Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (38 page)

range of modern concepts-such as the _ nation..- ate, nuclear family, econom.. ics, and so on-in a vesture of authenticity and traditionalism in order to jus.. tify their uniquely modem sociopolitical projects (Abu..Lughod 1998; Gilse.. nan 1982; Zubaida 1993). These scholars conclude that such attempts at positing continuity with the past do not stand up under the analytical gaze, precisely because none of these concepts and institutions actually existed in premodern Islamic history: these invocations of the past are authenticating moves that lack sociohistorical facticity.

Even though I think these critiques raise important points about the dis.. j unctural and fragmented character of modem existence and about the vari.. able deployments of the past to legitimize current projects, I would suggest there are other ways of thinking about tradition that privilege a somewhat dif.. ferent set of analytical questions. Tradition may also be understood along the lines of what Foucault calls a "discursive formation," a fi of statements and

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Olivier Roy ( 1994) and Malika Zeghal ( 1999) make similar arguments in regard to popular Islamic knowledges.

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Hobsbawm defi "invented tradition" as a "set ofpractices, normally govern by overtly or tacitlv accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past" (1983, 1) . Invented traditions, in this view, use history to authenticate actions and claims, and to cement "group cohesion" (Hobsbawm 1983 , 12 ).

practices whose structure of possibility is neither the individual, nor a collec.. tive body of overseers, but a form of relation between the past and present predicated upon a system of rules that demarcate both the limits and the pos.. sibility of what is sayable, doable, and recognizable as a comprehensible event in all its manifest forms.
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Talal Asad, in drawing upon the work of Alisdair Macintyre (Macintyre
1984, 1988 ),
proposes a notion of tradition that is commensurable with Michel Foucault's work on discursive formations (T. Asad
1986) .56
Asad suggests that Islam is best regarded as a "discursive tradition" whose pedagogical practices ar.. ticulate a conceptual relationship with the past, through an engagement with a set of foundational texts (the Quran and the Q. ), commentaries thereon, and the conduct of exemplary fi . Tradition, in this sense, may be con.. ceived as a particular modality of Foucault's discursive formation in which re.. fl upon the past is a constitutive condition for the understanding and re.. formulation of the present and the future . Islamic discursive practices, in this view, link practitioners across the temporal modalities of past, present, and fu.. ture through pedagogy of practical, scholarly, and embodied forms of knowl.. edges and virtues deemed central to the tradition (T. Asad
1986 , 14) .
Clearly indebted to Foucault's conception of power and discourse, Asad's formulation of tradition draws attention both to micropractices of interpersonal pedagogy, through which the truth of a particular discursive practice is established, and to the macrolevel of historically sedimented discourses, which determine the pos.. sibility of what is debatable, enunciable, and doable in the present.

Tradition, viewed in this way, is not a set of symbols and idioms that justify present practices, neither is it an unchanging set of cultural prescriptions that stand in contrast to what is changing, contemporary, or modem. Nor is it a historically fi social structure. Rather, the past is the very ground through which the subjectivity and self-understanding of a tradition's adherents are constituted. An Islamic discursive tradition, in this view, is therefore a mode of discursive engagement with sacred texts, one effect of which is the creation of sensibilities and embodied capacities ( of reason, affect, and volition) that in turn are the conditions for the tradition's reproduction. Signifi ntly, such a concept does not assume all..powerful voluntary subjects who manipulate

55
On discursive formation, see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982; Foucault 1972, 1991 b.

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Despite important overlaps, there are two critical differences, as I see it, between Macintyre's notion of tradition and that of Talal Asad. One, Asad places an emphasis on relations of power that are necessary both for the propagation of a tradition in relation to other discursive traditions and to the process by which certain practices and arguments become hegemonic within a tradi. tion. In Macintyre's theory of tradition, there is no discussion of power. Asad also differs from Macintyre in that he emphasizes the role embodied capacities (in addition to rational argumen.. tation) play in the reproduction of a tradition.

the tradition for their own ends, but inquires into those conditions of discur.. sive formulation that require and produce the kind of subjects who may speak in its name. The central question privileged by such an understanding of tra.. dition is: how is the present made intelligible through a set of historically sed.. imented practices and forms of reasoning that are learn and communicated through processes of pedagogy, training, and argumentation?

The conceptual role that foundational texts play in Asad's notion of tra.. cl on is particularly relevant to the ways in which the participants of the mosque movement used the canonical sources ( the Quran, the l). and ju.. ristic commentaries). For Asad, an engagement with the founding texts of Is.. lam is not limited to scholarly commentaries alone, but entai ls the practices of ordinary Muslims, such as when an unlettered Muslim invokes the authority of sacred texts to solve a practical problem, or a child argues with a parent about the correct ( or incorrect) nature of an Islamic practice. By emphasizing the practical context through which foundational texts gain their specifi meaning, Asad shifts from an understanding of scripture as a corpus of author.. itatively inscribed scholarly opinions that stand for religious truth, to one in

which divine texts are one of the central elements in a discursive fi of rela.. tions of power
through which
truth is established. Thus the process by which a

particular interpretation of a canonical source comes to be authorized depends not only upon one's knowledge of the scholarly tradition, but also upon the practical context of power relations ( including hierarchies of age, class, gen.. der, and knowledge) under which textual authority is invoked.
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As should be apparent by now, I have found Asad's conception of tradition eminently useful, for analytical as well as descriptive reasons, in exploring the practices of the movement I studied. Asad's notion of tradition is analytically useful because it helps me foreground questions of subject formation as a means of understanding how a particular discourse establishes its authority and truth within a historical moment. Descriptively speaking, many aspects of the mosque movement resonate with key aspects of this notion of tradition. The women I worked with understood their activities in terms of a recupera.. tion of a set of traditional practices they saw as grounded in an exemplary past and in classical notions of Islamic piety. The modality of instruction through which they honed their skills involved a type of argumentation that was criti.. cally dependent on various types of historical reference. Yet, while certain continuities with earlier practices were evident, it was also clear that the mod..

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These various elements do not interact in a determinate way, and an established order of hi.. erarchy may be challenged depending upon the particular context
of
power relations. For exam.. ple, given the popularity of the dacwa movement among younger generations, age hierarchy is of.. ten reversed when young ducat invoke higher moral authority and greater Islamic knowledge than their elders to criticize them for their lax religious lifestyles.

ern adaptations of classical Islamic notions did not mirror their historical precedents, but were modulated by, and refracted through, contemporary so.. cial and historical conditions.