Saba Mahmood Politics of Piety

I’ll quote and paraphrase the key parts of the introduction, which lays out the important theoretical ground. Then I’ll provide summaries (followed by some paraphrasing and quotations) of the argument for the rest of the chapters

Key terms:

Da’wa: Islamic proselytization movement, aimed at making Muslims more pious. The da’iya is the proselytizer

Chapter 1 (Introduction)

How do differences in culture and historical context affect feminist movements? Women’s involvement in Islamist movements is met with mixed reactions, as people wonder whether women are pawns of patriarchy (1). One of book’s main goals is to explore the challenges women’s involvement in Islamist movements poses to feminism and secular liberal thought (2, 5).

Women’s mosque movement marks first time in Egyptian history that women have held public meetings in mosques to teach one another Islamic doctrine, thereby altering the historically male-centered character of mosques as well as of Islamic pedagogy. At the same time, women’s religious participation within such public arenas of Islamic pedagogy is critically structured by, and serves to uphold, a discursive tradition that regards subordination to a transcendent will (and thus, in many instances, to male authority) as its coveted goal (2-3). The Mosque Movement is part of da’wa, a general term for revival activities, specifically indicates proselytization within Islam to encourage Muslims to be more pious (3).

Feminist scholarship has had a certain focus that makes assumptions that can obscure the way women can act as agents even in patriarchal structures (6). Feminist scholars presume that women being agents in these situations means they are resisting. Mahmood questions whether the category of resistance suggests a teleology (8-9). She problematizes the assumption that women seek freedom from male power (10). Negative vs. positive freedom: “absence of external obstacles” vs. “capacity to realize an autonomous will” (11). Individual autonomy is part of both of these: illiberal action if chosen can be considered under the umbrella of freedom. This is key to feminist examination of Arab world and elsewhere, but have been highly criticized (11-13).

Main argument thus far: “If we recognize that the desire for freedom from, or subversion of, norms is not an innate desire that motivates all beings at all times, but is also profoundly mediated by cultural and historical conditions, then the question arises: how do we analyze operations of power that construct different kinds of bodies, knowledge, and subjectivities whose trajectories do not follow the entelechy of liberatory politics? Put simply, my point is this: if the ability to effect change in the world and in oneself is historically and culturally specific (both in terms of what constitutes ‘change’ and the means by which it is effected), then the meaning and sense of agency cannot be fixed in advance, but must emerge through an analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being, responsibility, and effectivity. Viewed in this way, what my appear to be a case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view, may actually be a form of agency—but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment” (14-15).

Foucault and Butler idea that the very processes and conditions that secure a subject’s subordination are the means by which she becomes a self-conscious identity and agent (17)

Butler argues that social is first, and that there is no body before the social, no pure body (18). Agency for Butler comes form the “leakiness” of the system of performativity—in repeated enactment, iterations lead to possibility of change (19). Norms are not only consolidated and/or subverted, but also performed, inhabited and experienced in a variety of ways (22). Mahmood wants to move away from looking at norms dualistically (23)

Scholars of the Islamist movement have often argued that the resurgence of Islamic forms of sociability (such as veiling, increased interest in the correct performance of Islamic rituals, and the proliferation of Islamic charities) within a range of Muslim societies is best understood as the expression of resistance against Western politico-cultural domination as well as a form of social protest against the failed modernizing project of post-colonial Muslim regimes (25)

The relationship b/w Islamism and liberal secularity is one of proximity and coimnbrication rather than one of simple opposition, or for that matter, accommodation; it therefore needs to be analyhzed in terms of historically shifting ambigious and unpredictable encounters that this proximity has generated (25)

“[We must] explode the category of norms into its constituent elements—to examine the immanent form that norms take, and to inquire into the attachments their particular morphology generates within the topography of the self. My reason for urging this move has to do with my interest in understanding how different modalities of moral-ethical action contribute to the construction of particular kinds of subjects, subjects whose political autonomy cannot be grasped without applying critical scrutiny to the precise form their embodied actions take” (24).

Kant’s morality is based on reason and ideas not outward behavior (25). “One consequence of this Kantian conception of ethics is the relative lack of attention paid to the manifest form ethical practices take, and a general demotion of conduct, social demeanor, and etiquettes in our analyses of moral systems” (26, see also 118-119).

“Foucault’s conception of positive ethics is Aristotelian in that it conceives of ethics not as an Idea, or as a set of regulatory norms, but as a set of practical activities that are germane to a certain way of life. Ethics in this conception is embedded in a set of specific practices (what Aristotle called ‘practices of virtue’). It is only from the standpoint of the dispositions formed through these practices that the Kantian question of moral deliberation can be posed. In this view, you ask not what a particular ethical theory means, but what it does. In contrast to other contemporary writings on ‘virtue ethics,’ Foucault’s use of Aristotelian ethics is not geared toward asserting its universal validity, or recuperating its various elements for solving contemporary moral problems […] Instead, for Foucault, this tradition allows us to think of ethics as always local and particular, pertaining to a specific set of procedures, techniques, and discourses through which highly specific ethical-moral subjects come to be formed” (27-28).

