Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (58 page)

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Th concept can perhaps be illuminated by analogy to two diff models of dieting: an older model in which the practice of dieting is understood to be a temporary and instrumental so- lution to the problem of weight gain; and a more contemporary model in which dieting is under- stood to be synonymous with a healthy and nutritious lifestyle. Th second model presupposes an ethical relationship between oneself and the rest of the world and in this sense is similar to what Foucault called "practices ofthe care of the self." Th diff between the two models point to the fact that it does not mean much to simply note that systems of power mark their truth on hu- man bodies through disciplines of self-- rm In order to understand the force these disciplines command, one needs to explicate the conceptual relationship articulated between diff aspects of the body and the particular notion of the self that animates distinct disciplinary regimes.

constitutive outside of the discourse. In this view, there is no recuperable on- tological "thereness" to this abjected materiality (such as "a feminine experi- ence"), because the abject can only be conceived in relation to hegemonic terms of the discourse, "at and as its most tenuous borders" ( Butler 1 993 , 8). A well.- political intervention arising out of this analytic aims to demon.. strate the impossibility of "giving voice" to the subalterity of any abject being-thereby exposing the violence endemic to thought itself. This inter.. vention is famously captured in Gayatri Spivak's rhetorical question, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" ( Spivak 1988 ).

The analysis I have presented of the practice of al..}:t ( and the practice of veiling) departs from both these perspectives: I do not regard female subjec.. tivity as that which belies masculinist representations; nor do I see this sub.. jectivity as a sign of the abject materiality that discourse cannot articulate. Rather, I believe that the body's relationship to discourse is variable and that it seldom simply follows either of the paths laid out by these two perspectives within feminist theory. In regard to the feminist argument that privileges the role representations play in securing male domination, it is important to note that even though the concept of al..}:t embeds a masculinist understanding of gendered bodies, far more is at stake in the practice of al..}:t than this framework allows, as is evident from the conversation between Amal and her friend Nama. Crucial to their understanding of al..}:t as an embodied prac.. tice is an entire conceptualization of the role the body plays in the making of the self, one in which the outward behavior of the body constitutes both the potentiality and the means through which interiority is realized (see chapter 4). A feminist strategy that seeks to unsettle such a conceptualization cannot simply intervene in the system of representation that devalues the feminine body, but must also engage the very armature of attachments between outward behavioral forms and the sedimented subjectivity that al..}:t enacts. Repre.. sentation is only one issue among many in the ethical relationship of the body to the self and others, and it does not by any means determine the form this relationship takes.

Similarly, I remain skeptical of the second feminist framing, in which the corporeal is analyzed on the model of language, as the constitutive outside of discourse itself. In this framework, it would be possible to read al..}:t as an instantiation of the control a masculinist imaginary must assert over the dan.. gerous supplement femininity signifi in Islamic thought. Such a reading is dissatisfy to me because the relationship it assumes between the body and discourse, one modeled on a linguistic theory of signifi ation, is inadequate to the imaginary of the mosque movement. Various aspects of this argument will become clear in the next section when I address the notion of performativity underlying the Aristotelian model of ethical formation the mosque partici..

pants followed. Suffi it to say here that the mosque women's practices of modesty and femininity do not signify the abjectness of the feminine within

Islamic discourse, but articulate a positive and immanent discourse of being in the world. This discourse requires that we carefully examine the
work tha bod.. ily practices perform
in creating a subject that is pious in its formation.

To elucidate these points, it might be instructive to juxtapose the mosque participants' understanding of al..Q_ with a view that takes the pietists to task for making modesty dependent upon the particularity of attire (such as the veil). The contrastive understanding of modesty or al..Q_ (also known

as
i�tisha
that results from such a juxtaposition was articulated forcefully by

a prominent Egyptian public fi , Muhammad Said Ashmawi, who has been a leading voice for "liberal Islam" in the Arab world.5 He is a frequent con.. tributor to the liberal..nationalist magazine
Ruz a[
..
Yusuf,
which I quoted fr

earlier. In a series of exchanges in this magazine, Ashmawi challenged the then..mufti of Egypt, Sayyid Tantawi, for upholding the position that the adoption of the veil is obligatory upon all Muslim women (far4) (Ashmawi 1 994a, 1994b; Tantawi 1994). Ashmawi's general argument is that the prac.. tice of veiling was a regional custom in pre..Islamic Arabia that has mistakenly been assigned a divine status. His writings represent one of the more eloquent arguments for separating the virtue of modesty from the injunction to veil in Egypt today:

