Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (48 page)

22
Thus we fi that even though Plato and Aristotle both used the body/soul distinction, they had very different conceptions of the relationship between the two terms. Plato accorded the soul a metaphysical priority over the body, whereas for Aristotle the two were part of an inseparable unity in which the soul became the form of the body's matter. In keeping with this language, one might say that the women I worked with seemed to regard the body almost as the material enact, ment
of
the soul whereby the latter was a condition for the former.

23
See, for example, Garrett
1993 ;
Keane
1997, 2002;
Nuttall
1992.

to be the "original and spontaneous" expression of one's spiritual experience.24 Targoff explains this seeming discordance by examining two key assumptions that undergirded the Protestant leadership's decision to adopt a uniform model for public worship. First, the ecclesiasts in the Church of England re.. garded visible forms of public prayer-manifest in "the worshipper's physical posture, the tone of her words, and the nature of her expression"-as markers and measures of her sincerity and devotion, not only to outside observers but also for the worshiper herself
( 1 997, 57).
Second, they also believed in the power of public performance to transform the worshiper's soul, and regarded performative behavior ( in this case, collective prayer) as a vehicle of inward change. What to their critics seemed to be a misplaced faith in outward be.. havioral forms as refl ions of a corresponding interiority, was for the Church offi a logical extension of the necessary interdependence of body and soul (Targoff
2001, 17 ).
Targoff astutely points out that the debates about these formal prayer structures turned upon contrastive understandings of performa.. tive behavior and its relationship to interiority, the contentious nature of which is elided if we read the Church's policy as nothing more than ecclesias.. tical ambition. 25 For the ecclesiasts, prescribed forms of collective prayer, man.. ifest in specifi bodily gestures and behaviors, were a necessary means of creat.. ing the requisite devotional attitudes and dispositions among the worshipers ( Targoff
2001 , 10).

There are multiple levels of resonance between the Church of England's faith in the power of public prayer and the mosque movement's conception of

�alat as a disciplinary practice. One in particular that I want to explore in some depth is the Aristotelian model of ethical pedagogy undergirding both conceptions, in which external performative acts (like prayer) are understood to create corresponding inward dispositions. Among a range of ancient Greek concepts adopted by early Christians as well as Muslims is the Aristotelian formulation of
ha ,
which is concerned with ethical formation and presup. poses a specifi pedagogical process by which a moral character is secured.26

24
This move toward standardization does not appear to be surprising at all, of course, if we take into account the role Protestantism played in the formation of the nation�state in England. Sim� ilar attempts at standardization exist in other places in early modem Europe where religion played a role in the creation of the modem state.

25
Targoff points out that these contrasting notions of the linkage between interiority and ex� teriority were not limited to religious circles alone in Renaissance England, but were also extant in secular culture-particularly among the theatricalists and their critics (1 997 ).

26
For discussions of the Christian adaptation and reformulation of the Aristotelian notion of habitus, see Carruthers 1990; Inglis 1999; and Nederman 1989-90. For historical discussions of how ancient Greek ideas came to be adopted and developed in the Islamic tradition, see Fakhry 1983 ; Sherif 1975; and Watt 1985 .

The term
habitus
has become best known in the social sciences through the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who uses it as a theoretical concept to explain how the structural and class positions of individual subjects come to be embodied as dispositions-largely through unconscious processes ( Bourdieu 1977). My own work draws upon a longer and richer history of this term, however, one that addresses the centrality of gestural capacities in certain traditions of moral cultivation and that is therefore analytically more useful · for my pur- poses.
Habitus
in this older Aristotelian tradition is understood to be an ac- quired excellence at either a moral or
a
practical craft, learn through re- peated practice until that practice leaves a permanent mark on the character of the person. Thus, moral virtues .(such as modesty, honesty, and fortitude ) are acquired through a coordination of outward behaviors (e.g., bodily acts, social demeanor) with inward dispositions (e.g. , emotional states, thoughts, intentions) through the repeated performance of acts that entail those partie.. ular virtues.

In
Nicomachean Ethics,
Aristotle makes a distinction between intellectual

and moral virtues, and it appears that the pedagogical principle of habitus per.. tains to the latter but not the former: