Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (65 page)

22
Jamal could have countered this argument by pointing out that most proponents of daewa consider it to be a woman's duty only
if
daewa does not interfere with her service to her husband and children (see note above). But since Jamal was unfamiliar with these debates about daewa, he was unable to make this argument.

his impious behavior and his attempts to dissuade her from what she consid.. ered to be her obligations toward God. For Abir, the demand to live piously required the practice of a range of Islamic virtues and the creation of optimal conditions under which they could be realized. Thus Abir's complicated eval.. uations and decisions were aimed toward goals whose sense is not captured by

terms such as
obedience
versus
rebellion, compliance
versus
resistance,
or
submis..

sion
versus
subversion.
These terms belong more to a feminist discourse than to the discourse of piety precisely because these terms have relevance for certain actions but not others. Abir's defi of social and patriarchal norms is, therefore, best explored through an analysis of the ends toward which it was aimed, and the terms of being, affectivity, and responsibility that constituted the grammar of her actions.23

dacwa and kinship demands

The signifi of an analysis that attends to the grammar of concepts within which a set of actions are located may be further elaborated through another example, one that is well known and often cited among those who are famil.. iar with the fi of Zaynab al..Ghazali. As I mentioned in chapter 2, Zaynab al..Ghazali is regarded as a pioneering fi in the fi d of women's daewa in Egypt; she is also well known for having served as a leader of the Islamist po.. litical group the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1 95 0s and 1960s. Given her pub.. lic profi and political activism, al..Ghazali has been seen as a paradoxical fi .. ure who urged other women to abide by their duties as mothers, wives, and daughters, but lived her own life in a manner that challenged these traditional roles (Ahmed 1992; Hoffman 1985 ). An often.- ited example of this seeming contradiction is al.- zali's account of how she divorced her fi husband whom she claimed interfered with her "struggle in the path of God" (jihad fi

sab"r lillah) ,
and then married her second husband on the condition that

he not intervene in her work of daewa (Z. al..Ghazali 1 995 ; Hoffman 1 985 , 236-37).

In her well.- nown autobiographical account,
Days from My Life (Ayyam

min l) ),
al..Ghazali reports an exchange with her second husband, who,

23
My insistence throughout this book that we attend to the terms and concepts informing the actions of the mosque participants does not aim to simply reproduce "folk categories." Rather, my argument is that attention to these terms and concepts is necessary to rethinking analytical ques- tions about regnant notions of agency in the social sciences and feminist theory. In this sense, my approach to the analysis of concepts is informed by the philosopher Ian Hacking who notes, "a concept is nothing other than a word in its sites. That means attending to a variety oftypes of sites: the sentences in which the word is actually (not potentially) used, those who speak those sen- tences, with what authority, in what institutional settings, in order to influence whom, with what consequences for the speakers" (Hacking 2002, 17).

upon seeing the frequency of her meetings with male members of the Muslim Brotherhood increase, had inquired about the nature of her work. According to al..Ghazali, since the Brotherhood was under strict government surveil.. lance, with many of its leaders in Egyptian jails, her work with the Brother.. hood had to be performed clandestinely, and she refused to share the exact na.. ture of this work with her husband. When he probed, she conceded that her work with the Brotherhood could endanger her life, but reminded him of the agreement they had come to before their marriage:

I cannot ask you today to join me in this struggle [j ihad] but it is within my rights to stipulate
[ashtarat cala
that you not prevent me from my struggle in the path of God [jihadi
fi
sabil lillah] , and that the day this [task] places upon me the responsibility of joining the ranks of the strugglers [
mu
j
a
hi
d
T
n
] you do not ask me what I am doing. But let the trust be complete between us, between a man who wanted to marry a woman who has offered herself to the struggle in the name of God and the establishment of the Islamic state since she \vas eighteen years old. If the interests of marriage conflict with the call to God [
a
l
..dacwa �ila a
lla
h
]
,
then marriage will come to an end and the call [to God] [daewa] will prevail in my whole being/existence . . . . I know it is within your rights to order me, and it is incumbent upon me to grant you [your wishes] , but God is greater in us than ourselves and His call is dearer to us than our existence. (Z. al.. Ghazali
1995,

34-35)

In commenting on this passage, feminist historian Leila Ahmed points out that al..Ghazali's own choices in life "fl undercut her statements on the role of women in Islamic society" ( Ahmed 1992, 199-200). This contra.. diction is most apparent, in Ahmed's view, when al..Ghazali gives herself per.. mission to place her work above her "obligations to raise a family," but does not extend the same right to other Muslim women (Ahmed 1 992, 200). 24

While I do not deny that al..Ghazali's life has entailed many contradictions,
2
1

I think it is possible to understand her prescriptions for Muslim women as

24
Hoff ( 1985 ) offers a similar reading of these passages.

25
In her two.- book addressed to Muslim women in Egypt, al.- calls on women to enter the fi of da�wa
(Z.
al.- 1994a, 1996a). However, she advises a woman daeiya to con..
centrate
her eff
orts on
other women because "she can understand their temperaments, circum.. stances and characteristics, and therefore will succeed in reaching their hearts and solving their
problems, and [be able] to follow their issues" (1 994a,
2).
While al.- conducted daewa among women for a period of thirteen years, she also worked with men when she joined the Mus.. lim Brotherhood as part of what she considered her work in da'wa. She rose to a position of leader..
ship among the Muslim Brothers during a period when the majority of its top leaders were in jail and played a key role in coordinating the activities of the Brothers, a role for which she was later imprisoned. Clearly, her advice to women dtiyat-to primarily focus on other women-was not something she followed in her own life.