“Foucault distinguished ethical practices from ‘morals,’ reserving the latter to refer to sets of norms, rules, values, and injunctions. ‘Ethics,’ on the other hand, refers to those practices, techniques, and discourses through which a subject transforms herself in order to achieve a particular state of being, happiness, or truth […] For Foucault, ethics is a modality of power that ‘permits individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being’ […] in order to transform themselves inot the willing subjects of a particular moral discourse. Despite his attention to the individual’s effort at constituting herself, the subject of Foucault’s analysis is not a voluntaristic, autonomous subject who fashions herself in a protean manner. Rather, the subject is formed within the limits of a historically specific set of formative practices and moral injunctions that are delimited in advance—what Foucault characterizes as ‘motes of subjectivation.’ Foucault thus treats subjectivity not as a private space of self-cultivation, but as an effect of a modality of power operationalized through a set of moral codes that summon a subject to constitute herself in accord with its precepts. ‘Moral subjectivation,’ in turn, refers to the models available ‘for setting up and developing relationships with the self, for self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-examination, for the decipherment of the self by oneself, for the transformations that one seeks to accomplish with oneself as object’ (28).

People form relationship to moral code themselves. “The precise embodied form that obedience to a moral code takes is not a contingent but a necessary element of ethical analysis in that it is a means to describing the specific constitution of the ethical subject. In other words, it is only through an analysis of the specific shape and character of ethical practices that one can apprehend the kind of ethical subject that is formed” (29).

“I find Foucault’s analysis of ethical formation particularly helpful for conceptualizing agency beyond the confines of the binary model of enacting and subverting norms. Specifically, he draws our attention to the contribution of external forms to the development of human ethical capacities, to specific modes of human agency. Instead of limiting agency to those acts that disrupt existing power relations, Foucault’s work encourages us to think of agency: (a) in terms of the capacities and skills required to undertake particular kinds of moral actions; and (b) as ineluctably bound up with the historically and culturally specific disciplines through which a subject is formed” (29).

Foucault’s framework for studying ethics has 4 parts, though Mahmood says that the framework is not a blueprint for how to do it but raises questions to think about when studying ethics. “Substance of ethics” is part of self “that pertain to the domain of ethical judgment and practice” such as flesh and desire for medieval X. “Mode of subjectivation” is the how—it is “how people are incited or called upon to recognize their moral obligations.” Under this category are questions of authority. Third is “techniques of the self,” what one does, the process of becoming “an ethical subject.” Last is “telos” which is “the mode of being one seeks to achieve within a historically specific authoritative model” (30).

Living out this ethical tradition when viewed in this way allows for agency and for subject formation. Subjectivation is political (32-33)

Agency emerges within a system where people chart their own path, even when options are limited. She doesn’t want to say what agency is precisely to these women but recognize that agency can be found in this ethical action (34)

Political agency and ethical agency are inseparable (35)

“The political efficacy of these movements is, I would suggest, a function of the work they perform in the ethical realm—those strategies of cultivation through which embodied attachments to historically specific forms of truth come to be forged. Their political project, therefore, can only be understood through an exploration of their ethical practices. This requires that we rethink not only what our conventional understanding of what constitutes the political but also what is the substance of ethics” (35).

Chapter 2

Summary: Mahmood begins with a description of her sites and the women who inhabit them. She then describes the aims of the Mosque Movement: it emerges in reaction to the rise of a secular government and westernization. Women of the Mosque Movement want to define how to live like Muslims in the modern world. They do not wish to directly engage the state and try to reinstate shari’a but to have all of everyday life guided by Islamic, not secular ethics. They want practices like veiling to be normative, not just performative of tradition.

Mahmood argues that the increased questioning evident in the Mosque Movement is not the result of objectification of religion or another generalized reaction against modernity but a specific reaction to the context of people who want to live Islamically in the context of a secularizing world.

Mahmood then gives a genealogy of the da’wa movement and the da’iya (da’wa preachers) who have become new authorities outside the institutional structures of the state and the mosques. The Muslim Brotherhood and Rashid Rida are key groups/figures who transform da’wa from a collective effort undertaken by scholars to individual efforts by ordinary Muslims, which opens a space for women to participate, even though patriarchal structures are still in place. Also, other sociological changes allow space for women, including educational reforms and Islamic non-profits. She then gives a history of Zaynab al-Ghazali, who plays a key role in opening space for women in da’wa at the turn of the 20^th century.

Mahmood closes the chapter by arguing that religious non-profits and da’wa participatnts engage in politics, shaping ethical and aesthetic sensibilities even though they don’t directly try to change the state. She also argues that the state, who tries to resist these movements, is secular even though it is involved in regulating religion.

