Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (37 page)

Muslim al-- a�ir.
According to Yusuf al.. Qaradawi (see note 10 above), in his introduction to Abu Shuqqah's six .. volume compendium, Abu Shuqqah was, in his youth, close to Hasan al- Banna (the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood), was imprisoned under N asser (as was al.. Qaradawi) for his support of the Brothers, and continued to be a loyal supporter of the Brother- hood throughout his life. This six..volume study, which reportedly took Abu Shuqqah twenty years to fi is the only complete manuscript he authored. For a review of Abu Shuqqah's book, published upon his death, see Huwedi 1995 .

49
For example, when arguing for the rights of a woman to participate in the political, eco. nomic, and social life of her community, Abu Shuqqah is careful to spell out the conditions of her physical appearance in accordance with the majority juristic tradition: she must not be perfumed, she must wear dark..- and loose clothing that does not draw attention to her body, she must not behave in beguiling ways, and so on (1995, 3:38-39).

I l l

There seems to be a contradiction here in that even though women and men are both acknowledged to have sexual desire, which they are encouraged to pursue within the private space of matrimonial life, in public it is only male sexuality that is accorded a force. Since men are understood to be more sexu.. ally excitable in public than women, it follows that various kinds of social rules are set up to protect against men's propensity to commit sexual transgressions. This is only one illustration of how these ideas about male..female sexuality provide the necessary ground upon which much of the current Islamist debate proceeds; those who challenge these presumptions are often treated as being outside the fold of Islam: as being either "un..Islamic" or "secularist."50

As a number of feminist scholars have pointed out, these kinds of argu.. ments assign the burden of maintaining a community's purity and integrity to women, a task that necessitates their subordination to men, who are entrusted to oversee and control women's sexuality and mobility, as well as their access to a community's symbolic and material resources. In a system of inequality predicated on this view of male..female sexuality, diff ential gender roles are rooted in the naturalized topography of female and male nature in which the former is regarded as passive and the latter as agentival. Feminist cultural an.. thropologists have offered various explanations for why certain societies in.. vest women's sexuality with this valence. Some scholars have focused on the logic of sexual symbology that reproduces and naturalizes gender subordina.. tion ( Delaney
1 991;
Pitt..Rivers
1977 );
others have analyzed the socioeco.. nomic organization of systems of kinship and inheritance that are at the root of sexually diff rentiated relations of gender inequality ( Abu..Lughod
1 986;
Collier
1988;
Ortner
1978) .51
While this work is crucial in offering various an.. alytical paradigms to explain why and how female sexuality is linked to the production of gender subordination, my focus-in this chapter in particular, and in this book in general-is somewhat different.

My goal is not to explain why this particular system of gender inequality ex.. ists, but to ask: How did the women of the mosque movement practically work

50
In this respect, the debate in Egypt about male..female interactions diff signifi from what is happening currently in Iran, where Muslim activists have begun to argue that since women and men are equal in the eyes of God, they equally share the burden of guarding against illicit sexual desire and conduct. See Mir.-
1999;
N ajmabadi
1998.

51
Jane Collier, for example, argues, "Female chastity is not a single, coherent idiom with a sin. gle cause. Rather, it is a complex, multiply.- termined symbol. In a world where legitimate heirs are distinguished from illegitimate non.- a mother's chastity guarantees her children the right to inherit. Where only virgins are eligible to become mothers of legitimate children, a daughter's virginity may represent her family's hopes of upward mobility and political patronage" (Collier
1986, 1 06).
Collier thus locates inheritance fr fathers (whether in patrilineal or bilat.. eral systems) as the key factor that gives a particular cast and form to practices and relations of gender.

upon themselves in order to become the desirous subjects of this authoritative discourse ? What were the forms of reasoning and modes of persuasion they used to convince themselves and others of the truth of this discourse? And what were the practical consequences that followed when the truth of this discourse was argumentatively established? Clearly the women with whom I worked regarded the logic of feminine chastity and modesty as divinely or.. dained. Yet the task of living in accordance with this understanding was not a simple matter; it was mediated not only by debates internal to the Islamic tra.. cl on, particularly in its modernist reincarnation, but also by the practical conditions of the women's lives. In the foregoing analysis, part of my goal has been to explore the limits of this discursive tradition, its assumptions and pre.. suppositions, and the day..to..day context through which these limitations were enacted, contested, and lived.

TH E MOD ERN ITY OF TRAD ITI ONAL PRACTI CES

I would like to conclude by making some observations about the notion of tradition that has informed this chapter, in particular its relationship to what is sometimes considered to be the opposite of tradition, modernity. It is fash.. ionable these days to interpret any invocation of tradition, any claim to con.. tinuity with the past, as a nostalgic event, an "auratic" gesture that under the disillusioned (or hyperrealist?) modernist gaze crumbles to reveal the illusory character of such forms of (be) longing. Walter Benjamin's two essays, "The Storyteller" and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," are sometimes used to give credence to this judgment.
52
In these essays, Ben.. jamin argues that the fragmentary character of modern existence makes tradi.. tional crafts and modes of knowledge impossible to practice, rendering any ac .. cess to these past practices impracticable under the new perceptual regimes of "the modern" (Benjamin 1969a, 1969b). Indeed, the informational nature of

'i
For two recent formulations of this use of Benjamin's argument, see Ivy 1995 and Mufti

2000.
A closer reading of Benjamin's argument reveals, however, that Benjamin's interpretation
of
the terms "aura" and "authenticity" is far more complicated than these readings suggest. What

is
often missed in discussions of the aura and its loss is that for Benjamin what was at stake was
not simply tradition but a sense of historicity itself (see Asad on this point in Shaikh
2002 ).
Han.

nah Arendt, who is also known for remarks similar to Benjamin's about the loss of tradition in the
modern age, exhibits a similar ambivalence about this loss: "it cannot be denied that without a se.
curely
anchored
traditio
n-and
the loss of this security occurred several hundred years ago-the
whole dimension of the past has also been endangered. We are in danger of forgetting, and such
oblivion--q apart from the contents themselves that could be lost-would mean that, hu..
manly speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence" (Arendt 1977, 94 ).

the pedagogical Islamic materials I have described in this chapter, materials that are the mainstay of the Islamic Revival and the mosque movement, may well be regarded as emblematic of what Benjamin regards as the necessary character of modem knowledge: that it be gleaned from disparate sources, be promptly verifi ble, and be of immediate practical application ( Benjamin 1 969a). It follows from Benjamin's argument that the practitioners of these

forms of knowledge, despite their claims to the contrary, are only
-
tenuously connected to past practices and modes of reasoning, since the institutional conditions that made these practices possible (such as guilds, or organized

forms of apprenticeship
an
discipleship) no longer exist.
53

Another related version of the same argument, commonly used within the social sciences and the humanities, suggests that a claim for the traditional status of a practice is a particularly modem mode of asserting its legitimacy: this mode uses the past as a reservoir of symbols, idioms, and languages to authorize political and social projects that are in fact quite recent in origin. Historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger popularized this notion by coining the term "invented tradition" to describe how the past is used to au..

thenticate a novel set of practices that in fact lack historical antecedents ( Hobsbawm 1983
)
.54
Several scholars of the Arab..Muslim world implicitly or explicitly use the idea of "invented tradition" to show how Islamists clothe a