Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (46 page)

As the booklet and discussions among the mosque attendees make clear, weeping during the course of prayer is not tantamount to crying provoked by the pain of personal suffering. Nor must it be undertaken for the sake of im- pressing fellow Muslims, an act that some Muslim theologians explicitly iden.. tify as idolatrous
(shirk) .
This weeping must instead issue forth out of a sense of being overwhelmed by God's greatness, and must be enacted with the in.. tention of pleasing Him.20 Thus, the mosque participants do not consider fear and weeping, within the context of ritual action, to be generic expressions or acts devoid of intentionality; they are specifi to the economy of motivation and action of which they are a constitutive part and, in an important sense, impart to the ritual action its distinctive quality.

It might be tempting to explain such a reorientation of emotions as simply a performance of social obligations in the delimited context of acts of worship and, in keeping with anthropological theories of ritual, as an enactment of a socially authorized discourse that has little to do with what one "genuinely" or

19
There is a strong resonance here with Epicurean practices of self.-formation in which imagery and affect played a central role. See Hadot
2002, 1 13-26.

20
There is a large body of literature in Islam that deals with the importance of intention
(al.. niyya)
in the performance of religious and worldly acts. Thus the same act (such as slaughtering an animal) can acquire a different status depending on the intention with which it is under..

taken-fr an act of worship, to an ordinary act of tending to one's hunger, to an idolatrous act (al..Nawawi
1 990,
23
)
. Many of the mosque participants' discussions focused on how to render

mundane tasks of daily living virtuous by dedicating the intention accompanying these acts to God, a process that oriented one's "secular" acts toward securing His pleasure. Eor a contrastive reading of similar debates about the proper role of intention in Muslim prayer in Indonesia, see Bowen
1989, 2000.

"truly" feels ( as, for example, when one cries out of distress) (Bloch 1975 ; Scheff 1977; Tambiah 1 985 ; Turn 1969).21 However tempting such a read.. ing may be, I would argue that it would be a mistake to reduce the practice of weeping in prayer to a cross.-cultural example of conventionalized behaviors that are assumed to achieve the same goal in all contexts ( see Mahmood 2001b). Such a view does not give adequate attention to those performances of conventional behavior that are aimed at the development and formation of the self's spontaneous and effortless expressions. As is clear from the examples I give above, the pedagogical program among the mosque participants was geared precisely toward making prescribed behavior natural to one's disposi.. tion, and one's virtuosity lay in being able to spontaneously enact its most conventional aspects in a ritual context as much as in ordinary life, thereby making an a priori separation between individual feelings and socially pre.. scribed behavior unfeasible. Thus, ritual worship, for the women I worked with, was both
ena through,
and
productive of,
intentionality, volitional be.. havior, and sentiments-precisely those elements that a number of anthro.. pologists assume to be dissociated from the performance of ritual. Importantly, in this formulation, ritual is not regarded as the theater in which a preformed self enacts a script of social action; rather, the space of ritual is one among a number of sites where the self comes to acquire and give expression to its proper form.

RITUAL PERFO RMANCE AS A M EANS AN D AN EN D

Let me consider a different understanding of ritual prayer that contrasts sharply with the one captured in Mona's advice to the young woman, but that enjoys common currency among Egyptian Muslims. In what follows, I will quote a passage on the performance of �alat written by Mona Hilmi, a woman columnist who contributes regularly to the weekly magazine
Ruz al
..
Yusuf,
which represents a liberal..nationalist perspective in the Egyptian press. Hilmi's article was prompted by the arrest of several teenagers from upper.. middle.- lass and upper..class families for allegedly participating in "devil wor.. ship"
( eibadat al..shaitan).
This incident was widely reported in the Egyptian

2
1
Stanley
Tamb iah, for example, argues that "ordinary acts 'express' attitudes and feelings di, reedy (for example, crying denotes distress in Western society) and 'communicate' that informa,
tion to interacting persons (the person crying wishes to convey to another his feeling of distress).
But ritualized, conventionalized, stereotyped behavior is construed in order to express and com, municate, and is publicly construed as expressing and communicating certain attitudes congenial

to an ongoing institutionalized intercourse
. .
.
.
Stereotyped conventions . . . code not intentions but

'simula ' of intentions" (1 985 , 132;
emphasis added).

press and prompted a discussion about the appropriate role of religion-in particular ritual worship-in Egyptian society. Hilmi wrote:

The issue is not whether people perform rituals and acts of worship ribadat] either to get recompense or reward [�awab], or out of fear of God, or the desire to show off in front of other people. The issue instead is how rituals
[tuqiis
and worship ribadat] prepare for the creation of a type of person who thinks freely, is capable
[mu�ahhal]
of enlightened criticism on important daily issues, of distinguishing between form and essence, between means and ends, between secondary and basic issues. The biggest challenge is how to transform love for God inside every citizen
[muwatin wa muwatina]
into continuous self..criticism of our daily behaviors and manners, and into an awakening of innovative/creative revolutionary thought

that is against the subjugation of the human being and the destruction of his dignity. (Hilmi 1997, 81 )

Clearly Hilmi's argument engages with the signifi of religious practice in Egyptian society, but her interpretation of ritual practice is quite distinct from the one that Mona and her friends espoused. For one thing, Hilmi's ideas about what kind of person should be created in the process of performing ritu.. als are clearly diff rent from the ideas of the women I worked with. Hilmi im.. bues her view of what a human being should become with the language and goals of liberal.- ionalist thought: the highest goal of worship for her is to create a human being capable of "enlightened criticism on important daily issues" and "revolutionary thought that is against the subjugation of human beings" ( 1997, 81 ). As a result, Hilmi addresses "the citizen" ( muwatin wa muwatina) in her call to duty rather than "the faithful" (mu'min wa mu'mina) or "slaves of God"
( t! bad allah),
the terms more commonly used by the women with whom I worked. In contrast, for many of the mosque participants, the ul.. timate goal of worship was the natural and effortless performance of the virtue of submission to God. Even though women like Mona subjected their daily activities to self..criticism ( as Hilmi recommends), they did so in order to se.. cure God's approval and pleasure rather than to hone those capacities referred to by Hilmi and central to the rhetoric of liberal citizenship.