Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (64 page)

lau
ka
itmassik il..-mauqif] ,
I would not give up daewa."

In response to Jamal's increasing pressure, Ab ir adjusted her own behavior. Much to her family's surprise, she became uncharacteristically gentle with Ja.. mal, while using other means of persuasion with him. In particularly tense moments, she would at times cajole or humor him, and at times embarrass him by taking the higher moral ground ( as in the scene just described). She also

started to pray regularly for Jamal to his face, pointedly asking for God's par.. don
(maghfi )
and blessings
( baraka),
not only in this life but in the Here..

after. The phrase "rabbinna yihdik, ya rabh! " ("May our Lord show you the straight path,
0
Lord!"} became a refrain in her interactions with Jamal. Sometimes she would play tape..recorded sermons at full volume in the house, especially on Fridays when he was home, that focused on scenes of death, tor.. tures in hell, and the day of fi reckoning with God. Thus, in order to make Jamal feel vulnerable, Abir invoked destiny and death ( reminding him of the Hereafter when he would face God), urging him to accord these their due by being more religiously observant.

All of these strategies eventually had a cumulative effect on J amal and, even though he never stopped pressuring Abir to abandon her studies at the daewa institute, the intensity with which he did so declined. He
started to pray more regularly, and to visit the mosque occasionally with her. More importantly for Abir, he stopped indulging his taste for alcohol and
x
..
rated fi at home.

What is important to note in this account is that none of Abir's arguments would have had an effect on J amal had he not shared with her some sort of a commitment to their underlying assumptions-such as belief in the Hereafter, the inevitability that God's wrath will be unleashed on those who habitually disobey His commands, and so on. Abir's persuasion worked with J amal in part because he considered himself to be a Muslim, albeit one who was negli.. gent in his practice and prone to sinful acts. As an example of this, even when he did not pray in response to her repeated enjoinders, he did not offer a rea.. soned argument for his refu in the way an unbeliever might have when faced with a similar situation. Certain shared moral orientations structured the possibilities of the argument, and thus the shape of the conflict, between them. When confronted with the moral force of Abir's arguments, Jamal could not simply deny their truth. As Abir once explained to me, for Jamal to reject her moral arguments would be tantamount "to denying God's truth, something even he is not willing to risk." The force of Abir's persuasion lay partly in her perseverance, and partly in the tradition of authority she invoked to reform her husband, who was equally-if errantly-bound to the sensibili.. ties of this tradition. In other words, Abir's effectiveness was not an individual but a collaborative achievement, a product of the shared
·
matrix of back.. ground practices, sensibilities, and orientations that structured Jamal and Abir's exchanges.

Secondly, it is also important to- note that Abir's enrollment in the daewa institute against the wishes of her husband would not be condoned by major. ity of the daeiyat and Muslim j urists. This is because, as
I
explained in chapter 2, while daewa is regarded a voluntary act for women, obedience to one's hus..

band is considered an obligation to which every Muslim woman is bound.21 Abir was aware of the risks she was taking in pursuing her commitment to dac: Jamal's threats to divorce her, or to fi a second wife, were not entirely empty since he was within his rights as a Muslim man to do so in the eyes of the sharic: Abir was able to hold her position in part because she could claim a higher moral ground than her husband. Her training in dac: had given her substantial authority from which to speak and challenge her husband on is.. sues of proper Islamic conduct. For example, as she learned more about the modern interpretation of dac: from the institute where she attended classes, she started to justify her participation in dac: using the argument, now pop.. ular among many Islamist thinkers (see chapter
2),
that dac: was no longer considered a collective duty but an individual duty that was incumbent upon each and every Muslim to undertake-a change that had come about pre.. cisely because people like Jamal had lost the ability to know what it meant to live as Muslims.22 Paradoxically, Abir's ability to break from the norms of what it meant to be a dutiful wife were predicated upon her learning to perfect a tradition that accorded her a subordinate status to her husband. Abir's diver.. gence from approved standards of wifely conduct, therefore, did not represent a break with the signifi ory system of Islamic norms, but was saturated with them, and enabled by the capacities that the practice of these norms endowed her with.

It is tempting to read Abir's actions through the lens of subordination and resistance: her ability to pursue dac: work against her husband's wishes may well be seen as an expression of her desire to resist the control her husband was trying to exert over her actions. Or, from a perspective that does not priv.. ilege the sovereign agent, Abir's use of religious arguments may be understood as a simultaneous reiteration and resignifi of religious norms, whereby patriarchal religious practices and arguments are assigned new meanings and valences. While both analyses are plausible, they remain inadequately atten.. tive to the forms of reasoning, network of relations, concepts, and practices that were internal to Abir's actions. For example, what troubled Abir was not the authority Jamal commanded over her (upheld by divine injunctions), but

21
Even among those writers who argue that daewa in the modem period has acquired the status of an individual duty (fard al/ain) rather than a collective duty (fan;l al.- aya), daewa is still con. sidered, for women, an obligation secondary to their duties as wives, mothers, and daughters. This position is upheld not only by men but also by women, like Zaynab al.- who have advo. cated for women's increased participation in the fi of daewa (see Z. al.- 1996a, 39; al.. Hashimi 1990, 237).