R M S

f:I -
That which is permissible and legal.

f:I ii
- That which is forbidden and unlawfu

f:I nat.
- Merits accrued with God.

f:Iaya!) -
Shyness, diffi modesty, timidity.

f:I jab.
-
Veil; note that even though the term
�ijab
refers to the headscarf ( which is distinct from other forms of the veil such as the
khimii
or the
niqab),
it is also used as a general term for the veil in Egyptian colloquial and Modem Standard Arabic.

t{
-
Love.

t{
(plural:
�ka ). -
Literally means "to withhold, prevent, and refr while

l) has specifi meanings in Arabic philosophy and grammar, in Islamic j urispru- dence it refers to a ruling of the sharta.

'J dit.
- Acts of worship; in the sharta this term refers to religious observances and devotional practices.

I�tisham .
-
Shyness, modesty, decency.

Ikhtilat .
- Literally means "mixing and blending," but in Islamic ethical literature, it refers to rules of conduct that govern interactions between men and women who are not related
by
immediate kin ties.

Khas . -
Fear, anxiety, apprehension.

Khauf.
-
Fear.

Khimar.
-
A form of veil that covers the head and extends over the torso.

Kh . -
Circumcision.

Khushil .
- Submission, humility; a state particularly cultivated during acts of wor- ship.

Mad
(plural:
madhahib).
- School of Islamic law. There are four primary juristic schools in Sunni Islam known as the Shafaei, Hanafi Maliki, and Hanbali schools each of which is associated with the name of the Muslim jurist who founded the school.

M�ram
(plural:
mal) m) .
- Close male kin, which, according to Muslim jurists, in- clude a woman's immediate family ( for example, father, brother, nephews), her hus- band, the husband's immediate male kin, and any male who was breastfed by her mother.

Malaka .
-
It has often been translated as "habit," but its sense is best captured in the Latin term habitus.

Mae�iyya
(plural:
mae�i).
- Act of disobedience, sin.

Mueamalat.
- Social transactions; sections of the sharta concerned with transac-- tions, including bilateral contracts and unilateral dispositions.

Mufti .
- Juriconsult.

Niqab .
- A form of the veil that covers the head, face, and torso.

Raja!)
-
Hope, anticipation.

$abr - Patience, fortitude.

Sahabiyyii
- The Prophet's female companions.

al-- �wa al.-
- Islamic Revival.

$alat
(plural:
�alawat). -
Islamic prayer ritual that is considered obligatory within the

shar·(a

G L O S S A R Y O F C O M M O N LY U S E D A R A B I C T E R M S