Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (55 page)

choice and free will, rather than of custom, tradition, transcendental will, or social coercion. As I discussed in chapter 1, autonomy in this conception of freedom is a procedural principle, and not an ontological or substantive fea- ture of the subject, in that it delimits the necessary condition for the enact- ment of the ethic of freedom. Under this principle, even illiberal actions can arguably be tolerated if it is determined that they are undertaken by a freely

consenting individual who "acted on her own accord." Political theorist John Christman gives the example of a person who chooses out of her own free will to be someone else's slave (199 1) . In keeping with liberal precepts, as Christ.. man argues, the only way in which we can consider such a person free is if we can make a determination that the process by which she acquired her desire for slavery was indeed the result of her "own thinking and refl ion," unen.. cumbered by social and cultural infl (see my discussion in chapter 1). In other words, it is not the substance of desires but its "origin that matters in lib.. eral j udgments about autonomy" ( Christman 1991, 359).

It is in keeping with this logic that I am often told that the women of the mosque movement exemplify the liberal autonomous subject precisely be.. cause they are enacting their own desires for piety, despite the social obstacles they face, and not following the conventional roles assigned to women. Hence a true liberal, I am told, should be tolerant of this movement even if she disagrees with the movement's larger goals. In such a view, well captured in Christman's formulation of the "voluntary slave," it is not only assumed that conventional forms of behavior can be distinguished from one's true de.. sires, but also that such a distinction is universal. (As I suggested earlier, the same assumption often animates anthropological theories of conventional or ritual behavior. ) What I would like to emphasize here is that this model of hu.. man action presupposes that there is a natural disj uncture between a person's "true" desires and those that are socially prescribed. The politics that ensues from this disjuncture aims to identify moments and places where conven.. tional norms impede the realization of an individual's real desires, or at least obfuscate the distinction between what is truly one 's own and what is socially required.

The model of self presupposed by this position dramatically contrasts with the one that conceptually and practically shaped the activities of the women I worked with. The account I have presented of the mosque movement shows that the distinction between the subject's real desires and obligatory social conventions-a distinction at the center of liberal, and at times progressive, thought-cannot be assumed, precisely because socially prescribed forms of behavior constitute the conditions for the emergence of the self as such and are integral to its realization. One of the issues such a conception of self raises is: How does one rethink the question of individual freedom in a context where the distinction between the subject's own desires and socially pre.. scribed performances cannot be so easily presumed, and where submission to certain forms of (extern ) authority is a condition for the self to achieve its potentiality? What kind of politics would be deemed desirable and viable in a discursive tradition that regards conventions ( socially prescribed perfor.. mances) as necessary to the self's realization?

The argument I am making here should not be confused with the one made by communitarian philosophers (Sandel 1998; Taylor 1 985 a, 1985c) and their feminist interlocutors ( Benhabib 1 992; Friedman 1 997; Meyers 1 989; Nedel.. sky 1989; Young 1990) who have argued that liberalism has an anemic and anomie model of the individual, one that does not take full account of the ways in which the individual is socially produced and personifi the social within herself. According to many of these thinkers, recognition of the so.. cially embedded character of the individual would rectify the autonomizing tendency within liberalism. But what remains unproblematized by these crit.. ics is the distinction between the individual and the social: even among the communitarians and their feminist interlocutors, the interiority of the subject remains a valorized space to which one turn in order to realize one's interests and to distinguish those fears and aspirations that are one's own from those that are socially imposed.

For example, Charles Taylor, in criticizing the concept of atomism underly.. ing various strands of liberal theory,45 argues that the capacity for freedom re.. quires not only "a certain understanding of self, one in which the aspirations to autonomy and self..direction become conceivable," but also requires that this self..understanding be sustained and defi "in conversation with others or through the common understanding which underlies the practices of our society" (Taylor 1 985a, 209). What is notable here is that Taylor does not dis.. card the notion that autonomy is central to the exercise of freedom, but rather emphasizes the social conditions that are necessary for its production and fl Furthermore, autonomy, for Charles Taylor, means not simply acting as one wants ( the Hobbesian requirement of negative freedom), but consists in achieving "a certain condition of self..clairvoyance and self.. understanding" in order to be able to prioritize and assess confl desires, fears, and aspirations within oneself, and to be able to sort out what is in one's best interest from what is socially required ( 1 985c, 229). In other words, the exercise of freedom for Taylor turn not only on the ability to distance oneself from the social, but also, more importantly, on the capacity to turn one's gaze critically to refl upon oneself in order to determine the horizon of possibil.. ities and strategies through which one acts upon the world.