Ayesha complex: Da’yat here, like in the other mosques, speak in Egyptian colloquial Arabic, but there speech is marked by street colloquialisms that are characteristic of their and their audience’s working class backgrounds (42) more limited educational backgrounds of attendees, 1/3 are wear the Niqab (42)

Nafisa mosque: first Cairo mosque to start offering lessons to women around 1980, and it current commands largest female attendance of any mosque in Cairo- 500 women/week attend lessons—lessons delivered by group of 3 Da’iyat, all of whom were, at time of fieldwork, in process of obtaining formal training in preaching skills from state-run institutions of Da’wa --- are three are munaqabat (43)

Three mosque examples illustrate the broad based character of the women’s mosque movement evident in the variety of ages and socioeconomic backgrounds represented among the audience as well as in the range of rhetorical styles, modes of argumentation and forms of sociability employed by the teacher….the participants all shared a concern for what they described as the increasing secularization of Egyptian society, an important consequence of which is the erosion of religious sensibility, they considered crucial to the preservation of the “spirit of Islam” (43)

Many of mosque participants criticized what they saw as an increasingly prevalent form of religiosity in Egypt, one that accords Islam the status of an abstract system of beliefs that has no direct bearing on how one lives, or what one actually does in the course of the day (44)

Hajja Faiza is mainly concerned with Muslim who, despite performing their religious duties, have lost the capacity to render all aspects of their lives- of which worship is simply one, albeit an important part- into a means of realizing God’s will (46)

For most of the Da’iyat…reinstatement of Sharia remains marginal to the realization of the movement’s goals and few lessons address this issue (47)…this doesn’t mean that the mosque movement endorsed a privatized notion of religion that assumes a separation between worldly and religious affairs. Indeed, the form of piety women like Hajja Faiza advocate brings religious obligations and rituals to bear upon worldly issues in new ways, thereby living according the old Islamic adage “all of life is worship” (47)

In this sense, the mosque movement’s goal is to introduce a common set of shared norms of standards by which one is to judge one’s own conduct, whether in the context of employment, education, domestic life or other social activities. The mosque participants’ actions therefore post more of a challenge to the second aspect of secularism, namely the process by which religion is relegated to its own differential sphere, its influence curtailed to those aspects of modern life that are either “private” or “moral” (48)

Undergirding Fatma’s and Hajja Nur’s critique is a conception of religiosity that discriminates between religious practice that is part of the larger project of realizing Islamic virtues in the entirety of one’s life , and a practice that is Islamic in form and style but doesn’t necessarily serve as a means to the training and realization of a pious self…critique of those forms of Islamic practice whose raison d’etre is to signal an identity or tradition and which are, therefore, shorn of their ability to contribute to the formation of an ethical disposition. (51)

Phenomenon of veiling as an insufficient, though necessary, part of making society more religiously devout…the critical issue for Hajja Nur….is whether the proliferation of what appear to be Islamic practices..actually enable the cultivation of Islamic virtues in the entirety of a Muslim’s life (52)

For Islamists, religious rituals should be aimed towards the goal of creating a certain kind of polity, and the mosque movement fails precisely to make this linkage, keeping matters of worship and piety within what for them in a privatized world of worship (53)

“Religion” in the modern period has come to be understood as a self-enclosed system whose proper practice often entails, even on the part of lay practitioners, some form of familiarity with doctrinal assumptions and theological reasoning involved in religious rites and rituals (53)

Working women and students now bring questions of virtuous practice to bear on new problems, such as how to conduct oneself modestly on public transportation, and in schools and offices where pious protocols of sex segregation are not observed (55)

Need to understand religious practice in terms of larger goal to which it is teleogocially oriented (56)
The women of the mosque movement argue that they have had to create new structures of learning- in the form of mosque lessons- to inculcate values that were previously part of the social and familial ethos in Egypt (56)

Da’wa is understood by the contemporary piety movement of Egypt primarily as a religious duty that requires all adult members of the Islamic community to urge fellow Muslims to greater piety (57) These activities include establishing neighborhood mosques, social welfare organizations, Islamic educational institutions, and printing presses, as well as urging fellow Muslims towards greater religious responsibility (58)

Two innovations of Rashid Rida were crystallized further by work of Muslim Brotherhood under al-Banna whose elaboration of da’wa was a key part of his larger program aimed at creating institutional structures and sensibilities capable of contesting western cultural and political hegemony…directed his organizational efforts at education and reform of fellow Muslims…incorporated many of the concepts and organizational strategies integral to the practice of modern politics and governance….addressed fellow Muslims as citizens whose collective project was to sustain the Egyptian nation as an integral part of the Umma…similarly…made the public spaces of urban life…a key site of their Da’wa activity, and used aural and print media extensively…(63)

The Brotherhood successfully transformed mosques from spaces reserved for worship to what Al-Banna described as “schools for the commoners, the popular universities and the colleges that lend educational services to the young and old alike” (63)

Also, trenchant critique of traditional religious education, in particular against religious scholars and their institutions for making religion into a specialized field of knowledge that served only the interests of the ruling elites…it was in the context of a growing perception that scholars and preachers trained within the government administered religious institutions were no more than state functionalities and bureaucrats that there arose the figure of the self-trained preacher/da’iya who took on Da’wa as a vocation rather than as a form of employment…it is not an accident that it is secular universities….that have produced the most prominent da’iyat (both male and female) of the last century (64)

