Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (15 page)

In contrast to the Umar mosque is the Ayesha mosque, located in one of the largest and poorest neighborhoods on the outskirts of Cairo. Tucked be.. tween teetering cinder block residential buildings, in a narrow and darkened alleyway, the Ayesha mosque is surrounded by the sounds of roosters crowing,

3
Note that l)adnh when written with a defi article refers to the entire collection of the Prophet's actions and speech ( the }:l ), of which six collections are considered to be the most authoritative.
"A
badith" refers to an individual account of the Prophet's actions and speech. See Robson 1 999b.

4
See chapter 3 on the spectrum of positions that the mosque participants take on the veil, and the doctrinal reasoning behind it.

children screaming, and vendors hawking their wares-offering a sharp con.. trast to the sobriety and order of the Umar complex. The Ayesha mosque is associated with the largest Islamic nonprofi organization in Egypt, a}.. Jameiyya al..Sharciyya, and provides extensive welfare services to the neigh..

borhood's residents. Religious lessons are offered twice a week by two women d�fiyat, and once a week by the male
imam
(prayer leader) of the mosque. In

contrast to the reserved decorum of the Umar mosque, an informal and un.. ceremonious atmosphere characterizes the Ayesha mosque. For example, women attendees often interrupt the teacher to ask questions or to put for.. ward altern opinions they have heard elsewhere. There is constant ban.. ter back and forth between the daciya and her audience. The daciyat here, as in the other mosques, also speak in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, but their speech is marked by street colloquialisms that are characteristic of their and

their audience's working..class
(sha
backgrounds.5 Unlike the air..conditioned

seclusion of the Umar mosque, the atmosphere of the Ayesha mosque is satu.. rated with the sounds, smells, and textures of the neighborhood in which the mosque is located.

While the age spectrum of women attendees at the Ayesha mosque is simi.. lar to that found at the Umar mosque, their educational backgrounds are more limited: the majority have no more than a high school education, and a large number are illiterate. Women attendees sit on the thinly carpeted concrete

fl most of them dressed in crumpled ankle..length gowns
(galalzb;
singular:

gallabiyya}
and veils that cover their heads and torsos ( akhmira). In contrast to the Umar mosque, where women wearing the full face and body veil ( niqab) are almost never present, here a fu one..third of the attendees come

so attired. A majority wear the customary printed headscarves, and others dress in what has come to be called the
balad
dress, worn by the rural poor,

comprised of a loose black gown and a thin black headscarf tightly wrapped around the head.

If the Umar and Ayesha mosques stand at two extremes of the Cairene so.. cioeconomic spectrum, the N afi mosque, located in a prominent suburb of Cairo, represents a middle ground. This suburb is home to a large number of public and state employees, as well as to Egyptians who have return from the Gulf States after working there during the oil boom years of the 1970s and 1 980s.6 The N afi mosque is reputed to be the fi Cairene mosque to have

5
Since both the Quran and the Q. are written in a form of classical Arabic that is quite diff fr Modem Standard and colloquial Arabic, part of the daciyat's task is to render these texts into colloquial Egyptian Arabic that their audiences can easily follow.

6
Some scholars have suggested that the ascendant social conservatism of Egyptian society is partly a result of the "Gulfi form of Islam (sometimes called "petrodollar Islam") brought back by Egyptians who lost their jobs when the Gulf economies took a downturn in the 1970s and 1980s

started offering lessons to women, around 1980, and it currently commands the largest female audience of any mosque in Cairo. About fi hundred women attend the weekly lesson; a majority of them are housewives, although a fair number are students from one of the largest Cairene universities, located nearby. The lessons are delivered by a group of three d��t all of whom were,

at the time of my fi in the process of obtaining formal training in preaching skills from state..run institutes of
da�wa
(a key term in the Islamic Revival that I explore below). Unlike the women in the other two mosques,

all three dac: yat, as well as most attendees ( approximately 75 percent) wear the full face and body veil (niqab). Women who wear the niqab understand their practice to accord with a strict interpretation of Islamic edicts on female modesty, and often see themselves as more virtuous than women who wear the khimar ( the veil that covers the head and torso) or the hijab (headscarf). The sense of rigorous piety at the mosque embodied in the predominance of the niqab is further accentuated by the fi ..and..brimstone style in which the lessons are delivered, one that stands in sharp contrast to the gentle tones of Hajj a Faiza at the Umar mosque and the more casual manner of the dac:iyat at the Ayesha mosque.7

This brief overview of three of the six mosques where I conducted my fi .. work illustrates the broad.. based character of the women's mosque movement, evident in the variety of ages and socioeconomic backgrounds represented among the audience as well as in the range of rhetorical styles, modes of argu.. mentation, and forms of sociability employed by the teachers. Despite diff r.. ences among the mosque groups, though, the participants all shared a concern for what they described as the increasing secularization of Egyptian society, an important consequence of which is the erosion of a religious sensibility they

considered crucial to the preservation of "the spirit of Islam"
(rub
al
..
islam) .
In

what follows, I will examine what the mosque participants meant when they talked about "secularization," what aspects of social behavior they considered most consequential to this process, and fi ly, what form of religiosity they sought to restore through their activities. I will situate my discussion within the context of the various currents that comprise the current Islamic Revival, and the relationship of these currents to the history of Egyptian religious ac.. tivism in the last century. My aim in this chapter is not only to provide a brief sketch of the historical developments against which the contemporary

(Beinin and Stork 1997; Moensch 1988). For the most part, this view is based on an association drawn between the rate of returning workers and the rise of the Islamist movement in Egypt, but I do not know of any sociological or ethnographic study that has tracked or verifi this claim.

