Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (39 page)

In analyzing the renewed attention given to historical forms of ethical lis.. tening under the Islamic Revival, Charles Hirschkind provides an important corrective to Walter Benj amin's comments on the diffi y of practicing older forms of knowledges under modern conditions (Hirschkind 2001 b). It is worth keeping his admonition in mind as we move into the next chapter, which focuses on the embodied character of Islamic knowledge practiced by the mosque movement. Hirschkind argues that the fractured space and tern.. porality of modernity do not simply efface older forms of perception and knowledges, as Benjamin seems to suggest, but that these aspects of modernity also make possible the retrieval and maintenance of traditional practices and perceptual regimes , giving these practices a renewed life and novel form. In.. deed, one of his points is that the adoption of what are termed "modern" ways of being do not signify a wholesale replacement of preexisting sensibilities, but are structured by, and embedded in, ongoing historical traditions. It therefore becomes critical to ask what types of relationships are established between newly emergent practices and knowledges, and those of the past, with special attention to elucidating the limits and possibilities of such articulations.

4

Pos itive Eth ics and Ritual Conventions

W
ithin the vast literature produced on the topic of contemporary Islam, I s.. lamist movements have often been analyzed through the lens of identity poli.. tics. In such analyses, the increasing emphasis on Islamic forms of behavior among Muslims in the postcolonial Middle East has been commonly read as a recoding of nationalist sentiments in religious idioms, a recoding that does not so much replace Arab nationalism as recast its political sentiment in Islamic symbols. The increasing interest of Muslims in Islamic rituals and practices such as donning the veil, performing collective prayers, and listening to sermons is understood to enfold existent forms of Arab nationalism into particularistic forms of religious belonging, a development that has, if anything, narrowed the scope of nationalist politics by making the fi of the Muslim paradigmatic of the citizen subj ect. This continuity between Islamism and nationalism would appear to be all the more pronounced in regard to the question of gender, inso.. much as both ideologies seem to cast women as the repositories of tradition and culture, their bodies made the potent symbols of collective identity.

Indeed, it is not diffi to fi examples of the laminated character of Islamist..nationalist discourse
in
Egypt today. A number of Egyptian Islamists, for instance, speak of the veil as an expression of Arab identity (see chapter 2), while many of their secular..oriented critics view Islam as an essential part ofthe cultural terrain upon which the Egyptian nation has acquired its unique his.. torical character. 1 In contrast to these views, however, a large number of those

1
Consider, for example, how a primary,school textbook, widely used in Egypt today, recruits the ritual of Muslim prayer to the task of nation,building, "because in prayer there is rising and

who are part of the da(: movement are highly critical of such a nationalist.. identitarian understanding of Islam, and direct their organizational efforts at combating the practical effects of this interpretation. The critique put forward by the da(: movement is not simply that the nationalist..identitarian view viti.. ates the religious character of Islam in rendering it a political ideology. Rather, as I suggested in chapter 2, their criticism is that such a position reduces Islamic ritual practices to the status of cultural customs, a kind of Muslim folklore, thereby radically transforming the role such practices have played historically in the realization of a pious life. However abstruse this might sound to secular ears, debates about how to interpret and enact the variety of embodied Islamic in.. j unctions pervade Egyptian public life today, and even political discussions of.. ten devolve upon questions about the proper role ascribed to the performance of these practices.

To date, debates about the proper interpretation of religious obligations ( such as veiling, fasting, or praying) have been treated as inconsequential in most analyses of the sociopolitical landscape created by the Islamic Revival over the last forty years. Scholars have tended to treat questions of bodily form as superfi particularities through which more profound cultural meanings fi expression. Even in those instances where bodily practices (like veiling and praying) are considered within political analyses, they are under.. stood as symbols deployed by social movements toward political ends, serving at most as vehicles for the expression. of group interests or political dif erences. The specifi conception of bodily practices and the forms they take are not in themselves seen to have political implications. This tendency is in part a product of the normative liberal conception of politics, one separate from the domain of ethics and moral conduct, and is in part a refl ion of how the fi

of ethics has been conceptualized in the modern period. In regard to the lat.. ter, as I suggested in chapter
1,
there is a general lack of attention paid within post..Enlightenment thought to what I earlier referred to as the morphology of moral actions, an omission refl the legacy of humanist ethics, particu.. larly in its Kantian formulation. Since the Kantian tradition conceives of ethics as an abstract system of regulatory norms, values, and principles, it tends to disregard the precise shape moral actions take. In this view, ethical practices may elucidate a moral rule, or even symbolize the value a moral code exemplifi but the manifest form of an ethical practice does not help elabo..