The real meaning of the veil [l) ab] lies in thwarting the self from straying toward lust or illicit sexual desires, and keeping away fr sinful behavior, without having to conjoin this [understanding] with particular forms of clothing and attire. As for modesty [il) and lack of exhibitionism [�ada
al..- rr
in clothing and outward appearance [ma?:ha , this is something that is imperative, and any wise person would agree with it and any decent person would abide by it. (Ashmawi 1 994b, 25 )

Note that for Ashmawi, unlike for the women I worked with, modesty is less a divinely ordained virtue than it is an attribute of a "decent and wise person," and in this sense is similar to any other human attribute that marks a person as respectable. Furthermore, for Ashmawi the proper locus of the at.. tribute of modesty is the interiority of the individual, which then has an ef.. feet on outward behavior. In other words, for Ashmawi modesty is not so much an attribute of the body as it is a characteristic of the individual's inte..

5
Ashmawi served as the chief justice of the Criminal Court of Egypt and as a professor of Is.. Iamie and Comparative Law at Cairo University. For an overview of his work on Islamic legal the.. ory, see Hallaq
199 23 1-54.

riority, which is then expressed in bodily form. In contrast, for the women I worked with, this relationship between interiority and exteriority was almost reversed: a modest bodily form ( the veiled body) did not simply express the self's interiority but was the means by which it was acquired. Since the mosque participants regarded outward bodily markers as an ineluctable means to the virtue of modesty, the body's precise movements, behaviors, and gestures were all made the object of their efforts to live by the code of modesty.

performativity and the subject

It might seem to the reader that the differences between these two perspec.. tives are minor and inconsequential since, ultimately, both understandings of modesty have the same effect on the social fi d: they both proscribe what Ashmawi calls "illicit sexual desires and sinful behavior." Disagreement about whether or not one should veil may appear to be minor to those who believe it is the moral principle of the regulation of sexuality, shared by Ashmawi and the mosque participants, that matters. The idea that such differences are mi.. nor accords with various aspects of the Kantian model of ethics discussed in chapters 1 and 4; however, from an Aristotelian point of view, the difference between Ashmawi's understanding of modesty and that of the mosque partie.. ipants is immense. In the Aristotelian worldview, ethical conduct is not sim.. ply a matter of the effect one's behavior produces in the world but depends crucially upon the precise form that behavior takes: both the acquisition and the consummation of ethical virtues devolve upon the proper enactment of prescribed bodily behaviors, gestures, and markers (Macintyre 1966 ). Thus, an act is judged to be ethical in this tradition not simply because it accom.. plishes the social objective it is meant to achieve but also because it enacts this objective in the manner and form it is supposed to: an ethical act is, to borrow J. L. Austin's term, "felicitous" only if it achieves its goals in a pre.. scribed behavioral form (Austin 1 994).

Certain aspects of this Aristotelian model of ethical formation resonate with J. L. Austin's concept of the performative , especially as this concept has been conjoined with an analysis of subject formation in Judith Butler's work (1 993 , 1 997a) , which I touched upon briefl in chapter 1. It is instructive to examine this resonance closely for at least two reasons: one, because such an examination reveals the kinds of questions about bodily performance and sub.. jectivity that are important to foreground in order to understand the force this Aristotelian tradition of ethical formation commands among the mosque par.. ticipants; and two, because such an examination reveals the kind of analytical labor one needs to perform in order to make the ethnographic particularity of

a social formation speak generatively to philosophical concepts-concepts whose anthropological assumptions are often taken for granted.

A performative, which for Austin is primarily a speech act, for Butler in.. eludes both bodily and speech acts through which subjects are formed. Butler, in her adoption of Derrida's interpretation of performativity as an "iterable practice" ( Derrida 1 988 ), formulates a theory of subject formation in which

performativity becomes "one of the infl ntial rituals by which subjects are formed and reformulated"
(
1 997a, 1 60). Butler is carefu to point out the dif..

ference between performance as a "bounded act," and performativity, which "consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the per..

former's 'will' or 'choice' " ( Butler 1993 , 234
)
.6 In
Excitable Speech,
Butler

spells out the role bodily performativ-e play in the constitution of the subject. She argues that "bodily habitus constitutes a tacit form of performativity,
a
ci.. tational chain lived and believed at the level of the body" ( 1997a,
155)
such

that the materiality of the subject comes to be enacted through a series of em.. bodied performatives.
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