Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (50 page)

27
Nederman notes, "Aristotle does not . . . construe the permanence and stability of moral character as the product of an in.-bred or natural inheritance. Nature bestows upon man only a ca. pacity . . . to be good or evil. The capacity must be actualized through moral education" (1989-90, 90).

28
See Leaman 1999 for a discussion of the term
malaka
in the Islamic tradition.

ample, Farid 1990, 1993 ; Hawwa 1995 ) .29 Even though the term malaka is not used in these publications and discussions, the role outward behavioral forms play in shaping moral character is clearly indebted to Islamic reformulations of Aristotle's notion of habitus, as will become clear below.

Since it is almost impossible to discuss the term
habitus
in the social sciences without evoking the work of Pierre Bourdieu, it is best to clarify how the older Aristotelian genealogy diff rs from Bourdieu's use of the term and why I have found the older formulation more usefu for analyzing the practices of the mosque movement. Bourdieu proposed the notion of habitus as a means to con.. ceptually integrate phenomenological and structuralist approaches in order to elucidate how the supraindividual structure of society comes to be lived in hu.. man experience ( Bourdieu 1977, 1990). For Bourdieu, habitus is a "generative principle" through which "objective conditions" of a society are inscribed in the bodies and dispositions of social actors ( 1 977). According to Bourdieu, struc.. tured dispositions that constitute habitus correspond to an individual's class or social position and are engendered "in the last analysis, by the economic bases of the social formation in question" (1977, 83 ). While Bourdieu acknowledges that habitus is learn the sense that no one is born with it-his primary concern is with the unconscious power of habitus through which objective so.. cial conditions become naturalized and reproduced. He argues that "practical mimesis" ( the process by which habitus is acquired) "has nothing in common with an
imita
that would presuppose a conscious eff to reproduce a ges.. ture, an utterance or an object explicitly constituted as a model . . . [instead] the process of reproduction . . . tend[s] to take place below the level of conscious.. ness, expression and the reflexive distance which these presuppose. . . . What is 'learned by the body' is not something that one has, like knowledge that can be brandished, but something that one is" ( Bourdieu 1 990, 73 ).

Apart from the socioeconomic determinism that characterizes Bourdieu's discussion of bodily dispositions,30 what I fi problematic in this approach is

29
While -A. H. al.- was critical of the neo..Platonist infl on Islam (Fakhry 1983 , 21 7-33
)
, his ethical thought retained a distinctly Aristotelian infl On this point, see Sherif 1975 , and the introduction by T. J. Winter in A. H. al.- 1 995 , xv-lxxi. For A. H. al..Ghaz.. ali's seminal work on practices of moral self.- see A. H. al.- 1984, 1 992, 1995 .

'0
Th correspondence Bourdieu draws between the class and social position of social actors and their bodily dispositions needs to be complicated by the fact that in any given society there are traditions of discipline and self..formation that cut across class and social positions. See Cantwell 1999 for an excellent discussion of this point. Indeed, my work with mosque groups from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds shows that the tradition of moral formation I have described, with its corresponding pedagogical program, while inflected by relations of social hierarchy, did not in any simple way refl the social and class position of the participants. For a discussion of this point in the context of other traditions of discipline, see Foucault 1 997 c; Hadot 1995; and Rose 1998.

its lack of attention to the pedagogical process by which a habitus is learned. In the ethnographic account I have presented of the mosque movement, the body was thematized by the mosque participants as a site of moral training and cultivation; the intentional nature of this cultivation problematizes the nar.. row model of unconscious imbibing that Bourdieu assumes in his discussion of habitus. Consistent with the Aristotelian conception of habitus, conscious training in the habituation of virtues itself was undertaken, paradoxically, with the goal of making consciousness redundant to the practice of these virtues. This was evident in Mona's advice to the young woman when she said that one should become so accustomed to the act of praying five times a day that when one does not pray one feels just as uncomfortable as when one for.. gets to eat: at this stage, the act of prayer has attained the status of an almost physiological need that is fulfi led without conscious refl Yet it would be a mistake to say that mosque participants believe that once a virtue has taken root in one's disposition, it issues forth perfunctorily and automatically. Since the point is not simply
tha
one acts virtuously but also
how
one enacts a virtue (with what intent, emotion, commitment, and so forth), constant vigilance and monitoring of one's practices is a critical element in this tradi.. tion of ethical formation. This economy of self..discipline therefore draws at.. tention to the role self..directed action plays in the learning of an embodied disposition and its relationship to "unconscious" ways of being.31