bowing and prostration, all actions that invigorate the body, and the Muslim devotes himself to work with zeal and energy, and increases production and spreads the good, and promotes [the progress of] the nation. . . . Prayer accustoms us to order, and the keeping of appointments, and the binding together of Muslims with cooperative ties and love and harmony" (quoted in Starrett 1995a, 962 ).

rate the substance of a moral system. It is therefore not surprising, for exam.. ple, that even those scholars who write on the subject of Islamic ethics focus on Islamic doctrinal and legal arguments, while much of the literature that

falls under the heading of fiq
al
..
t! badit
( the pedagogical aspects of religious

obligations) remains outside of their purview.
2

I would like to pursue a somewhat diff approach to ethics here, glossed as "positive ethics" ( the skeletal structure of which was laid out in chapter 1 ) , in which the particular form that ethics takes is not a contingent but a neces.. sary aspect of understanding its substantive content. Originally grounded in the tradition of ancient Greek philosophy, and more recently expanded by Michel Foucault, ethics in this formulation is founded upon particular forms of discursive practice, instantiated through specifi sets of procedures, tech.. niques, and exercises, through which highly specifi ethical..moral subjects come to be formed (Colebrook 1998; Davidson 1 994; Foucault 1997 c; Hadot 1 995 , 2002; Martin, Gutman, and Hutton 1988). An inquiry into ethics from this perspective requires that one examine not simply the values enshrined in moral codes, but the different ways in which people live these codes-some.. thing anthropologists are uniquely situated to observe. What is consequential in this framework is not necessarily whether people follow the moral norms or not, but what relationships they establish between the various constitutive el.. ements of the self (body, reason, emotion, volition, and so on) and a particu.. lar norm. In this view, the specifi gestures, styles, and formal expressions that characterize one's relationship to a moral code are not a contingent but a nee.. essary means to understanding the kind of relationship that is established be.. tween the self and structures of social authority, and between what one is, what one wants, and what kind ofwork one performs on oneself in order to re.. alize a particular modality of being and personhood. (See my discussion of ethics in chapter 1.)

An obvious resonance exists between my exploration of processes of self.. formation and anthropology's historical concern with the cultural construe.. tion of personhood,
as
represented in the work of scholars like Marcel Mauss, Margaret Mead, Erving Goffman, and Marilyn Strathern. However, two im.. portant differences distinguish my approach from this tradition of anthropo.. logical scholarship. First, the approach I have outlined here does not assume a homogeneous notion of a self that is coextensive with a given culture or tern.. porality. Rather, as I will show, very different confi of personhood can cohabit the same cultural and historical space, with each confi

the product of a specifi discursive formation rather than of the culture at

2
See, for example, Carn 1983 ; Hashmi
2002.

1 20

large.
3
One need only think of the diff rent conceptions of self that operate within economic, legal, familial, and medical realms in the United States ( however complexly intertwined and overlapping) to understand the analyti.. cal purchase of this presupposition (see, for example, Rorty
1987).4
This in.. sight is particularly germane to the fault line that exists in Egypt today be.. tween those who promote a nationalist.. identitarian understanding of Islam, and those members of the da�wa movement who oppose it. As
I
will show, dif.. ferent ways of understanding ritual obligations among Egyptian Muslims actu.. ally reveal radically dif erent conceptualizations of the role bodily behavior plays in the construction of the self, a difference that in turn has conse- quences for how the horizon of individual freedom and politics is imagined and debated.

My analytical framing differs from anthropological studies of cultural con.. structions of personhood (particularly the work of Mead and Goffman)5 in an.. other respect: I do not begin my inquiry from the vantage point of an individ- uated consciousness that uses various corporeal techniques to acquire a cultural specifi ity. Rather, my investigation treats the empirical character of bodily practices as the terrain upon which the topography of a subject comes to be mapped, and
I
elaborate the architecture of the self through the imma.. nent form bodily practices take-an analytical move that productively re - verses the usual routing from interiority to exteriority in which the uncon..

3
Consider, for example, Foucault's remarks on the diff forms an ethical subject may take: "[The subject] is not a substance. It is a form, and this form is not primarily or always identical to itself. You do not have the same type of relationship to yourself when you constitute yourself as a political subject who goes to vote or speaks at a meeting and when you are seeking to fulfi your desires in a sexual relationship. Undoubtedly there are relationships and interferences between these diff rent forms of the subject; but we are not dealing with the same type of subjects. In each case, one plays, one establishes a diff rent type of relationship to oneself' ( 1997a, 290). See Niko- las Rose's comments on this aspect of Foucault's work (Rose 1998, 31 -3 3).