Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (68 page)

reality that often escape the logic of representation and symbolic articulation.

EPI LOGUE

N
o study of Islamist politics situated within the Western academy can avoid engaging with the contemporary critique of Islamic ethical and political be.. havior, and with the secular.-liberal assumptions that animate this critique. This owes to the fact that the "problem" giving rise to current scholarly con.. cern surrounding Islam centers on this tradition's (potentially dangerous) di.. vergence from the perceived norms of a secular.- liberal polity. The force this framing commands is apparent not only in the writings of those who are criti.. cal of Islamist politics but also in the posture of defense that many Islamist writers must adopt in order to make their case in the court of international public op inion. Even the concepts I have had to rely on in describing the mosque movement incorporate this evaluative purview. The neologism "Is .. lamism," for example, frames its object as an eruption of religion outside the supposedly "normal" domain of private worship, and thus as a historical anomaly requiring explanation if not rectification. The events of September 11 , 2001, have only served to strengthen the sense that it is a secular..- liberal inquis ition before which Islam must be made to confess.

A study that focuses on "Muslim women" carries the burden of this judg.. ment even more because of all the assumptions this dubious signifi triggers in the Western imagination concerning Islam's patriarchal and misogynist qualities. Far more than issues of democracy and tolerance, the "Woman Question" has been key within the development of the Western critique of Is.. lam, even for writers who express distinctly antifeminist views when it comes to women in the West.
A
long history of colonialism has of course helped se.. cure this essential framing: colonialism rationalized itself on the basis of the "inferiority" of non..Western cultures, most manifest in their patriarchal cus.. toms and practices, from which indigenous women had to be rescued through

the agency of colonial rule ( Abu-- ughod 2002; Ahmed 1 992; Lazreg 1994; Mohanty 1991; Spivak 1987). Western Europeans were not the only ones to deploy this trope within a colonial context; the Soviet Union also fore- grounded
a
similar set of arguments in executing its civilizing mission among Muslim populations in Central Asia.1 Today the force of this evaluative fram- ing remains glaringly apparent in the fact that women's active participation in contemporary Islamist movements, rather than constituting a challenge to such long-- nding assumptions, is taken instead as further evidence of the profound subjugation of Muslim women (see Mahmood 2003 ). My point in mentioning the tenacity of such views is not to suggest that there is no vio- lence against women in the Muslim world, but that it is the reductive charac- ter of this framing, one that orchestrates an entire chain of equivalences asso- ciated with Islam, that needs to be questioned.

Admittedly, this evaluative stance I have described is not limited to Islam but, to varying extents, has long been a structural feature of the anthropologi- cal enterprise itself, as many anthropologists have pointed out. Marilyn Strath.. em, for example, has written eloquently about the historical understanding of Melanesia ( her area of study) in the Western imagination as a space of "cul- tural primitiveness" that helped secure the West's own self-- as "modem, civilized, and scientifi ( 1988 ). Strathem deals with the weight this prior framing exerts on her work by employing a textual strategy that begins by acknowledging the constructed quality of what stands in for Melanesia in Western discourse. She writes, "I am constrained by the fact that there is, of course, no 'Melanesian case' that is not a Western projection. I therefore delib.. erately 'reveal' it through a binarism fi located in an us/them contrast that works by inversion and negation. These are my means. Not the infi strat- egy of third (mediating) terms, but a strategy of displacements. I thus try to present Western discourse as a form through which Melanesian discourse can appear. If one thinks about it, 'Melanesian discourse' can, of course, have no other locus" (Strathem 1992b, 75). Note that Strathem's strategy is not an tempt at cultural translation ( through the use of "third mediating terms"); in.. stead it seeks to displace Western analytical categories by staging inversions of familiar ways of thinking and conceptualizing.

