Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (33 page)

Nisa', and then explaining, "We are awarded ten merits [Q.asanat] for every good deed we perform with sincerity of intent
[al.. earna bil..-ikhla�] ,
but only one sin [
sa
yyt
a
] is written against us for every bad deed we do. It is a testimony to His munifi that if we perform even ordinary tasks, but do them with the intent of pleasing Him, it will accrue us rewards with Him."23

It is clear that even though the metaphor of trade is well established among Islamic scholars, the authority it carries among elite and well.-educated Egyp.. tians today is diminished because it renders the relationship between the cre.. ator and the created in worldly terms in a way that confl with the deistic conception of God invoked by people from these classes.24 Yet, as Umm Faris's usage above makes clear, the metaphor of trade is quite popular among poor and uneducated Muslims in Egypt. What this illustrates is that there is no di .. rect correspondence between the views of religious scholars and elite classes, as the scriptural and folk dichotomy seems to suggest. Rather, there is a com.. plex relationship between scholarly arguments, elite interpretations, and the practices of unlettered Muslims, which calls into question any simple correla.. tion between the social position of a particular group and the religious inter.. pretation that the group's members uphold.25

The interesting issue, therefore, is not how religious ideology refl class interests, but the more complicated question of what forms scholarly opinions and arguments take when they traverse the hierarchical divisions of class, gender, education, and social status. Scholarly arguments are not simply frozen bodies of texts, but live through the discursive practices of both lettered and unlettered Muslims whose familiarity with these arguments is grounded in a variety of sources-not all of which are controlled by scholars. Moreover, scholarly arguments are often transformed by the contexts in which they are evoked, a process that imparts to the arguments new meanings, usages, and

23
For the use of the term
ti li
in the Quran, see verse 10 in Surat Al..$aff "You who have at.. tained to faith! Shall I point out to you a bargain that will save you fr grievous suffering [in this world and in the life to come] ?"

24
Competing translations of the Quranic term
eabd alla
often provoke a similar reaction. The

term literally means "slave of God," and for many Muslims it captures the unconditional obedi.. ence that is characteristic of the relationship between the creator and the created. In modern times,
eabd alla
has come to be translated "servant of God, worshiper, or believer," a translation

that avoids the idea of total subordination implied by "slave," which is incompatible with the hu.. manist assumptions of many contemporary Muslims. On this issue, see T. Asad 1 993, 221-22.

25
This is a point that has been made eloquently, and demonstrated repeatedly, by well--re- spected historians of early and medieval Christianity. See, for example, P. Brown
1981;
Bynum 1 992.

valences not intended by the original authors. Even in those instances when what are termed "folk practices" go against scholarly opinions, it is important to pay attention to the reasoning, arguments, and terms used to justify and contest these practices, precisely because these terms reveal the set of assump.. tions that bind oppositional viewpoints into a shared discursive terrain broadly construed as "Islamic."

In order to elaborate this point, I would like to examine Umm Faris's usage of the }:t in the excerpt from her lesson quoted above. Note the manner in which Umm Faris defends herself against the charge that she relies on sto.. ries about the Prophet and his Companions that are not considered to be reli.. able or authoritative by the guardians of the canon. To begin with, even though no one in the audience challenges the veracity of her account of the conversation between Ali and the Prophet, she voluntarily acknowledges that the }:t on which it is based is considered "weak" (<;lae if) by the imam of the mosque. Despite its dubious status, Umm Faris goes on to support her use of this }:t by arguing that since the advice it proffers urges incorporating Quranic verses into one's daily life, it is in accord with general wisdom in Is.. lam about the edifi. effects of Quranic recitation and its use is therefore warranted. Importantly, Umm Faris's argument resonates with a longstanding tradition among Muslim jurists who have justifi the use of weak a}:tadith if they encourage or promote pious behavior.26 I am not suggesting that Umm Faris was necessarily familiar with this scholarly argument. But what I want to draw attention to is the wide scope this kind of reasoning enjoys today, even among uneducated Muslims, facilitated in part by the kind of Islamic peda.. gogical materials (oral, visual, and print) that I discussed earlier, the produc.. tion and circulation of which has only increased since the effl of the Islamic Revival. The widespread distribution of such popular Islamic pedagog.. ical materials has substantially changed the conditions of assessment essential to the classical distinction made within Islam between
ealim,
"one who has knowledge," and
jahil,
"one who is ignorant."27

Umm Faris's engagement with the Prophetic tradition-the badith-calls into question any attempt to draw a fi boundary between folk Muslim prac- tices and the scholarly or scriptural tradition. Doctrinally speaking, the }:t

is a collection of the Prophet's speech and actions that Muslim jurists com..-

26
For example, when well,known Muslim jurists such as al,Jawzi and al,Dhahabi criticized the twelfth,century theologian A. H. al,Ghazali for his use of weak al) several tulama' defended this usage on the principle that if the argument in which the weak l) is located inspires vir,

tuous conduct, then its use is justifi (Winter
1989,
xx). Winter points out that this principle is

generally well known among scholars of
u�ul al
..
l)ad
and is cited in al,Nawawi's authoritative twelfth..century text,
Shar� matn al..arbaeun al,nawawiyya (1990 ).

27
On this distinction, see Messick
1 993 , 15 2-67.

piled in the eighth century
A.
D./second century
A. H.
28
A number of such com. pilations exist, but only six of these are considered to be the most authorita.. tive. To understand the importance of the b.adith within lived practice, how.. ever, one has to move beyond these authorized compilations and consider the multiple relocations and embodiments of this scholarly genre. As historians of Islam have pointed out, the boundary between scholarly practices of b. compilation and popular stories has always been permeable (Berkey 2001). This border has become even more porous in the modern period, where con.. temporary b.adith materials now range from shorter versions excerpted from authorized collections, to booklets and pamphlets on ab. about popular

topics, to oral traditions that include devotional stories, sermons, and reli.. gious lessons that are both
.
tape.-recorded and publicly delivered. In other

words, the practice of b. is not limited to the citational protocols of reli.. gious scholars, but comprises a field of proliferating discourse with multiple dislocations that, nonetheless, engages with scholarly procedures in some form or another.

Brinkley Messick's description of how the shart= functioned prior to the modem period reveals certain similarities with contemporary citational prac.. tices involving b. ( Messick 1993 )
.
Messick argues that prior to the intro.. duction of the modem legal system in Yemen, the shari�a, while based on a set of founding texts, was not so much a system of codifi rules as it was a set of discursive practices "lived in social relations, in human embodiers and inter.. pretive articulations" (1 993 , 152). These discursive practices entailed not only secondary commentaries on the founding texts, but also the practical ways in which a variety of social actors used the shar·ta to resolve a range of problems and settle arguments. Although the sharica was abstracted from the fabric of daily life in Muslim societies as it increasingly came to be reconcep.. tualized on the model of modem legal systems, the kind of b. practices I have described here, insomuch
as
they continue to inform a range of everyday practices and arguments, bear a certain similarity to the premodern sharica practice described by Messick. Invocations of the b.adith constitute a genre of speech act that is constantly lived, reworked, and transformed in the context of daily interactions. The Islamic Revival has played a key role in embedding

b. invocations into the social fabric of contemporary Cairene life, prolif..