There are both theological and sociological bases for women’s entrance into this field- theological: modern interpretations of Da’wa often draw upon those verses of the Quran that enjoin men and women equally to undertake this duty…and sociological: the ability to practice Da’wa has come to depend not so much on doctrinal expertise as on one’s moral uprightness and practical knowledge of the tradition- this is particularly significant for women who have little formal training in doctrinal issues (65)

Women’s participation in the Da’wa field is structured by certain limits—not allowed to instruct men (65)

Women’s entry into field of Da’wa has been facilitated by the conditions of higher literacy and increased social mobility afforded to women in post-colonial Egypt…Al Azhar began to enroll women….all of these developments have gradually opened doors for urban women to pursue religious study, and have endowed them with a sense of entitlement that they should be able to proclaim the Islamic tradition in a manner parallel (although not necessarily equal) to men (66)

Center for Preaching and Advice (Society of Muslim Ladies)--- even after affiliation with Al Azhar ended around 1938-9, al Ghazali’s organization continued to train women in the art of religious exhortation well into the late 1950’s (67)

Ghazali’s Islamic activism was shaped by the liberal discourse of the early nationalism- women should play an active role in public, intellectual and political life with the important caveat that those responsibilities should not interfere with what she considers to be the woman’s divinely ordained obligations to her immediate kin…Ghazali’s modernist religious activism illustrates how the histories of Islamism and secular liberalism are intimately connected, a connection that is nonetheless saturated with tension and ambivalence (70)

Da’iyat seldom employ language of religious equality, don’t demand to be able to preach on Friday (71)

Despite the fact that the University of al-Azhar opened its doors to women in the study of religious sciences in the 1960’s, none of the contemporary Da’iyat have come to the practice via this institutional trajectory, and only a very few of the mosque groups are affiliated with the Muslim Brothers (71)

The one institutional structure that continues to play a significant role in facilitating women’s da’wa activities is that that of the Islamic nonprofit organizations, whose focus has typically been on providing welfare and charitable services to the poooor….the larger number of women Da’wa training centers are run by Islamic non-profit organizations in Egypt today (72) Such organizations have historically been concerned not only with the provision of religious instruction but also with cultivating an Islamic ethos that makes them distinct from secular nonprofit organizations (73)

Regulation …of practices is of eminent political concern b/c they play a crucial role in shaping the civic and public sensibilities essential to the consolidation of a secular liberal polity (74)

As part of the Egyptian government’s ongoing efforts to regulate religious associational life, in 1996 2 laws were approved for implementation aimed at controlling the activities of the Da’wa movement. One aims to nationalize thirty thousand non-government mosques within five years…the second is directed at preaching activities: the state now requires that all male Du’at and female Da’iya regardless of their prior religious training or experience, undergo a 2 year training program in da’wa administered by the ministry of religious affairs (75)

Through the nationalization and direct management of the religious institutions the state has attempted to redefine the locations and modalities of proper religious practice as part of the project of creating a modern polity. While the constitution heralds Sharia as the basis of Egyptian law, in actual practice the Sharia has been restricted to the domain of personal status law in accord with the modernist logic of keeping religion domesticated within the private realm (77)

Chapter 2:

Summary

Urbanization and mass media have bolstered peoples’ abilities to access materials of the tradition. New forms of texts have been written to make traditional material accessible to ordinary Muslims. Mahmood examines the women’s mosque lessons to understand how shifts in authority have happened and how new materials are used.

Mahmood describes two extremes of da’iya teachers, one from a wealthier community and one from a poorer community. She shows the different styles: the former explains a number of opinions which allows women to choose which juridical opinion they think fits their lives, though Mahmood points out that this isn’t the secular-liberal notion of choice since it takes place within the orthodox structures of the tradition. In the poorer area, the lessons are disorganized, less authoritative, engage in question and answer within the lessons. The teacher gives prescriptions not choices. The mosque movement women engaging in the tradition to decide how to live their everyday lives shapes the tradition, which isn’t just received but is also inhabited (discursive tradition).

Mahmood shows the way that the women inhabit the tradition through an example of dealing with sexual norms. Mahmood traces how women deploy classical Islamic concepts to deal with issues in their lives. Da’iya doesn’t try to change the institutions (like that there are not women’s higher education institutions) but tries to instruct women how to live virtuously within the coeducational institutions (like not making eye contact with men). Da’iya doesn’t just impart knowledge but the students argue and debate the Quranic principles and about how to navigate classical texts. Mahmood shows that there is room for the divine ordinances of modesty to be adjusted to the realities of everyday urban life.

Mahmood ends by theorizing on the relationship between traditional and modern. She turns to the concept of a discursive tradition—that macrolevel limits shape what is possible at the level of micropractices. The Islamic tradition is a mode of engaging with texts that shape how people live, but do not simply define how people live. Truths are made through engagement with texts, not found within the texts themselves. This allows for agency within the tradition’s limits.

