Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (49 page)

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name
ethike
is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word
ethos
( habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arise in you by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to nature. . . . For the things we have to learn before we can

do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. . . . By doing the acts we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly. (Aristotle 1941, 592-93)

While a virtuous habitus is acquired through virtuous habits, the two are not to be confused because habitus-unlike habits-once acquired through assidu- ous practice, takes root in one's character and is considered largely unchange- able. What is noteworthy is that
habitus
in this tradition of moral cultivation implies
a
quality that is acquired through human industry, assiduous practice, and discipline, such that it becomes a permanent feature of a person's charac- ter. In other words, "a habitus can be said to exist only when someone has ac--

tively formed it" (Nederman 1989-90, 96 ).
2
7 Premeditated learning is a teleo- logical process in this sense, aimed at making moral behavior a nondeliberative aspect of one's disposition. Both vices and virtues in this understanding insofar as they are considered products of human endeavor, rather than revela.. tory experience or natural temperament-are acquired through the repeated performance of actions that entail a particular virtue or vice, until all behavior comes to be regulated by the habitus. The appeal of this notion to Christian and Muslim theologians is not hard to understand given its emphasis on hu.. man activity and deliberation, rather than divine grace or divine will, as deter- minants of moral conduct.

This Aristotelian understanding of moral formation infl a number of Islamic thinkers, foremost among them the eleventh..century theologian Abu Hamid al-- (d. 1111 ), but also al-- skawayh (d. 1030), Ibn Rushd (d. 1 198 ), and Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406). Historian Ira Lapidus draws attention to this genealogy in his analysis of Ibn Khaldun's use of the Arabic term
malaka
28
Lapidus argues that although Ibn Khaldun's use of the term
malaka
has often been translated as "habit," its sense is best captured in the Latin term
ha itus,
which Lapidus describes as "that inner quality developed as a result of outer practice which makes practice a perfect ability of the soul of the actor" (Lapidus 1984, 54) . Consider, for example, Ibn Khaldun's remarks in
The
Muqad ah,
which bear remarkable similarity to Aristotle's discussion: "A habit[us] is a fi rooted quality acquired by doing a certain action and repeating it time af.. ter time, until the form of that action is fi fixed [in one's disposition] . A habit[us] corresponds to the original action after which it was formed" ( Ibn Khaldun 1958, 346). In terms of faith,
malaka
according to Lapidus, "is the ac- quisition, from the belief of the heart and the resulting actions, of a quality that has complete control over the heart so that it commands the action of the limbs and makes every activity take place in submissiveness to it to the point that all actions, eventually, become subservient to this affi of faith. This is the highest degree of faith. It is perfect faith" (1984, 55-56).

This Aristotelian legacy continues to live within the practices of the con.. temporary dac: movement in Egypt. It is evident in the frequent invocation of Abu Hamid al..Ghazali's spiritual exercises and techniques of moral cultiva.. tion, found in popular instruction booklets on how to become pious, and of.. ten referred to in ordinary conversations within the da(: circles (see, for ex..