Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (32 page)

eff ?
[itt:aggib t: li , izzli ba�ul il..l) di wi ana gayy
anli ?] . He asked the

Prophet, 'How do I read the whole of the Quran before I go to sleep because the longest chapter in the Quran, Surat al..Baqara, is made up of 285 verses, and the shortest, Surat al..Kauthar, has three verses. How am I to do this?"' There were cries of "Oh God!" from the audience at the diffi of the task, followed by a rustle of speculations.

Umm Faris silenced the whispers in her characteristic style by calling upon them to declare the oneness of God
(
wa�id al
la
h
!
)
, and the audience re.. sponded, "There is one and only one God!" She continued, "The Prophet said

to Ali, if he recited Surat al.. Ikhla� [a short chapter of the Quran comprised of four verses] three times before going to sleep, it was as if he had recited the whole Quran [
lau �aret
Surat al.. Ikhla�
ta marrlit ka innak �aret il
..
qur�an kita

allah kullu] ."
This engendered a commotion among the audience: many started

to recite the verses aloud, and others repeated for each other the number of times they were to be performed before going to sleep. In this manner, Umm Faris went down the list, in each case providing a set of devotional formulas derived from the Quran that one could perform in lieu of the mammoth tasks Muhammed had asked Ali to perf and which would earn them the same level of merit with God.

As she proceeded with her list, someone shouted from the crowd, "Can we recite these verses instead of performing the ritual prayers [�ala ?" In midsen.. tence, Umm Faris stopped, turn to this woman, and said emphatically, "No, no,
0
sister, you must perform all [religious duties] that [are] incumbent upon

you [la
la yakhti , lazim ti t: ili kull..il t: leki] !
You can't say this in lieu of the

obligations. Listen, make yourself struggle and work hard all day long [in the path
of
God}: say the obligatory prayers, the supplicatory prayers, do the oblig.. atory fasts and the supplicatory ones. But when you come to sleep, there is an.. other hadith! Now Shaikh Jibreel [the imam of the mosque] says that this ha..

dith is weak. Yes, he said that. But since in all the ahadith there is goodness, we should abide by them [
ah, huwwa �az kida wi lakin fi kullu khair wi i�na ni t:mil bi]."
She went on to support this claim further by saying, "Aren't we told that

when we recite the Quran we accrue merit with God [�sanli ? In every verse there is benefi and reward, isn't it so? [The audience responded, yes, of

course.] So even if it's a weak l). there is good in it, because it calls upon us to recite the Quran. Now do we want to trade with God [
ni
(
a
gi
r mat:a allah] ,

or do we j ust want to sit on our hands saying that I prayed and fasted and I don't have to do anything else? We have to bargain with God all the time. So

if you do all these things, while getting merits with God you will also have your grave all lit up!"

There are several aspects of Umm Faris's dars that more literate members of the audience, and daeiyat from middle.. and upper.. middle..class mosques, fi

objectionable. Umm Faris is criticized for trivializing piety in her liberal dis.. pensation of devotional formulaic verses-investing short verses with an inor.. dinate power, which might lead people to think they can recite these in lieu of performing the more diffi duties of Muslim worship. Similarly, the meta.. phor of trading
( tijara;
colloquial Egyptian Arabic:
tigara)
with God that Umm Faris uses at the end of the lesson described above offends the sensibili.. ties of educated and well.. to-do attendees. This metaphor is commonly used in the popular neighborhoods in Cairo, but the daeiyat from other mosques criti.. cize it, claiming that it diminishes one's relationship to the divine by render.. ing it in worldly terms. As l- ajja Faiza from the Umar mosque once remarked, when asked about the appropriateness of the expression "trade" in regard to the divine, "It is not incorrect per se, but it does not capture the proper eti.. quette [adab] with which you should approach God Almighty. " Indeed, some scholars might regard Umm Faris's preaching style and the criticisms it elicits as exemplary of a "folk Islam" that is assumed to characterize the practices of
the poor and uneducated, and that is distinct from the "scriptural Islam" up
..
held by religious scholars and the elite classes (see, for example, Geertz 1 968; Gellner 1981; Gilsenan 1 982 ).

A closer analysis of Umm Faris's argumentative logic, however, reveals something more complex than a simple distinction between folk and elite Is.. lam might suggest. To begin with, Umm Faris's defense against her critics is grounded in the same set of authoritative sources and doctrinal reasoning that the more educated d�tiyat use, and it evokes a consonant rationale. For exam.. ple, in the passages quoted above, when someone asks Umm Faris whether the devotional verses whose virtues she is extolling could serve as a surrogate for the performance of other religious obligations, she resolutely answers that this is not the case. She in fact invokes the same doctrinal principle that informs the arguments of her critics, namely, that the prescribed ritual obligations are the sole means of fulfi ing one's duty toward God. Similarly, when I asked Umm Faris what she thought of the objections raised against her use of the metaphor of trading with God, she was taken aback, and said that even though she did not remember the exact verses, she knew that this expression was used in several places in the Quran.

When I asked Shaikh Yusuf from al..Azhar, with whom I had been taking lessons in the principles of Islamic jurisprudence, about this issue, he con.. curred and said, "What is wrong with trading with God? It is not as if God

benefi from our good deeds or worship, it is we who benefi !
He
does not need our acts of worship:
we
need them." He then proceeded to lay out what the logic of trading with God entailed by fi quoting verse 40 from Surat al..