Mosque movement aims at pedagogy that explains practical ways of living Islamically (80). Fiqh manuals and fatwas now focused on practical problems of everyday life form a structure of authority in which mosque women operate to shape their ethical lives (80-81)

Da’iya Hajj Faiza outlines a range of juridical opinions for women to choose: “The range of choices Hajj Faiza outlines are determined by the scholarly opinions expressed within earlier traditions of juristic reasoning that provide the authoritative bases for any decision. As such, choice is understood not to be an expression of one’s will but something one exercises in following the prescribed path to becoming a better Muslim” (85). “noninterventionist style” relies on women to take responsibility for making their own choices (86)

Women gain authority by learning the male scholarly tradition and learning to navigate it (89-90)

Clarification on choice within the tradition, which is quite different from what one thinks about in secular humanism “[T]he form of reasoning one follows in exercising a choice must be guided by the requisite rationale and capacities that the jurists have deemed authoritative, thereby complicating the sovereign subject of liberal-humanist discourse” (90).

In the working class, poorer mosque, ethical technique of tarhib was used, invoking fear. Women were told what to do not given an outline of options (91-99). This di’ya Umm Faris “performatively constituted” (99) the authority of the hadith by her interpretation. As a discursive tradition, she does not constitute it freely but within certain bounds, but she still does work to live the tradition in everyday life, which requires interpretive measures.

Women interpreting classically male tradition (100). Da’iya teaches to overt gaze when dealing with gaze because God has commanded it, so there is no choice (102). Issue is that institutional structures are such that women must deal with men in their working and educational lives, so da’iya wants to teach girls how to live as the Qur’an and Hadith teach them to in the company of men; this requires exegesis to navigate the juridical tradition and apply it to modern life. Women engage in that exegesis and debate over correct interpretation within the structures of male authority and authority from God (102-4). Women don’t stray much, they stay close to jurist positions, though there is a range (106). Another example with modesty of how women see modesty as ordered by God but then figure out how to live it through exegesis and practical considerations (113)

Foucault’s idea of discursive tradition, also used by Talal Asad and Alisdair MacIntyre (114-15) helps to contextualize how women navigate the tradition. People live within macrolevel limits but they live it at the microlevel by negotiating their practices (115). Scriptures come to be seen as the medium through which truth is established instead of truth itself. Truth and tradition produced by subjects through historical processes (116)

Hirschkind argues that fractured space and temporality of modernity do not simply efface older forms of perception and knowledge…but that these aspects of modernity also make possible the retrieval and maintenance of traditional practices and perceptual regimes, giving these practices a renewed life and novel form….the adoption of what are termed the “modern” ways of being do not signify a wholesale replacement of pre-existing sensibilities, but are structured by, and embedded in, ongoing historical traditions (117)

Chapter 4

Summary

The ethical in this chapter returns to the Aristotelian, where the ethical subject is formed through actions, not ideas (as Kantian subject). The relevant action here for the mosque movement is ritual. Mahmood traces how the external action shapes the internal self. One must cultivate the desire to pray through discipline, just as one does in everyday aspects of life—ritual is not a separate sphere of behavior. Goal of ritual is to shape the self to please God: for da’wa women, ritual is an ethical means and ends.

Mahmood also looks at the relationship between ritual (external acts) and agency and power. She turns to the Aristotelian concept of habitus, which is unlike Bourdieu’s usage, as it pays attention to the work done to shape the ethical self by an agent as opposed to determinist, sociopolitical structures acting on the subject. She looks at the ethical emotion of fear, which is an epistemic tool for distinguishing good from bad and moves the person to right action. It is not just motivational—fear should also shape action, which through repetition shapes the self. In the end, Mahmood argues that ethical norms are scaffolding/potentiality, and that self-work by the agent needs to be done to shape the self. Women cultivate ethical selves as agents who work for what they desire, which may line up exactly with what society prescribes.

Uses positive ethics, based on discursive practices involving the body. Discursive practices acted on the body forms the subject. Personhood formed within these morality forming discursive practices (120). To understand the person and the authoritative moral structures, one must pay attention the body (120).

Subject formed through external practices. Internal shaped by external (121)

Piety: pious women must nurture desire to do pious acts with pious attitudes. Must shape your heart, the moral organ, to want to be pious. Discipline the self to hone moral capacities so they are acted out in everyday life (123-6).

“A close examination of Mona’s advice to the young woman reveals that the enactment of conventional gestures and behaviors devolves upon the spontaneous expression of well-rehearsed emotions and individual intentions, thereby directing attention to how one learns to express ‘spontaneously’ the ‘right attitudes.’ For women like Mona, ritual (that is, conventional, formal action) is understood as the space par excellence for making their desires act spontaneously in accord with pious Islamic conventions” (129).

