Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (69 page)

The uniquely modem character of identity politics has been analyzed from a variety of perspectives. Charles Taylor, for example, argues that identity pol.. itics is a result of the intertwining of two different discourses that the culture of liberal modern has made available: the universalist discourse of equal rights and dignity on the one hand, and the particularistic discourse of the ideal of authenticity on the other (Taylor 1 992). Other theorists, following J acques Lacan, regard identity politics as an expression of a fundamental psy.. chological process through which an individual comes to define herself in op.. position to the Other (see, for example, Laclau 1990). On this view, new so. cial movements are an expression of the constitutive lack that haunts all

2 As
I describe in chapter 2, the emergence and proliferation of Islamist movements are deeply indebted to modem mass education, practices of media consumption, and forms ofpolitical and as. sociational life characteristic of civil society of which are crucial elements within the histori.. cal trajectory of secular liberalism across the globe.

processes of identity formation, a lack that on the symbolic level (which is also the realm of culture and language) manifests itself as a condition of possi- bility for these movements. Despite theoretical differences between these two perspectives as to how identity is constituted, there is agreement that con- temporary (or "new") social movements are best analyzed in terms of a politics of identity that manifests itself in claims of rights, recognition, distributive justice, and political representation.

If we examine the material I have presented in this book about the charac- ter of the piety movement, it is quite apparent that this particular strand of the Islamist movement is only marginally organized around questions of rights, recognition, and political representation. Indeed, as I have shown, the mosque participants are quite ambivalent about the question of identity and are, in fact, emphatically critical of those Muslims who understand their reli- gious practices as an expression of their Muslim or Arab identity rather than as a means of realizing a certain kind of virtuous life (see chapters 2 and 4). In this sense, it is not toward
recogn
that the activities of the mosque or the piety movement are oriented but rather toward the
retraining
of ethical sensi- bilities so as to create a new social and moral order. In light of this, it would therefore be a mistake to assume that all contemporary social movements fi their genesis in a politics of identity and should be analyzed as responses to the juridical language of rights, recognition, and distributive justice.

The fact that the piety movement does not directly engage the state and its juridical discourses, however, should not lead us to think that it has no di- rect political implications.3 To the extent that all aspects of human life (whether they pertain to family, education, worship, welfare , commercial transactions, instances of birth and death, and so on) have been brought un- der the regulatory apparatuses of the nation-- tate, the piety movement's ef- forts to remake any of these activities will necessarily have political conse- quences. As Charles Hirschkind has argued persuasively, "Modern politics and the forms of power it deploys have become a [necessary] condition for the practice of many of our more personal activities. As for religion, to the extent that the institutions enabling the cultivation of religious virtue have become subsumed within ( and transformed by) the legal and administrative structures linked to the state, then the (traditional) project of preserving those virtues will necessarily be political if it is to succeed" ( 1997, 13). In other words, it is not that the pietists have "politicized" the spiritual domain of Islam ( as some scholars of Islamism claim) but that conditions of secular--

3
This is a position, as I suggested earlier, that is upheld by a number of scholars of Islamic re.. form movements. See, for example, Beinin and Stork 1997; Gole 1996; Metcalf 1993 , 1994, 1998; Roy 1994.

liberal modernity are such that for any world.-making project (spiritual 9r otherwise) to succeed and be effective, it must engage with the au.. encompassing institutions and structures of modem governance, whether it aspires to state power or not. It is not surprising, therefore, that the suppos.. edly apolitical practices of the piety movement have been continually tar.. geted by the disciplinary mechanisms of the Egyptian state.

While acknowledging the constitutive role practices of governance con.. tinue to play in the formation of the piety movement, it is nonetheless crucial to point out that the full sociopolitical force of this movement cannot be ap. prehended in terms of an analysis solely focused on conditions of postcolonial govern . The discursive logic that has sustained this movement, and the contingent eff it has produced in the social fi are in no way cotermi.. nous with the operations of state power. Yet it seems to me that we have few conceptual resources available for analyzing sociopolitical formations that do not take the nation.- ate and its juridical apparatuses as their main points of reference. Partha Chatterjee expresses a similar dissatisfaction with our con.. ceptual vocabulary when he argues that even though affi tions of lineage, re.. ligion, caste, and language ( all of which exceed national forms of belonging) continue to command a powerful force within contemporary postcolonial so.. cieties, they remain poorly theorized within contemporary discussions of post. colonial modern ty. Chatterjee glosses these affi tions under the "fuzzy" no.. tion of "community" and argues:

I do not believe that the imaginative possibilities afforded by the fuzziness of the community have disappeared from the domain of popular political discourse. On the contrary, I suspect that with the greater reach of the institutions and processes of the state into the interiors of social life, the state itself is being made sense of in the terms of that other discourse, far removed from the conceptual terms of liberal political theory.
(1993 , 225 )

What Chatterjee discusses under the rubric of "community" has a certain resonance with my thematization of ethics in this book insomuch as my analysis of the ethical practices
of
the piety movement makes explicit those modalities of action through which embodied attachments to historically specific forms of belonging are forged. These ethical practices, as I have suggested, are also practices of subjectivation whose logic, while clearly shaped by modes of secular.. liberal governance, is not reducible to its oper.. ations. It seems to me that such an understanding of the ethical in terms of the political, and vice versa, is crucial if we are to understand the power that extra..national forms of belonging currently command in the postcolo.. nial world.

FEMINIST PO LITI CS AN D ETH ICAL DI LEM MAS

Finally, in conclusion, I want to revisit some of the questions regarding femi.. nism with which I opened this book: How does my analysis of this movement complicate the analytical and politically prescriptive projects of feminism ? What does it mean for feminists like myself to take the mosque participants' concepts of human fl hing into account? What are the ethical demands that a consideration of nonliberal movements such as the mosque movement imposes on us? What are the analytical resources that feminist theory offers to help us think through these questions?

As I suggested above, for a scholar of Islam, none of these questions can be adequately answered without encountering the essential tropes through which knowledge about the Muslim world has been organized, key among them the trope of patriarchal violence and Islam's (mis) treatment of women. The veil, more than any other Islamic practice, has become the symbol and evidence of the violence Islam has infl upon women. I have seldom pre.. sented my arguments in an academic setting, particularly my argument about the veil as a disciplinary practice that constitutes pious subjectivities, without facing a barrage of questions from people demanding to know why I have failed to condemn the patriarchal assumptions behind this practice and the suffering it engenders. I am often struck by my audience's lack of curiosity about what else the veil might perform in the world beyond its violation of women. These exhortations are only one indication of how the veil and the commitments it embodies, not to mention other kinds of Islamic practices, have come to be understood through the prism of women's freedom and un.. freedom such that to ask a diff rent set of questions about this practice is to lay oneself open to the charge that one is indifferent to women's oppression. The force this coupling of the veil and women's ( un)freedom commands is equally manifest in those arguments that endorse or defend the veil on the grounds that it is a product of women's "free choice" and evidence of their "liberation" from the hegemony of Western cultural codes.

What I fi most troubling about this framing is the analytical foreclosure it effects and the silence it implicitly condones regarding a whole host of issues-issues that demand attention from scholars who want to productively think about the Islamic practices undergirding the contemporary Islamic Re.. vival. I understand the political demand that feminism imposes to exercise vigilance against culturalist arguments that seem to authorize practices that underwrite women's oppression. I would submit, however, that our analytical explorations should not be reduced to the requirements of political j udgment,