Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (62 page)

16
In the language of positive fr Sana may be understood to be a "free agent" because she appears to formulate her projects in accord with her own desires, values, and goals, and not those of others.

17
For contemporary discussions of $Q,br among leaders of the Islamic Revival, see M. al..Ghazali 1 990; al..Qaradawi 1989.

words, resides neither in its ability to reduce suffering nor in its ability to help one realize one's self.directed choices and/or goals. When I pressed N adia for further explanation, she gave me the example of Ayyub, who is known in Is� lam for his exemplary patience in the face of extreme physical and social hard- ship ( Ayyub is the equivalent of Job in the Judeo�Christian tradition). Nadia noted that Ayyub is famous
not
for his ability to rise above the pain, but pre- cisely for the manner in which he
lived
his pain. Ayyub's perseverance did not decrease his suffering: it ended only when God had deemed it time for it to end. In this view, it is not only the lack of complaint in the face of hardship, but the way in which �abr infuses one's life and mode of being that makes one a
�abira
(one who exercises �abr). As Nadia notes in the conversation reported earlier, while �abr is realized through practical tasks, its consummation does not lie in practice alone.

Importantly, Nadia's conception of �abr is linked to the idea of divine causality, the wisdom of which cannot be deciphered by mere human intelli- gence. Many secular�oriented Muslims,18 like Sana above, regard such an ap- proach to life as defeatist and fatalist-as an acceptance of social inj ustice whose real origins lie in structures of patriarchy and social arrangements, rather than in God's will manifest as fate (qa<;i ') . According to this logic,
holding humans responsible for unj ust social arrangements allows for the pos
..
sibility of change, which a divine causality forecloses. Note , however, that the we ight Nadia accords to fate does not absolve humans from responsibility for the unj ust circumstances single women face. Rather, as she pointed out to me later, predestination is one thing and choice another
(al..- sha{' wal..-

shaf' akhir) :
while God determines one's fate (for example, whether someone is poor or wealthy), human beings still choose how to deal with their situations (for example, one can either steal or use lawful means to ameliorate one's sit- uation of poverty). What we have here is a notion of human agency, defi

in terms of individual responsibility, that is bounded by both an eschatological structure
and
a social one. Importantly, this account privileges neither the re- lational nor the autonomous self so familiar to anthropologists (Joseph 1999), but a conception of individual ethics whereby each person is responsible for her own actions. 19

1
8
As I indicated in chapter 1, I am using "secular.- Muslims" as shorthand to refer to those for whom religious practice has limited relevance outside of personal devotion. See chapter 2 for my discussion of how the term "secularism" is used by the mosque participants in Egypt today.

1
9
Notably, Sunni Islam shares with Protestantism two central ideas. First, they both share the assutnption that each follower of the tradition is potentially capable of inculcating the highest virtues intern to the tradition and is responsible for the self-discipline necessary to achieve this goal (even though divine grace plays a central role in both traditions). Second, they both share

Just as the practice of self..esteem structured the possibilities of action
-
that were open to Sana, so did the realization of �abr for Nadia, enabling certain ways of being and foreclosing others. It is clear that certain virtues ( such as hu.. mility, modesty, and shyness) have lost their value in the liberal imagination and are considered emblematic of passivity and inaction, especially if they don't uphold the autonomy of the individual: �abr may, in this view, mark an inadequacy of action, a failure to act under the inertia of tradition. But �abr in the sense described by Nadia and others does not mark a reluctance to act. Rather, it is integral
to
a constructive project: it is a site of considerable invest.. ment, struggle, and achievement. What Nadia's and Sana's discussions reveal are two different modes of engaging with social injustice,
_
one grounded in a tradition that we have come to value, and another in a nonliberal tradition that is being resuscitated by the movement I worked with.

Note that even though N adia regarded herself as only partially responsible for the actions she undertook ( the divine being
at
least equally responsible for her situation), this should not lead us to think that she was therefore less likely to work at changing the social conditions under which she lived. Nei.. ther she nor Sana, for a variety of reasons, could pursue the project of reform.. ing the oppressive situation they were forced to inhabit. The exercise of �abr did not hinder N adia from embarking on a project of social reform any more than the practice of self..esteem enabled Sana to do so. One should not, there.. fore, draw unwarranted correlations between a secular orientation and the ability to transform conditions of social inj ustice. Further, it is important to point out that to analyze people's actions in terms of realized or frustrated at.. tempts at social transformation is necessarily to reduce the heterogeneity of life to the rather fl t narrative of succumbing to or resisting relations of domi..