Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (13 page)

Let me now tum to the second objection: that my emphasis on agency as ethical self-formation abandons the realm of politics. This objection in some ways refl an old distinction within liberal political theory that regards is.. sues of morality and ethics
as
private, and issues pertaining to politics as nee.. essarily public. This distinction is problematic for a variety of reasons, not the .· least of which is the existence of a robust disagreement within the liberal tra..

cl on itself about the proper role ethics and virtues should, and do, play in the creation of liberal polities ( see Pocock 1985 ; Skinner 1998 ) . This com.. partmentalization of the ethical and the political is made all the more diffi

to sustain if we take into account an insight that has become quite common..

place in the academy today, namely that all forms of politics require and as.. sume a particular kind of a subject that is produced through a range of disci.. plinary practices that are at the core of the regulative apparatus of any modem political arrangement.

While the validity of this insight is commonly conceded, the line of ques.. tioning is seldom reversed: How does a particular conception of the self re.. quire and presuppose different kinds of political commitments ? Or to put it another way, what sort of subject is assumed to be normative within a particu.. lar political imaginary ? Stating the question in this manner does not assume that the political ensues from the personal, precisely because, as I have argued above, the self is socially and discursively produced, an effect of operations of power rather than the progenitor of these operations. As such, an inquiry into the constitution of the self does not take the personal preferences and pro.. clivities of the individual to be the object of study, but instead analyzes the historically contingent arrangements of power through which the normative subject is produced. I have found this framework particularly powerful inso.. much as it helps denaturalize the normative subject of liberal feminist theory thereby making it possible to approach the lives of the mosque participants in ways not determined by the truths this body of scholarship asserts as universal. Foucault's formulation of ethics suggests a means of inquiring into various techniques of subject formation, particularly within those traditions that place an emphasis on individualized (rather than juridical) modes of subjecti.. vation. Political theorist William Connolly interprets Foucault's work on the arts of the self as an implicit acknowledgment of the crucial ways in which po.. litical engagement is not simply an abstract mode of deliberation but issues

forth from "visceral modes of appraisal"
(
1 999 ). Connolly challenges the reg..

nant rationalist account of politics, arguing that political judgments do not simply entail the evaluation of moral principles but issue forth from intersub- jective modes of being and acting that, while not always representable and enunciable, are nonetheless effi in regards to social and political be.. havior (Connolly 1999, 27-46 ). 53 Indeed, once we recognize that political for.. mations presuppose not only distinct modes of reasoning, but also depend

53
Connolly draws upon the work of a number of philosophers in making this argument. He writes: "Th itself for Deleuze (and Epicurus, Spinoza, Bergson, Freud, and Nietzsche too) operates on more than one level; it moves on the level of the virtual (which is real in its effectiv.. ity but not actual in its availability) and that of the actual (which is available to representation,

but not self..suffi ient). Infrasensible intensities of proto..thinking, for instance, provide a reser.. voir from which
surprise
sometimes unsettles fi explanations, new
pressures
periodically swell up to disrupt existing practices of rationality, and new
drives to identity
occasionally surge up to modify the register of justice and legitimacy upon which established identities are placed"
(
1999, 40).

upon affective modes of assessment, then an analysis of ethical practices of self..formation takes on a new, distinctly political, relevance. Nikolas Rose, who has explored the connection between Foucault's arts of the self and prac.. tices of govemmentality in late ..liberal Western societies, argues that analyti.. cal attention to ethico..politics "allows the possibility of opening up the edu..

cation of forms of life and
conduct to the diffi and interminable business of debate and contestation"
(
1 999, 192). This is a point that res.. onates with a longstanding feminist insight that any political transformation

necessarily entails working on those embodied registers of life that are often cordoned off from the realm of "pure politics."

eth cs and agency

How does this intertwining of the ethical and the political impact my critique of regnant notions of agency within liberal..progressive accounts? First of all, as I hope I have made clear,
I
am not interested in offering
a
theory of agency, but rather I insist that the meaning of agency . must be explored within the grammar of concepts within which it resides. My argument in brief is that we should keep the meaning of agency open and allow it to emerge from "within semantic and institutional networks that defi and make possible particular

ways of relating to people, things, and oneself"
(T.
Asad 2003 , 78). This is

why I have maintained that the concept of agency should be delinked from the goals of progressive politics, a tethering that has often led to the incarcer.. ation of the notion of agency w ithin the trope of resistance against oppressive and dominating operations of power. This does not mean that agency never manifests itself in this manner; indeed it sometimes does. But the questions that follow fr this relatively s imple observation are complicated and may be productively explored, I would suggest, through the nexus of ethics and politics.