“Thus, ritual worship, for the women I worked with, was both enacted through, and productive of, intentionality, volitional behavior, and sentiments—precisely those elements that a number of anthropologists assume to be dissociated from the performance of ritual. Importantly, in this formulation, ritual is not regarded as the theater in which a preformed self enacts a script of social action; rather, the space of ritual is one among a number of sites where the self comes to acquire and give expression to its proper form” (131).

Aristotelian ethical pedagogy: “external performative acts (like prayer) are understood to create corresponding inward dispositions” (135).

Key term is habitus, and she uses this in the Aristotelian sense instead of in Bourdieu’s more deterministic sense. “Habitus in this older Aristotelian tradition is understood to be an acquired excellence at either a moral or a practical craft, learned through repeated practice until that practice leaves a permanent mark on the character of the person. Thus, moral virtues (such as modesty, honesty, and fortitude) are acquired through a coordination of outward behaviors (e.g., bodily acts, social demeanor) with inward dispositions (e.g., emotional states, thoughts, intentions) through the repeated performance of acts that entail those particular virtues” (136).

The da’wa movement can be seen as reflective of Aristotelian ethics of working for moral attainment (137).

Goes over why Bourdieu’s habitus is less helpful, because it is based on societal superstructures and is deterministic; also, it is unconscious, as opposed to something people work for.

Example of fear—people train themselves to fear God’s power and to act with that fear. “[R]epeated invocations of fear, and practices that evoke and express that fear, train one to live piously (act as a spur to virtuous action) and are also a permanent condition of the pious self” (143). Sedimentation of fear in the heart—example of Aristotelian habitus (143)

How is the ethical fear cultivated? One way is through tarhib (144)

“As I have described, the mosque participants did not regard authorized models of behavior as an external social imposition that constrained the individual. Rather, they viewed socially prescribed forms of conduct as the potentialities, the ‘scaffolding,’ if you will, through which the self is realized. It is precisely this self-willed obedience to religiously prescribed social conventions—what is often criticized as blind and uncritical emulation—that elicits the critique that such movements only serve to reproduce the existing patriarchal order and to prevent women from distinguishing their ‘own desires and aspirations’ from those that are ‘socially dictated’” (148).

Because people cultivate their ethics, they exhibit agency (151)

Chapter 5

Summary

This chapter tries to lay out different modalities of agency that go beyond resistance. She starts with the formation of the virtue of shyness: woman cultivates the virtue of shyness by repeated action. For mosque movement women, the external shapes the internal, though the secular woman she describes sees the cultivation of shyness as passivity. Mahmood evaluates Judith Butler’s concept of performativity and concludes that it does not describe the mosque movement even though it is based on the concept of repeated performance for self-formation and creation of agency. Thus, to get at a better fitting concept of agency, Mahmood examines how women navigate marriage in a patriarchal society. She tries to show how secular women may take a different approach to marriage, but it is no more aimed at altering patriarchal structures than the mosque movement women. Mosque movement women are agents even in the patriarchal system because she recognizes her responsibility to deal with her situation even if she cannot change it. Mahmood finishes by looking at different ways women deal with/were taught to deal with husbands who are not pious. How does one practice da’wa in a patriarchal system if the husband disapproves? Women navigate the textual tradition to choose how to deal with it. This is another modality of agency that shows resistance/subordination way of looking at agency is insufficient.

In the last chapter, she ties together argumentative and embodiment as scaffolding practices (154).

Cultivation of shyness (155-157).

Action creates ethical feelings. Cultivating shyness by acting on the self so that it becomes part of the self (157)

Rejects Butler’s theory of performativity (repeatedly acting out norms, which forms the self but also leaves room for agency) as being applicable to the mosque movement (162-7).

Last chapter on agency shows the way women navigate within the patriarchal structures of marriage to show the ways in which they make choices within these constraints—different modalities of agency.

MM woman discussing marriage shows that even though they feel that they live in a situation that God predestines, they feel they have responsibility for how they act (173, 183).

“The constraining nature of these alternatives notwithstanding, I would argue that they nonetheless represent forms of reasoning that must be explored on their own temrs if one is to understand the structuring conditions of this form of ethical life and the forms of agency they entail. Note that the various paths followed by the women do not suggest the application of universal moral rule (in the Kantian sense), but are closer to what Foucault calls ethics: the careful scrutiny one applies to one’s daily actions in order to shape oneself to live in accordance with a particular model of behavior” (187)

living ethically involves self-monitoring and individual responsibility (188)

Epilogue

Basic gist: Let’s escape our closed mindedness that comes from liberal-progressive ideas and even though we are forced to use the terminology and analytical tools of the West, we should question our assumptions and destabilize the dichotomies we set up with respect to agency.

