Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (47 page)

I do not mean to suggest that the discourses of nationalism have been in.. consequential in the development of the mosque movement or that the mod.. ern state and its forms of power (social, political, and economic) have not shaped the lives of the women I worked with in important ways. My point is simply that the inculcation of the ideals of enlightened citizenship is
not
the aim of worship for the women I worked with as it seems to be for Hilmi. Note that Hilmi does not abide by a deistic and deontologized conception of reli. giosity, one in which embodied rituals play no role in the creation of the reli.. gious subject. (In this sense, Hilmi and Mona agree that rituals like �alat

should
play a role in the creation of a proper Muslim subjectivity. ) But where the two women disagree sharply is in their ideas of what this end ("proper Muslim subjectivity") actually entails, that is, what
kind
of Muslim one should ideally become through the performance of these rituals.

Furthermore, the different models of an ends--and--means relationship that Mona's and Hilmi's understandings of �alat presuppose mark a critical disj unc.. ture between the two perspectives. For Hilmi, it seems, the goal of creating modern autonomous citizens remains independent of the means she proposes (Islamic rituals); indeed, one may argue, various modem societies have ac.. complished the same goal through other means. In Hilmi's schema, the means (ritual or �alat) and the end ( the model liberal citizen) can be characterized without reference to each other, and a number of quite different means may be employed to achieve one and the same end. In other words, whereas rituals such as �alat may, in Hilmi's view, be usefully enlisted for the project of

ing a self.- ritical citizenry, they are not necessary but
contingent
acts in the process. Hence Hilmi emphasizes the citizen's ability to distinguish between essence and form-that is, between an inner meaning conceptually indepen.. dent from the outward performances that express it-and the dangers of con.. fl the two.

In contrast, for women like Mona, ritual acts of worship are the sole and in.. eluctable means of forming pious dispositions. A central aspect of ritual prayer, as understood by most mosque participants and captured in Mona's dis.. cussion above, is that it serves both as a
means
to pious conduct and an
end.
In this logic, ritual prayer (�alat) is an end in that Muslims believe God requires them to pray, and a means insofar as it transforms daily action, which in turn creates or reinforces the desire for worship. Thus, the desired goal (pious wor.. ship) is also one of the means by which that desire is cultivated and gradually made realizable. Moreover, in this worldview, neither consummate worship nor the acquisition of piety are possible without the performance of prayer in the prescribed ( that is, codifi ) manner and attitude. As such, outward bod- ily gestures and acts (such as �alat or wearing the veil) are indispensable as.. pects of the pious self in two senses: first in the sense that the self can acquire its particular form only through the performance of the precise bodily enact- ments; and second in the sense that the prescribed bodily forms are necessary attributes of the self.

Notably, Hilmi and Mona's understandings of ritual action entail very dif.. ferent articulations of interiority and exteriority, despite their shared re.. liance on this dichotomy. Indeed, as Marilyn Strathern has astutely ob- served, what is analytically interesting is not so much the binary nature of the inner/outer distinction when found in a particular cultural context, but the relation between these two terms, the particular form their articulation

takes ( Strathem 1 988 , 88) �22 In what follows I will refl further upon the relationship between inwardness and outwardness articulated within the practices of the mosque participants, in particular on the techniques and ex.. ercises through which this relationship was secured. My aim in pursuing this is to analyze how different conceptions of interiority and exteriority are predicated upon different arrangements of power and authority, which in turn enfold contrastive visions of what it means to act politically in this world.

EXTERI ORJTY AS A M EAN S TO I NTE RI ORITY

The ongoing contestation in Egypt about the proper understanding of ritual performance is reminiscent of similar debates about worship in a variety of historical and cultural contexts.23 One debate that has strong parallels with the one taking place in Egypt t
o
day occurred in Renaissance England over the question of whether or not Protestant Christian notions of devotional prac.. tice required a prescribed form of collective prayer. Literary critic Ramie Tar.. goff challenges the established scholarship on the Renaissance which has tra.. ditionally argued that the separation between a public exteriority and a privatized interiority, so characteristic of modern ty, was secured in this pe.. riod. Targoff explores a counterdiscourse within the Renaissance that
_
was crit.. ical of such a separation and sought to reentrench the link between outward behavior and the interiorized subjectivity of the individual (Targoff 1 997, 2001).

In making her argument, Targoff focuses on debates that were spurred by the Church of England's adoption of a formalized structure of public prayer, conducted in the vern ar. The prescribed form of this public prayer was spelled out in the
Book of Common Prayer,
a manual that came to be widely used in the late sixteenth.. and early seventeenth..century English churches. Such a move toward standardization may seem surprising given the Protestant

tendency to emphasize individualized forms of devotional practice that, in contrast to
_
Catholicism's emphasis on sacraments and liturgy, were considered