1
As Rosalind Morris has perceptively shown in a recent article, Muslim women in the Central Asian republics came to be regarded by a number of early Marxist theerists (key among them Lenin and Trotsky) as a "surrogate proletariat" whose enslaved status made them supposedly more receptive to the emancipatory promises of communism (Morris 2002 ). Ironically, his opposition to Trotsky notwithstanding, it was Stalin who put these ruminations into practice; Gregory Mas.

sell ( 197 4) documents the immense
human disaster that the Soviet policy of recruiting Muslim

women into the communist project unleashed in what were then called "the Eastern states."

My project in this book partakes in some aspects of Strathern's arguments. Like the Melanesian case, my discussion of Islamist politics perforce must also engage the terms through which Islamism has come to be understood in pop.. ular Euro-- discourse. My juxtapositions of the practices of the pietists against secular..liberal understandings of agency, body, and authority in this book therefore take on a necessary quality: it is not a task I choose so much as one that is thrust upon me. It is clear that, regardless of whether I stage such juxtapositions or not, the horizon of secular.. liberal presuppositions about the proper role religiosity should play in the constitution of a modem subjectivity, community, and polity will inevitably structure my audience's reading of this book. Not wanting to promote the particular assumptions that such a framing entails, I have attempted to circumvent these predictable modes of reading by parochializing the terms my readership is likely to bring to this material, displacing them through a combination of narrative descrip.. tion and analytical preemption.

There is a further layer of complication to my exploration of the Islamist movement in Egypt that is perhaps different from the dilemmas that Strath.. ern faced. It has to do with the fact that North Atlantic geopolitical interests in the Middle East have long made it a primary site for the exercise of West.. ern power, and thus for the deployment of the secular..liberal discourses through which that power often operates. What is at stake in Western cri.. tiques of Islam, in other words, is not simply a question of ideological bias, but rather the way these critiques function within a vast number of institutional sites and practices aimed at transforming economic, political, and moral life in the Middle East-from intern fi ial institutions to human rights associations to national and local administrative bureaucracies. The transfor.. mations brought about within the context of this vast modernizing project have enveloped the entire social fabric of the Middle East, impacting every.. thing from pedagogical techniques to conceptions of moral and bodily health to pattern of familial and extra..familial relations.

In light of this, secular liberalism cannot be addressed simply as a doctrine of the state, or as a set of juridical conventions: in its vast implications, it de.. fi es, in effect, something like a form of life. It is precisely for this reason that the knowledges, ethics, and sensibilities of even nonstate movements like the women's mosque movement necessarily engage its broad and diffuse agency. As I have sought to demonstrate in this book, this engagement cannot be analyzed in terms of a conflict between two historically distinct opponents. While contemporary Islamist activities identify secular liberalism as a power.. ful corrosive force within Muslim societies, the discourses in which they do so also presuppose practical and conceptual conditions that are indebted to the

extension of the secular..liberal project itself.2 As the preceding chapters have made clear, however, the inextricable intertwining between these two forma.. tions is not without its tensions and ruptures. One of the basic premises of this book is that in order to understand Islamism's enmeshment within, and chal.. lenges to, assumptions at the core of the secular..liberal imaginary, one must tum not to the usual spaces of political struggle ( such as the state, the econ.. omy, and the law) but to arguments about what constitutes a proper way of living ethically in a world where such questions were thought to have become obsolete. In Egypt today, the primary topoi for this ethical labor are the body, ritual observances, and protocols of public conduct.

POLITICS IN UNUSUAL P LACES

It is customary to analyze debates about religious markers of public behavior through the lens of identity politics, a politics that presupposes that each in.. dividual and group seeks to express its authenticity through symbols of ethnic, religious, and other forms of particularistic belonging so as to achieve recogni.. tion and respect from other members of the social collectivity. To the extent that claims on the state for rights, goods, and services must be made on the ba.. sis of social identity, it comes to be politicized as a key site of contestation. In this view, contemporary movements of multiculturalism and queer identity in Western liberal democracies,
-
and ethnic and religious movements in the non..

Western world, all exemplify this form of politics in that they are seen to be

making claims on the state in particular, and the social collectivity in general, on the basis of certain shared characteristics that the participants consider es.. sential to their self..defi ition as a group.