Seyla Benhabib, as a critical interlocutor of communitarians, proposes a feminist communicative ethics that builds upon the work of philosophers like Sandel and Taylor, and deontological liberal theorists like Rawls and Haber..

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Taylor describes atomism as "a vision of society as in some sense constituted by individuals for the fulfillment of ends which [are] primarily individual"-a notion that underlies social contract theory in particular, but also informs other traditions of thought in liberalism ( 1985a, 187).

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mas, who have argued for the priority of the right over the good ( 1992).46 What Benhabib fi useful in the communitarian critique is the recognition of the socially embedded quality of the individual, and the necessity of a par.. ticular structure of the social that makes the ideal of autonomy possible and sustainable in the fi t place. Benhabib is right to point out, however, that this view is not limited to the communitarians alone but shares something critical with a conception of communicative ethics that is Habermasian and Rawlsian in origin but is often assumed to be the opposite of communitarian views of the social and the individual (1 992, 71 -76 ). What these contentious ethical traditions share, Benhabib argues, is an understanding of the self that upholds moral autonomy as a necessary "right of the self to challenge religion, tradi.. tion and social dogma, but also the right of the self to distance from social roles and their content or to assume 'refl social distance' " ( Benhabib 1 992, 73 ). Benhabib fi this bridge between the communitarians and the deontologists to be of critical importance in building a feminist conception of ethics that is predicated upon a critique of an ahistorical and atomistic con.. ception of self and society. What Benhabib's argument makes evident is that even feminist renditions of the communitarian point of view aim to establish a balance between social belonging and critical refl ion wherein critical re.. fl is understood fundamentally as an autonomous exercise.47

It should be clear by now that the liberal communitarian framework is not appropriate for the analysis of conceptions of the self and its relationship to authority that were prevalent among the women of the mosque movement. Ultimately a person for whom self..realization is a matter of excavating herself (developing what Taylor calls "self..clairvoyance" ), or sorting out her own in.. terests from those that are social and collective (what Benhabib calls "the right of the self to distance from social roles and their content"), looks to a dif.. ferent set of strategies and horizons than a subject for whom the principle ideals and tools of self..reference reside outside of herself. This is one reason I have tried to use the analytical language of ethical formation to describe the process of moral cultivation (note the relevant term here is "cultivation" and

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The emphasis Rawls and Habermas place on the concept of individual rights stands in con, trast to the view of communitarian philosophers like Taylor and Sandel who argue for the primacy of a shared vision of the collective good in a given society. The latter connect their critique of the impoverished notion of the unencumbered self in liberalism to what they think is an exaggerated importance given to the concept of individual rights in liberal societies.

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The fact that communitarian views embody this tension between the social and the individ, ual is not entirely surprising given their Romantic legacy. As Charles Larmore points out, a range of Romantics-from Burke to Herder to Rousseau-seem to have embraced, to varying degrees, the notion of a private interiorized subjectivity, which, even though it was recognized to be a product of the larger community, nonetheless had to be distinct from the community in order to be "true to itself' (Larmore
1 996, 66-85 ).

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not "inculcation"). My argument therefore has not focused on contextualizing the individual within a particular structure of the social. Rather, I have tried to map the contours of the kind of subject presumed to be necessary to the po.. litical imaginary of the piety movement (of which the mosque movement is an important part) and the various embodied practices through which such a subject is produced. If the desire for freedom from social conventions is not an innate desire, as I have argued, but assumes a particular anthropology of the subject, then it is incumbent upon us to analyze not only hierarchical struc.. tures of social relations, but also the architecture of the self, the interrelation.. ship between the constituent elements of the self, that make a particular imaginary of politics possible.