The questions that the audience members posed and the answers that the da’iyat provided assumed that a woman is responsible for herself and her moral actions – anguish felt by women was product of both moral responsibility these women felt and the limited scope of choices available to them within the Orthodox tradition (187)

The emergence and proliferation of Islamist movements are deeply indebted to modern mass education, practices of media consumption, and forms political and associational life characteristic of civil society- all of which are crucial elements within the historical trajectory of secular liberalism across the globe (192)

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 under the regulatory apparatuses of the nation-state, the piety movements efforts to remake any of these activities will necessarily have political consequences (193) As Charles Hirschkind argues persuasively, “modern politics and the forms of power it deploys have become a [necessary] condition for the practice of many our more personal activities. As for religion, to the extent that the institutions enabling the cultivation of religious virtues 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 be necessarily political if it is to succeed….it is not that the pietists have “politicized” the spiritual domain of Islam…but that conditions of secular liberal modernity are such that for any world-making project (spiritual or otherwise) to succeed and be effective, it must engage with the all encompassing institutions and structures of modern governance, whether it aspires to state power or not (194)

Charles Hirschkind The Ethical Soundscape

Key terms:

Da’wa: Islamic proselytization movement, aimed at making Muslims more pious. The da’iya is the proselytizer

Khatib: traditional preacher

I put notes for the introduction and then summaries + notes for each chapter after that.

Introduction

“As I will argue, the contribution of this aural media to shaping the contemporary moral and political landscape of the Middle East lies not simply in its capacity to disseminate ideas or instill religious ideologies but in its effect on the human sensorium, on the affects, sensibilities, and perceptual habits of its vast audience. The soundscape produced through the circulation of this medium animates and sustains the substrate of sensory knowledges and embodied aptitudes undergirding a broad revival movement within contemporary Islam. From its inception in the twentieth century, this movement has centered on a critique of the existing structures of religious and secular authority. For those who participate in the movement, the moral and political direction of contemporary Muslim societies cannot be left to politicians, religious scholars, or militant activists but must be decided upon and enacted collectively by ordinary Muslims in the course of their normal daily activities. The notions of individual and collective responsibility that this movement has given rise to have come to be embodied in a wide array of institutions, media forms and practices of public sociability. In doing so, they have changed the political geography of the Middle East in ways that have vast implications for the future of the region. This book examines the contribution of the cassette-recorded sermon to the revival movement and to the transformations it has engendered. Although the listening practices I explore inhabit a counter-history—counter to the modernist formations of politics and religion and the ideologies that sustain and legitimate them—this history nonetheless exerts forcible claims on the contemporary, and thus on the futures imaginable from its shores” (2-3).

Emphasizes that cassettes are part of the lives of ordinary Muslims, not just fundamentalists (Hirschkind takes a normative stance in the introduction and epilogue of this book that tries to disavow the assumption that Muslims are violent, prone to terrorism, etc.) (4)

Tapes are “part of a complex ethical and political project whose scope and importance cannot be contained within the neat figure of the militant or terrorist. Islamic sermon tapes have helped craft and give expression to a religious sensibility moored in a set of ethical and social problems” (4). Ethical tied to social and political. From this, political has sense of public sphere political (figure of militant or terrorist indicates this)

Cassettes can comment on the politics of the state, but is not aimed at political action to take on the state. “Rather, such political commentary gives direction to a normative ethical project centered upon questions of social responsibility, pious comportment, and devotional practice” (5). Political commentary causes people to think about how to act as pious people, not to engage in activities against the state

“In the popular neighborhoods of Cairo, sermon tapes are part of the acoustic architecture of a distinct moral vision, animating and sustaining the ethical sensibilities that enable ordinary Muslims to live in accord with what they consider to be God's will. Recorded and rerecorded, passing through worn-out electronics, bustling crowds, and noisy streets, the vocal performances resonate both within the sensorium of sensitive listeners and outside, around them and between them. In doing so, they create the sensory conditions of an emergent ethical and political lifeworld, with its specific patterns of behavior, sensibility, and practical reasoning. To call this lifeworld ‘fundamentalist’ to chalk it up to the contortions of the religious mind in a secular age, misses the point of this ethicopolitical project. The reduction enacted by such terms blinds us to a variety of ambitions, goals, and aspirations, foremost among them the desire on the part of ordinary Muslims to live in accord with the demands of Islamic piety within a context of rapidly changing social, political, and technological conditions. As I show in chapter 4, this attempt entails the creation of new discursive forms for collectively arguing about and acting upon the conditions of social and political life. The emergent public arena articulated by the circulation of cassette-recorded sermons connects Islamic traditions of ethical discipline to practices of deliberation about the common good, the duties of Muslims in their status as national citizens, and the future of the greater Islamic community (the umma). These deliberative practices are not oriented toward politics as it is conventionally understood: their purpose is not to influence the formation of state policy or to mobilize voting blocs behind party platforms. Rather, the activities that constitute the public arena I describe are political in a way close to the sense Hannah Arendt (1958) gives to the term: the activities of ordinary citizens who, through the exercise of their agency in contexts of public interaction, shape the conditions of their collective existence. As conceived by its participants, this arena constitutes that space of communal reflexivity and action understood as necessary for perfecting and sustaining the totality of practices upon which an Islamic society depends” (8).