Consider, for example, the fact that the practices of the mosque partici.. pants often pose a challenge to hegemonic norms of secular..liberal sociability as well as aspects of secular..liberal govern (see chapters 2 and 4). These challenges, however, have impacted conditions of secularity in a manner that has far exceeded both the intentionality of the pietists and the expectations of their mos severe retractors. For example, as chapter 4 will show, the pietists' interpretation of Islamic rituals and observances has proved to be enormously unsettling to the state..oriented Islamists as much as their secular critics be.. cause of the implicit challenge this interpretation poses to key assumptions about the role ascribed to the body within the nationalist imaginary. As a re.. suit, the supposedly apolitical practices of the mosque movement have been

met, on the one hand, with the disciplinary mechanisms of the state and, on the other hand, with a robust critique of this form of religiosity from secular.. liberal Muslims and Islamist political parties who share a certain nationalist.. identitarian worldview. One might say that the political agency of the mosque movement ( the "resistance" it poses to secularization) is a contingent and unanticipated consequence of the effects its ethical practices have produced in the social fi d.

What I want to emphasize here are two interrelated points: first, that it is impossible to understand the political agency of the movement without a proper grasp of its ethical agency; and second, that to read the activities of the mosque movement primarily in terms of the resistance it has posed to the logic of secular..liberal governance and its concomitant modes of sociability ignores an entire dimension of politics that remains poorly understood and undertheorized within the literature on politics and agency.

Note that the activities of the mosque movement, like the rest of the piety movement, seldom engage those institutions and practices that are commonly associated with the realm of politics, such as participating in the electoral process, making claims on the state, using the judicial system to expand the place of religion in public life, and so on.
54
As a result it is easy to ignore the political character of this movement and for its activities to fall off the "polit.. ical radar" of the analyst. Indeed, it is quite common for scholars to consider movements of this kind-movements that focus on issues of moral reform

apolitical in character (see, for example, Beinin and Stork 1997 ; Gole 1996; Metcalf 1993 , 1994; Roy 1 994
)
. This characterization is a gross political and analytical mistake, however, because the transformative power of movements

such as these is immense and, in many cases, exceeds that of conventional po.. litical groups. The political effi of these movements is, I would suggest, a function of the work they perform in the ethical realm-those strategies of cultivation through which embodied attachments to historically specifi forms of truth come to be forged. Their political project, therefore, can only be understood through an exploration of their ethical practices. This requires that we rethink not only our conventional understanding of what constitutes the political but also what is the substance of ethics. Part of the analytical Ia.. bor of this book is directed at addressing this challenge.

54
This does not mean, of course, that the piety or women's mosque movement does not de.. pend upon structures of modern governance for its organization. As my arguments in chapter 2 will make clear, modern political developments provide the necessary conditions for the emer.. gence and flourishing of the piety movement in Egypt. What
I
am pointing out here is simply that the piety movement does not seek to transform the state or its policies but aims at reforming the social and cultural fi

ethics and critique

A feminist concern with relations of gender inequality might ask: How are we to think about the possibility of subverting and challenging those patriar.. chal norms that the mosque movement upholds? By untethering the concept of agency from that of progressive politics for the purpose of analytical clarity, have we abandoned any means of judging and critiquing which practices sub.. ordinate women and which ones allocate them some form of gender parity? Have I lost sight of the politically prescriptive project of feminism in pushing at the limits of its analytical envelope? The response to these questions can.. not be given simply in a few phrases or paragraphs, but will, I hope, emerge within the course of this book. Here I only want to suggest some preliminary ways of thinking about these questions.

To begin with, the question of how the hierarchical system of gender rela.. tions that the mosque movement upholds should be
pr
transformed is,

on the one hand, impossible to answer and, on the other hand, not ours to ask. If there is one lesson we have learn from the machinations of colonial feminism and the politics of "global sisterhood," it is that any social and polit.. ical transformation is always a function of local, contingent, and emplaced struggles whose blueprint cannot be worked out or predicted in advance ( Abu..Lughod 2002; Ahmed 1 982; Lazreg 1 994; Spivak 1987 ). And when such an agenda of reform is imposed fr above or outside, it is typically a vi.. alent imposition whose results are likely to be far worse than anything it seeks to displace (see, for example, Collier 1997; Mani 1998 ; Massell 1974 ). As for