Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (25 page)

The one institutional structure that continues to play a signifi role in fa.. cilitating women's daewa activities is that of Islamic nonprofi organizations
(al.. jameiyyat) ,
whose focus has typically been on providing welfare and charitable services to the poor.79 Just as it was al..Ghazali's nonprofi institute that initi.. ated daewa lessons for women, the largest number of women's daewa training centers are run by Islamic nonprofi organizations in Egypt today. Chief among these is al..J am\yya al..Shareiyy established in 1912 , which
owns ap.. proximately seven thousand mosques in Egypt and is well known for providing an extensive array of services to the poor (including medical services, literacy classes, fi assistance, and remedial tutoring for children).80 In 1997 al.. J amaeiyya al..Shareiyya ran six training centers {Maeahid al..Daewa) for women in Cairo alone, in which eight hundred women were reportedly enrolled in two.. to four..year daewa programs. 81 More modest in scope but providing a simi.. lar range of services are An�ar al..Sunna, established in 1926, and Daewat al.. tlaq, created in 1975, both of which also have institutes for training women and men in daewa.82 Large numbers of women continue to enroll in these daewa centers: for example, in 1996 when I was conducting my fi ldwork, the number of women enrolled at the training centers run by al..J ameiyya al..Shareiyya and An�ar al--Sunna exceeded the number of men.83

78
For an exception to this general rule, see Zaynab al-- two books written on the topic of women's etiquette in the performance of daewa (1994a, 1 996a), and one other publication to which I was repeatedly referred when I expressed puzzlement at this lacuna:
Nisa� al--diti
by

Taufi al--Waei ( 1 993 ).

79
The fi Islamic charitable organization, al-- al.- was established in 1892. It provided religious education, vocational training, and medical services to the poor, and was taken over by the Ministry of Health in 1965 (al.- hram Center for Political and Strategic Studies 1996, 233 ) .

80
Al-- al-- activities are almost entirely funded by voluntary donations col- lected fr neighborhoods in which the organization is active; it receives only a nominal amount from the Egyptian govern and accepts no donations from foreign countries. Yet the scope of its services is vast. For example, in 1 996 alone the organization spent 1,914,460 Egyptian pounds

on the provision of welfare services to poor children
(al--
1 996). For a brief history of al-

Jameiyya al-- see al-- Center for Political and Strategic Studies 1996, 238-42.

81
Personal communication with the Secretary of al-- al-- Cairo, 7 J anuary 1 997.

82
Both these organizations publish popular monthly journ on daewa-- issues: An�ar al- Sunna publishes
al..TaulJ
and Daewat al--lj publishes
al--Hud al--Nab i.

83
Based on personal interviews with the program coordinators of these two organizations, 20 February 1997.

MODES OF SOCI ABI LITY

Nonprofi religious organizations of the kind I describe above have histori- cally been concerned not only with the provision of religious instruction, but also with cultivating an Islamic ethos that makes them distinct from secular nonprofi organizations. If we take the examli)le of the Society of Muslim Ladies, it is clear that even though it shared with the EFU some of the liberal- bourgeois and nationalist assumptions that permeated the Egyptian middle classes in the 1 940s, there was a marked diff rence in the sources of authority and models of sociability each tried to emulate. While it was Europe that in- formed the sociocultural imagination of organizations like the EFU, the Soci- ety stressed a mode of living that was grounded in what they saw as Islamic values and ethics. If anything, this disparity between styles of conduct has grown even wider in Egypt today, and is manifest in the sharp lines drawn be- tween those who conduct themselves in an "Islamic manner" and those who ground their sociability in what may be glossed as "Western--liberal" lifestyles. Women's mosque groups and Islamic nonprofi organizations (such as al- Jameiyya al-- hareiyya) believe that the formation of a virtuous society is criti- cally dependent upon the regulation of everyday conduct in keeping with Is- lamic principles and values. As we saw earlier in this chapter, this not only includes performing religious obligations in a prescribed manner, but also in- cludes regulating how one conducts oneself in public, how one maintains one's family and kinship relations, the kind of entertainment one consumes, and the terms on which public debate proceeds.

It would be a mistake to dismiss these concerns of the daewa movement as a preoccupation with superfi ial distinctions of style and form that have little impact on issues of "real import" (such as economics and electoral politics), or to assume that since piety movements do not confront the state directly, they are apolitical in character-as some scholars of the Middle East have recently argued ( Gole 1996; Roy 1994).
84
As theorists of the public sphere have come to recognize, regulation of such quotidian practices is of eminent political concern because they play a crucial role in shaping the civic and public sensi--

84
Roy, for example, makes a distinction between what he calls "political Islamism" and "nonpo, litical" or "neofu talist" Islamism wherein he sees the former as a product of modern y and
the
latter as a rejection of modern
( 1994).
In my opinion, Roy subscribes to far too narrow an
understanding of politics, and does not give adequate attention to the ways in which piety move, ments (which would fall under Roy's category of "nonpolitical" and "neofundamentalist" move,
ments) are as much a product of modern as are the state,oriented Islamist groups he regards as "political."

bilities essential to the consolidation of a secular.- iberal polity.
85
The elabora.. tion of the secular.- liberal project in the Middle East has entailed a profound alteration in, and reorganization of, people's ethical and aesthetic sensibili.. ties, life choices, and manner of public and personal conduct-not to men.. tion a complete transformation of legal, educational, and political institu.. tions. For example, Kemal Ataturk's project of secularizing Turkey critically rested on transforming modes of public sociability by making religious attire illegal, mandating European dress for women and men, abolishing the use of Arabic script ( in light of its association with Islam), prohibiting the display of other public markers of religious practice, and banning religious education from schools (Gale 1996; Navaro.- 2002 ).