consistent with the conditions she stipulated in her own marriage. Notably, al..Ghazali does not argue that the pursuit of
any
kind of work in a woman's life permits her to excuse herself from familial duties (as Ahmed suggests):

only her work "in the path of God" (fi sabil lillah) allows her to do so, and only in those situations where her kinship responsibilities interfere with her commitment to serving God. According to al..Ghazali, had she been able to bear children, her choices would have been more complicated because, as she expressed to me in one of my interviews with her, this would not have left her "free to devote herself to the path of God" ( Cairo, 22 July 1 996). She also

talks about this in an interview that was published in a Saudi women's maga.. zine called
Sayyidati
(Hindawi 1997 ). In this interview, al..Ghazali explains

her decision to seek divorce fr her fi husband by saying, "It was God's wisdom that He did not divert me from my [religious] activities by endowing me with a son, or blessing me with children. I was, however, and still am, a mother to all Muslims. Thus, confronted with the treasure and ardor of this call [to daewa], I was not able to keep myself from responding to it. When my [fi husband refused to let me continue my daewa activities, I asked him for a divorce and this was how it happened" (Hindawi 1997, 72).

Two doctrinal presuppositions are at the core of Zaynab al..Ghazali's argu.. ment. One is the position within Islamic jurisprudence, and commonly es.. poused by contemporary daciyat and the eulama', that a woman's foremost duty is to her parents before marriage, and to her husband and offsprh1g after mar.. riage, and that this responsibility is second only to her responsibility toward God. Only in situations where a woman's loyalty to God is compromised by her obligations toward her husband and family is there space for debate on this issue, and it is within this space that al..Ghazali formulates her dissent against her husband.

Zaynab al..Ghazali's argument also turn upon another important distinc.. tion made by Muslim j urists between one's
material
and
spiritual
responsibili..

ties toward one's kin-both of which are organized along lines of age, gender, and kinship hierarchy. In this moral universe, while women are responsible for the
physical well..being
of both their husbands and children in the eyes of God,

they are accountable only for their own and their children's
moral conduct

not that of their husbands. Husbands, on the other hand, by virtue of the au.. thority they command over their wives and children, are accountable for their
moral conduct
as well as their
social and physical well..being.
Thus, while inferiors and superiors have mutual
material
responsibilities toward each other ( in the sense that wives, husbands, and children are obligated to care for one an.. other's material comforts, albeit in diff rent ways), it is husbands who are ac..

countable for their wives' virtue, while wives are accountable only for the moral conduct of their children. This distinction allowed al..Ghazali to argue

that her inability to bear children had "freed her" to pursue daewa activities, something she would have been unable to do if she were encumbered by the responsibility for her children's moral and physical well.-being.

Al..Ghazali's ability to break successfully from traditional norms of familial duty should be understood, as I suggested in chapter 2, within the context of her considerable exposure to a well.- eveloped discourse of women's rights at the tum of the twentieth century, a discourse that had been crucial to her for.. mation as an activist. Indeed, it is quite possible to read al.-Ghazali's ability to stipulate conditions in both her marriages as a function of the opportunities that were opened up for women of her socioeconomic background in the 1 930s and 1 940s in Egypt and the new consciousness this had facilitated re.. garding the role women had come to play in the public domain.

While this social and historical context is undoubtedly important for expli.. cating al..Ghazali's actions in her personal and public life, it would be a mis.. take to ignore the specifi ity of doctrinal reasoning and its govern logic that accorded her actions a particular force-a force whose valence would be quite different if her arguments had relied upon the claim that women should be granted rights equal to those enjoyed by men within Islam in regard to mar.. riage, divorce, and other kinship responsibilities. Al..Ghazali's actions and her justifi ions for her actions did not, in fact, depend on such an argument for equal rights. Instead her argument pivoted upon the concept of "moral and physical responsibility" that she as a Muslim woman owed to her immediate kin. In al.-Ghazali's reasoning, her ability to break from these responsibilities was a function of her childless status. Whether we agree with the politics this reasoning advances or not, the discursive effects that follow from her invoca.. tion of this concept of moral responsibility explain both the power she com.. mands as an "Islamic" (rather than a "feminist") activist in the Muslim world today and the immense legitimacy her life story has accorded juristic Islamic discourse on kinship-particularly for those who want to pursue a lifestyle that breaks from the traditional demands of this discourse while at the same time abiding by its central tenets and principles.

Here I do not mean to suggest that the effect of al.-Ghazali's abidance by the terms of juristic discourse is best understood in terms of the lifestyles it has le.. gitimized; rather, my point is that her narrative account should be analyzed in terms of the particular fi d of arguments it has made available to Muslim women and the possibilities for action these arguments have opened and fore. closed for then1. It is this dimension of al..Ghazali's reasoning that I have wanted to emphasize, particularly because it is often ignored and elided in ac.. counts that explain her actions in terms of the universal logic of "structural changes" that modernity has heralded in non..Western societies like Egypt. While these "structural changes" provide an important backdrop for under..