7
For a detailed analysis of the rhetorical styles employed by the da"iyat at the three mosques, see chapter 3.

mosque movement has emerged, but also to critically engage with existing themes in the scholarship on Islamic modern regarding such movements.

AI MS OF THE MOSQU E M OVEM ENT

According to participants, the women's mosque movement emerged in re.. sponse to the perception that religious knowledge, as a means for organizing daily life, had become increasingly marginalized under modem structures of secular govern Many of the mosque participants criticized what they con.. sidered to be an increasingly prevalent form of religiosity in Egypt, one that ac.. cords Islam the status of an abstract system of beliefs that has no direct bearing on how one lives, on what one actually does in the course of a day. This trend, usually referred to by the movement's participants
as
"secularization"
( �almana

or
�almaniyya)
or "western (
tagharrub),
is understood to have reduced

Islamic knowledge ( both as a mode of conduct and as a set of principles) to the status of "custom and folklore"
( �ad wa fulklur).
While a handful of mosque participants used the terms "secularization" and "western to refer to specifi events in recent Egyptian history,8 most employed the terms more loosely to describe a transformative force beyond their control that was corro.. sive of the sensibilities and habits of a certain kind of religious life.

Hajja Samira from the Nafi mosque was one of the daciyat who spoke pas.. sionately and clearly about the kind of religious sensibility that the mosque participants felt was under threat. This is what she had to say during one of her lessons:

Look around in our society and ask yourselves: who do we emulate? We emulate the Westerners
[g iyyin] ,
the secularists
[ '"almaniyyin] ,
and the Christians: we smoke like they do, we eat like they do, our books and media are full of pictures that are obscene
[f h(ta h] .
When you enter the homes of Muslims, you are surprised: you can't tell whether it is the house of a Christian or a Muslim. We are Muslims in name, but our acts are not those of Muslims. Our sight, dress, drink, and food should also be for God and out of love for Him
[ibna muslimin wi lakin af'"alna mish
ka
muslimin : il..'" , wil..libs , wil..shurb , wil-- lazim yikun lillah wi fi �ubb allah] .
They will tell you that this way of life [the one she is recommending] is

8
For example, some of the women I worked with used the terms "secularization" and "west- ern to refer to the adoption of the policy of
infita
(economic liberalization) by President Anwar Sadat in the 1970s, which they said marked a radical transformation in Egyptian social

mores and lifestyles. The d�f Hajja Nur, for instance, argued that with increased displays of wealth on the streets, rising infl and an infl of imported consumer goods and Western me- dia, she found Egyptians becoming more ambitious, competitive, and selfish, with less regard for their family, friends, and the larger community-a shift she characterized as "secular."

uncivilized
[gha mutabcuJ4,ir]:
don't listen to them because you know that real civilization [}Ja4a for we Muslims is closeness to God.

These remarks may be interpreted as abiding by a discourse of cultural iden.. tity, one through which contemporary Egyptian Muslims seek to assert their religious distinctiveness, as expressed in styles of consumption, dress, and communication. I would like to propose an altern reading, however, that draws upon a set of debates taking place in mosque circles that express con.. cerns quite distinct from those of national or cultural identity. In this alterna.. tive reading, Hajja Samira's comments can be understood as critiquing a prevalent form of religiosity that treats Islam as a system of abstract values that is to be cherished but that, nonetheless, remains inessential to the practi.. cal organization of day..to..day life. In Hajja Samira's eyes, this is demonstrated by the fact that one cannot tell Muslims apart from either Christians or non.. believers, since the way Muslims organize their daily affairs gives little indica.. tion of their religious commitments. The daeiyat and the mosque attendees want to ameliorate this situation through the cultivation of those bodily apti.. tudes, virtues, habits, and desires that serve to ground Islamic principles within the practices of everyday living. The mosque lessons provide a training in the requisite strategies and skills to enable such a manner of conduct, and the lives of the most devoted participants are organized around gradually learning and perfecting these skills. As the end of the quote above suggests, Hajja Samira's position is articulated against those Egyptians who consider such quotidian attention to religious practice to be passe, or uncivilized ( ghair mutaQ. ), a judgment Hajja Samira challenges through her appropriation

of the term
l)a4a
(a term that carries the same Western..centric biases as the