Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (30 page)

Hajja Faiza's response is striking for a number of reasons. Note that Hajja Faiza does not ground her justifi for leading women in prayer rituals in an argument for gender equality, or women's equal capacity to perform such a task. Instead, she locates it within the space of disagreement among Muslim jurists about the conditions under which women may lead the prayer ritual. Her argument exemplifi two trends set into motion by modem Muslim re- formers. First, her position on a Muslim's right to follow the opinion of any ju.. rist fr the four schools of Islamic law is one that has gained ascendancy in the modem period-glossed as
ta fiq,
it connotes, as I indicated earlier,
a
de.. emphasis on fi lity to any one school, and the freedom to choose from any of the opinions authorized by Muslim jurists.19 The second position Hajja Faiza adopts in her argument against her critics is that she, like the shaikh she dis- agrees with, is within her rightS- to adopt even a minority opinion ( shadhdh) from among the jurists.
20
In this she echoes a trend among modern Muslim re..

19
The principle of talfiq not only informed the practices of upper..class mosque participants, but was also commonly evoked in poor neighborhoods. For example, a woman who wore the full body and face veil once challenged the_ male imam of the Ayesha mosque (fr the humble Cairene suburb), asking whether it was appropriate for him to deliver a dars to women without a barrier between them. The imam responded that there was no clear ruling in the Quran or the Q.adith on this issue; the woman, unsatisfi with this answer, posed the same question to other male imams of adj acent mosques. When attacked by her neighbors for sowing seeds of social dis.. cord (jitna in the community by doubting their local imam's words, this woman defended herself by arguing that it was her right to determine the most correct ruling (�ukm �al). ) on a religious is.. sue, an argument that seemed to convince her critics.

20
While
shi
literally means "anomalous," in the Q. classifi literature it refers to

a Prophetic tradition that is attributable to only a single source of authority, and which also dif.. fers fr reports drawn fr other transmitters. While one may choose to follow such a tradition, it must be rejected if it counters the wisdom of other traditions transmitted through sources of greater or more reliable authority. See Robson 1999b. Strictly speaking, Hajja Faiza is not refer..

ring here to a Q.adith, and her use of
shi
applies to juristic opinions.

formers toward making the adoption of even "weaker doctrines" legitimate, bestowing upon them a legitimacy that was previously restricted to sound doctrines
(�a�I�)
( Hallaq
1997,
210). Hajj a Faiza's ability to clearly articulate

these two fairly complex positions within modern Islamic thought is as much a testimony to her command of canonical sources as it is indicative of the in- terpretive trends that are characteristic of Islamic debates in Egypt today.

What is rhetorically interesting about Hajja Faiza's use of scholarly argu- ments is that even though her own position is grounded in the majority opin- ion, and it is her critics who ascribe to the minority view, she is careful to spell out the doctrinal reasoning that secures her right to choose even unorthodox positions. Note that Hajja Faiza is criticized because she violates a popular Egyptian religious custom ( which follows the Maliki school) , even though her position is actually consonant with the majority juristic opinion. The consid- erable caution Hajja Faiza must exercise in challenging a well-- egarded shaikh is illustrative of the precarious position women preachers occupy today, given the lack of institutional basis for women's daewa and the relative newness of the practice. She establishes her authority in part by demonstrating her com- mand of canonical issues and debates, and goes to some length to show that she is well aware of the various interpretations that exist on the subject among
jurists, customary practice in Egypt notwithstanding. It is precisely her
knowl- edge of authoritative sources that enables Hajja Faiza to challenge the wide.. spread Egyptian practice of deferring leadership of prayer to men; a daeiya with less command of such sources would not be able to accomplish such a task. It is interesting to note that, in the absence of religious institutions that train women in scholarly Islamic arguments, it is within the institutional space of daewa (exemplifi by the mosque lessons) that women have come to acquire the requisite knowledge and create the conditions for their exercise of reli.. gious authority.