Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (42 page)
Read Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject Online
Authors: Saba Mahmood
Tags: #Religion, #Islam, #Rituals & Practice, #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #Women's Studies, #Islamic Studies
far�ficJ diligently, but also attested to their faith ( iman) by continuously doing good deeds· ( al.- �mal al..�aliba)8 and practicing virtues (al..faga,il). As the fol.. lowing exchange makes clear,
_
these women pursued the process of honing and nurturing the desire to pray through the performance of seemingly unrelated deeds during the day (whether cooking, cleaning, or running an errand), until that desire became a part of their condition of being ( also see footnote 20).
The setting for this conversation was a mosque in downtown Cairo. Since all of the three women worked in the same building as clerks for the local state bureaucracy, it was convenient for them to meet in the neighboring mosque
_
in the late aftern after work on a weekly basis. Their discussions some..
times attracted other women who had come to the mosque to pray.
In
this in.. stance, a young woman in her early twenties had been sitting and listening in.. tently when she suddenly interrupted the discussion to ask a question about
one of the fi basic prayers required of Muslims, a prayer known as
al..- r.
This prayer is performed right after dawn breaks, before sunrise. Many Mu_ ..
lims consider it the most demanding and diffi of prayers because it is hard to leave the comfort of sleep to wash and pray, and also because the period
within
which it must be perf is very short.-
This
young woman expressed the diffi she encountered in performing the task of getting up for the morning prayer and asked the group what she should do about it.
Mona, a member of the group in her mid..thirties, turn
to
the young woman with a concerned expression on her face and asked, "Do you mean to say that you are unable to get up for the morn prayer
habitually and consis..
ten
tl
y?" The young woman nodded yes. Bearing the same concern expres.. sion on her face, Mona said, "You mean-to say that you forbid yourself the re..
ward
[�awii
of the morn prayer? This
surely
is
an indication of
ghafla
on