Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (26 page)

Comparable changes, even if more limited in scope and ambition, can also be tracked in Egypt, since the Egyptian state has, at least since the nineteenth cen.. tury, instituted a range of reforms targeted at the transformation of religious in.. stitutions and sensibilities (see T. Asad 2003 ; T. Mitchell 1 991; Salvatore 1998; Skovgaard.-Petersen 1997; Starrett 1998 ). These reforms have been aimed not so much at abolishing religion fr Egy political and public institutions as at regulating Islamic practices in order to ensure that they take a particular form. In instances when Islamic practices depart from state.-endorsed forms, they are met with the disciplinary force of the state apparatus. One recent ex.. ample was the Ministry of Education's ban on the donning of the veil in primary schools (grades 1-5), which was ruled constitutional in 1994 when challenged in the Supreme Constitutional Court and subsequently enforced (Herrera 2003 , 1 76-80). This regulation echoes similar decisions in Turkey and France, which also prohibit girls and women from wearing headscarves in public schools.86 Even though there are important differences between the political cultures of these three countries, it is striking that a mundane article of clothing has pro.. voked similar reactions among otherwise dissimilar liberal and would..be.- beral states. I would argue that the reason the veil elicits such strong responses is that

85
Among the institutions that characterize modern society, social theorists have defi the public sphere as a critical space in which citizens come together to articulate and debate a variety of moral and political concern (Calhoun 1 992; Habermas 1991; Warner 2002 ). While the secu. lar character of the public sphere is often taken for granted, an increasing number of scholars ar.. gue that long.- religious sensibilities and institutions have played a crucial role both in the creation of the public sphere in various historical contexts and in the conceptualization of many of its ideals (see T. Asad 1 999; Connolly 1999; Hirschkind 2001a; van der Veer 2001).

86
For example, in March 1998, Istanbul University banned veiled students from attending classes, and later, in May 1999, an elected member of the Turkish parliament was denied permis. sion to take offi because she refused to remove her headscarf (Kinzer 1998, 1999). Similarly, the French govern banned the wearing of headscarves by Muslim girls in public_schools in 2004 as part of a broader ban on the display of religious symbols in schools (Sciolino 2004 ). For the 1994 debate about the veil in France, see Ibrahim 1994; Moruzzi 1 994.

it continues to assert a kind of religiosity that is incommensurable with, and in.. imical to, those forms of public sociability that a secular..liberal polity seeks to make normative. Differently put, one can say that the forms of attire toward which secular..liberal morality claims indifference are indexical precisely of the kind of religiosity that makes such a secular-- morality possible in the fi place. The indifference is put into question when nonliberal forms of religiosity claim the public space, and wittingly or unwittingly challenge the premise of this indifference. The fact that men's religious attire in the context of public schools-such as Jewish men's yarmulkes or Sikh men's turbans-does not elicit the same response further suggests that women's adoption of religious clothing is taken to be a sign of social coercion in a way that men's wearing of religiously symbolic clothing is not.
87

Insofar as the secular.. liberal project is aimed at the moral reconstruction of public and private life, it is not surprising that the Egyptian state has found a contentious rival in the piety movement, whose authority is grounded in sources that often elude and confound the state.
88
As part of the Egyptian government's ongoing efforts to regulate religious associational life (Gaffney
1991),
in
1996
two laws were approved for implementation aimed at control.. ling the activities of the daewa movement. One aims to nationalize thirty

thousand nongovernment mosques within fi years-a process that was initi.. ated in
1996
but continues
(al..f:Iayat
1 997;
al
..
Nur
1 997 ) .89
The second is di.. rected at preaching activities: the state now requires that all male du\it and fe..

male d�t yat, regardless of their prior religious training or experience, undergo a two..year training program in daewa administered by the Ministry of Reli.. gious Affairs
(al..f:Iayat
1996b).
Upon completion of this training, the dueat and daeiyat are conferred a state license to preach, and all those found preach.. ing without this license may be punished by up to three months of imprison.. ment and a fi of one hundred Egyptian pounds ( approximately thirty dol.. Iars). In addition, the govern has stepped up its surveillance of women's mosque lessons, and it is now customary to see a government employee with a tape recorder sitting at the back of the mosque recording the lessons, which

�:�
I am thankful to Jane Collier for urging me to take into account this aspect of the reaction to the veil.

88
For
example, even though the institution of al�Azhar is under the control of the Egyptian
government, and legitimizes many of its policies, it has also continued to produce strong currents of resistance to state policies from time to time (Moustafa
2000;
Zeghal 1999 ). In fact, the most vociferous opposition to the govern legislation aimed at controlling preaching activities has
come from the Azhar Scholars' Front (Jabhat eUlama� al�Azhar). The government has responded by reorganizing the Front and dismissing many of its critical members (Moustafa
2000).

