Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (53 page)

While the examples above make clear the importance of fear in this tradition of ethical formation, the question arises as to how this emotion is acquired and cultivated, particularly since the mosque participants do not consider fear of God to be natural, but something that must be learn According to the women I worked with, there are many avenues for pursuing training in fear. One is the space of the mosque lessons. There were a number of women at.. tendees who were familiar with the scholarly and gentle style of the daeiya Hajja Faiza-who delivered lessons at the upper.- iddle.-income Umar mosque near their homes-but preferred Hajja Samira's admonitory manner, and of.. ten went to the extra trouble of commuting to the Nafi mosque. When I asked one of these women why she preferred Hajja Samira's severe and stri .. dent
(muta hadid)
style of delivery, she responded:

We live in a society in which it is hard to remain pious and to be protective of our religion
[ni�fuz
eala
dinina].
When
-
we hear this kind of talk, it startles us and keeps us from getting lost in the attractions of the world. You see, the path to piety

[taqwa] is very diffi Hajja Samira and others are afraid that unless they use [the rhetorical style of] ta [[to cause to fear] , people will have wasted all the

eff they exerted in getting there. They want people to hold on to their eff in the path of piety [taqwa] and this is why they use takhwif.

It is clear from this response that Hajja Samira's audience appreciated her not so much for her _scholarly knowledge or argumentative logic, but for her ability to transform moral character through engendering in her audience var.. ious emotions associated with the divine.37 Hajja Samira, it seems, did not simply prescribe fear as a necessary condition for piety, but deployed a dis .. course and rhetorical style that elicited it as wel1.38 In doing so, she punctuated her lessons with evocations of the fi of hell, the trials faced in death, and the final encounter with God after death, all of which served as evocative techniques for the creation of virtuous emotions.

This style of preaching, aimed at the creation of fear in the listeners, is termed
tarhrb
(and at times
ta f,
as the woman interviewed above indi.. cates); its antonym,
ta
g
hr
b
, refers to the evocation of love for God in the audi..

ence. Most daeiyat stress the importance of maintaining a fi balance between

37
I am reminded here of Pierre Hadot's admonishment to th who fault Plato's dialogues for doctrinal inconsistencies. Hadot argues that this is a judgment inconsistent with Plato's own in- tent, which was to "form" people rather than "inform" them (Hadot 2002, 73 ).

38
Rhetoric in this usage refers to the process by which the orator recruits her listeners to par..

ticipate in a shared economy ofaction and response (Burke
1969;
McKeon
1987 ).
For an excel.. lent discussion of how rhetoric, within a particular tradition of Yemeni poetry, both expresses and constructs emotions, see Caton
1990.