In summary, even though Bourdieu draws upon the Aristotelian tradition in retaining the sense that habitus, once acquired, is a durable aspect of one's disposition, he leaves aside the pedagogical aspect of the Aristotelian notion as well as the context of ethics within which the notion of habitus was formu.. lated. One result of Bourdieu's neglect of the manner and process by which a person comes to acquire a habitus is that we lose a sense of how specifi con.. ceptions of the self ( there may be different ones that inhabit the space of a single culture) require diff rent kinds of bodily capacities. In contrast, the Aristotelian notion of habitus forces us to problematize how specifi kinds of bodily practice come to articulate diff rent conceptions of the ethical subject, and how bodily form does not simply express the social structure but also en.. dows the self with particular capacities through which the subject comes to enact the world.

3 1
Gregory Starrett ( 1995a) has drawn attention to Bourdieu's neglect of the role explicit dis� course plays in fi the ideological meaning of embodied practices. While I agree with Starrett's critique, my point here is somewhat diff in that I am interested in conscious action that is di� rected at making certain kinds of behaviors unconscious or nondeliberative. See my response to Starrett's argument, Mahmood 2001b. For an argument similar to Starrett's from a diff cul� tural context, see Bowen 1989, 2000.

FEAR, FELICITY, AN D MO RAL ACTI ON

Perhaps no other theme of the mosque lessons better captures the Aristotelian principle of ethical formation than that of the classical triad of fear
(al
..khauf) , hope
(al..raja!) ,
and love
(al
..
�ubb)
invoked by the attendees and the daeiyat.32 The process of cultivating and honing a pious disposition among the mosque participants centered not only on the practical tasks of daily living, as we have

seen, but also on the creation and orientation of the emotions such a disposi.. tion entailed. As elaborated in the mosque lessons, fear ( al..khauf) is the dread one feels from the possibility of God's retribution (such as, fi of hell), an ex.. perience that leads one to avoid indulging in those actions and thoughts that may earn His wrath and displeasure; hope (al..raj a') is the anticipation of the closeness to God one would achieve if one were to act piously; and love ( al..

Q. ) is the affection and devotion one feels for God, which in turn inspires one to pursue a life in accordance with His will and pleasure. Thus, each emo.. tion is tied to an economy of action that follows from the experience of that particular emotion.

For a long period during my work with the mosques, I understood this tri.. partite matrix of emotion and action in terms of the "carrot and stick" of reli.. gious discipline. It appeared to me that the elements of hope and love were the "carrot" of religion insomuch as the promise of gaining merit with or rec..

ompense
( l).asanat)
from God inspired one to undertake religious duties. Like..

wise, fear of God's wrath was the "stick" that motivated one to abstain from sins and vices. It was only toward the end of my two..year period of fi ldwork that I began to realize the triad's complex relationship to the larger system of pedagogy, wherein these emotions are constituted not simply as motivational devices, but as integral aspects of pious action itself. Moreover, it became ap.. parent to me that the argument that people are driven to behave piously be.. cause of the fear of hell or the promise of rewards leaves unexplained what it seeks to answer: specifi y, how these emotions are acquired and come to command authority in the topography of a particular moral..passional self. In what follows, therefore, I want to attend to the specifi texture of these emo.. tions-in particular, fear-and to understand how they came to be consti.. tuted as motives for, and modalities of, pious conduct in the realization of a virtuous life.

Consider the following excerpt from a mosque lesson delivered by Hajja Samira, mentioned in the earlier chapters of this book, who often draws an audience of fi hundred women at the N afi mosque. Hajja Samira was well

32
For a discussion of the triad of fear..hope..love in the Sunni tradition, see McKane 1965 .

known for her repeated evocations of fear in her weekly lessons, and was sometimes criticized by her audience for these evocations. In response, she had the following to say one morn as she wrapped up her hour..long lesson ( dars):

People criticize us for evoking fear in our lessons [duriis] . But look around you: Do you think ours is a society that is afraid of God? If we were afraid of Him and His fury [qahr] , do you think we would behave in the way we do? We are all humans and commit mistakes, and we should ask for forgiveness from Him continually for these. But to commit sins
intentionally,
as a habit, is what is woeful ! Do we feel remorse and cry at this condition of the Islamic community [umma] ? No! We do not even know we are in this condition. The last shred of fear in our hearts has been squeezed out by the countless sins we commit, so that we don't even know the difference between what is permissible and what is not [l) wa l) .