H l)
This law was initially proposed in 1964 and has been on the books since (Gaff 1 991 ).
Various govern from Nasser's to Sadat's to Mubarak's, have made use of this law as they have sought to modulate their conflicts with the Islamist opposition.

are then examined for phrases and ideas considered objectionable from the state's point of view. Since I fi my fi ldwork, all of the mosques where I worked have had lessons terminated for variable periods of time, and in the case of the Nafi mosque, the govern restricted the number of d�tiyat who could teach there, transferring some to lesser-- mosques.

The govern has responded to increasing criticism of this legislation by arguing that it is the most effective means of weeding out "extremist ele- ments" and preventing them from using mosques to spread their message
(al.. l:fayat
1 997;
al-- limun
1996;
al..Wasat
1997).90 Since the activities of the mosques have multiplied over the last two decades, the govern worries that many men and women have used the authority conferred to them as preachers to propagate views critical of the state. This new legislation is an extension of state eff to combat the Islamist movement on its cultural and pietistic fronts, having successfully put an end to the militant Islamist threat.91 The Egyptian govern hopes that by regulating the training that preach- ers receive and making them go through the licensing process, it will be able to control the kind of people who speak from the authoritative space of the mosque. The women d�f�iyat have responded to this legislation by enrolling in the governmental training centers in order to procure the requisite license so that they can continue to preach. They are quite conscious, however, that the state lacks the resources to create the kind of institutional structure that could bring the vast resources of da<: networks under its control. They, therefore, intend to continue doing their work despite state surveillance.

egy t a secular state?

Some readers may argue that I am wrong to describe the Egyptian state in secular..liberal terms because the Egyptian govern violates the principal divide between religion and state that is so germane to normative models of secularism. According to such an argument, the Egyptian government's will .. ingness to allow Islam an ongoing role in the administrative structure and

90
There has been vociferous opposition to this legislation not only fr popular male duat, but also, surprisingly, from the 'ulama� of al-- zhar, all of whom regard the law about preaching as the state's attempt to nationalize the fi of da�wa and turn preachers into government employees

(al--l) 1996b; al
..
Sha
1997 ).
The government has been criticized for muzzling those du�at who

have had considerable experience in the fi of preaching but who are trained at institutes other than those run by the Ministry of Religious Affairs.

91
The Egyptian government was particularly successful in curtailing Islamist violence after the passage of an anti--terror law in July
1 992,
which expanded the power of the police to arrest and de-

tain Egyptians suspected of terrorist activities. Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in
2001 ,
the Egyptian govemment has capitalized on the U.S.-- ponsored "war on terrorism" to fu quell Islamist opposition and to generally ban any form of political dissent.

policies of the state, and the state's fi support for and management of religious institutions ( such as mosques and the University of al..Azhar), are all examples of the Egyptian state's departure from the model of secular gover.. nance best embodied in late..liberal Western societies.

By way of a response, let me fi say that it is important not to conceptual.. ize secularism on a single model whose skeletal structure has been fl out by Euro..American societies, a model by which the modernizing attempts of non.. Western nations are to be assessed. Even if we understand secularism in its most narrow sense-as the doctrinal separation of religion and state-it is worth noting that this separation has been negotiated in a variety of ways even in Europe and the United States. Moreover, even in self..avowedly secu.. lar.- liberal societies this doctrinal principle has not entailed the banishment of religion from the realm of politics, law, and public life. Various and contrast.. ing imbrications of religion and politics within secular.-liberal polities can be seen historically in the role Puritanism played in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the centrality of the Anglican Church in Britain, and in the place of the Catholic church in Spanish and Italian modernity. Within these contexts , secularism has entailed the legal and administrative intervention into religious life so as to construct "religion"-in its spatial entailments, in its worldly aspirations, and the scope of its reasoning-along certain lines (T. Asad 2003 ; Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Connolly 1 999; Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2003 ; van der Veer 2001 ).

From the late-nineteenth century to the present, the Egyptian state has been deeply involved in just such an intervention into the religious practices of the population it has governed.92 Through the nationalization and direct management of religious institutions the state has attempted to redefi the locations and modalities of proper religious practice as part of the project of creating a modern polity. While the constitution heralds the sharf �a as the ba.. sis of Egyptian law, in actual practice the shari'=a has been restricted to the do.. main of personal status law in accord with the modernist logic of keeping reli.. gion domesticated within the private realm. Furthermore, Egyptian statecraft operates on the basis of an entire range of epistemological assumptions that

92
One of the central challenge for scholars of postcoloniality lies, I believe, in the ability to
conceptualize modes of secular-- governance in non--Western societies, societies that on the

one hand follow the structural logic of what Foucault calls
got'ernmentality
in the context of late-