Sermon listening has long been seen to shape the heart, the organ of “ethical sensibilities undergirding moral action” (9). Tapes now work in this tradition. Tapes can be listened to in private or in public, as they now saturate the soundscape. Hirschkind recognizes that these two modes of listening may do distinct ethical work on subjects listening, encouraging people to live piously (10)

Tapes bring the sermon to life in a world of mass media and new political situations (11)

There is a shifting acknowledgement of aural in post-Enlightenment world (13). Enlightenment thinkers saw sight as authoritative (14). There’s a fear of irrationality, rote memorization that comes with listening (16). Cassettes do not lead to lack of thought or terrorism (16-17). Occulencitricity continues post-enlightenment (18). We view aural as old, outdated, connected to a nostalgia (19). Though historical discipline marginalizes some senses wrt epistemic value, an openness to a variety of senses allows for flexibility and heterogeneity, which is well-suited for the plurality of modernity (20). As Steven Connor shows, listening can be an essential part of the urban world (21)

Unconscious form of work on the self, leads to ethical reasoning: “Played in public transport, in shops, garages, and cafes, sermon tapes reconfigure the urban soundscape, imbuing it with an aural unconscious from which ethical reasoning and action draw sustenance. In other words, beyond their utility as a distraction from toil, such media create the intensifying sensory background for the forms of social and political life that the Islamic Revival has sought to promote and extend. Sermon tapes enable their listeners to orient themselves within the modern city as a space of moral action, with its characteristic challenges, threats, and daily problems. The style of listening that tape consumers bring to the practice render this media form something very different from a popular distraction or an instrument of religious propaganda, difference, I argue, that has profound implications for collective life within contemporary Egypt” (22).

Auditory used for self-fashioning: “Not unlike psychoanalysis, as I will show, cassette-sermon audition is also a technique of self-fashioning predicated on the therapeutic capacities of listening, albeit one elaborated in ethical (rather than psychological) terms and in relation to a theologically based form of reasoning” (22-23).

Schmidt’s work shows importance of listening for “the fashioning of modern subjectivity” (23): “I extend Schmidt's analytic to the Egyptian context by exploring the way new media practices have helped bring about the discursive relocation of Islamic traditions within Egyptian social, political, and religious life” (24).

“The impact of sermon tapes on the perceptual habits of their vast audience, I argue, has produced a unique religiopolitical configuration that simultaneously compliments and challenges both the secular-bureaucratic rationalities of the state and Egypt's longstanding institutions of religious authority” (24).

Listening recruits the body, causing bodily response (25). “Ethical sedimentation” happens through listening repetitively (28).

“In this book, I seek to extend this rich tradition of anthropological inquiry into the senses in an explicitly political direction through an interrogation of the sensorium as both a condition for and object of an emergent form of ethical-political reasoning. It is increasingly difficult to sustain an image of political life that does not include recognition of the role of embodied sensibilities and prereflexive habits in shaping our commitments and reasons. Political judgments are not the product of rational argumentation alone but also of the way we come to care deeply about certain issues, feel passionately attached to certain positions, as well as the traditions of practice through which such attachments and commitments have been sedimented into our emotional-volitional equipment. As Talal Asad has succinctly put it: ‘The public sphere is not an empty place for carrying out debates. It is constituted by the sensibilities—memories and aspirations, fears and hopes—of speakers and listeners. And also by the manner in which they exist (and are made to exist) for each other, and by the propensity to act and react in distinctive ways’ […] Within modern society, popular media play an essential role in the crafting of such public sensibilities, hence their importance to modern political method. For some liberal scholars, the power of contemporary mass media to mold affects and desires represents an immense threat to democratic practices of political deliberation (see, most notably, Habermas 1989). By introducing nonrational elements into political discourse, the argument goes, popular media practices undermine the rational-critical character of public debate necessary to deliberative democracy. This claim, of course, also undergirds the secular judgment that religion should be confined to the sphere of private life, as the passionate attachments that are said to characterize religious belief corrupt the rationality of political discourse” (30-31).

Chapter 2

Summary

Hirschkind begins the chapter by discussing the pre-20^th tradition of emphasizing the listener over the speaker, the Sufi traditions that are the backdrop to today’s preaching techniques, and the importance of the heart as the organ of audition and moral comportment. In traditional sermon practices, the sermon is a technology of the self whereby people fashion themselves so that they can receive divine speech. Modernization challenges the ear’s ethical function, and the state comes to control religious institutions. Within the structure of the state, the written comes to replace the aural, the eschatological becomes outdated, and ethical listening becomes a thing of the private sphere. After 1952, the state favors rationalized, secular morality and preachers become subsumed under state authority; sermons become a site to convey information instead of ethical virtue. There is also the rise of new media. Hirschkind gives the examples of how new media (radio and tv) are used by Nasser and Kuthman (singer) in ways (for politics and entertainment, respectively) that draws on the traditional ethical forms but for new purposes. With the advent of the Islamic revival, new spaces are opened up for new incarnations of ethical listening. The growth of lay religious leaders who work outside the state sanctioned institutions are particularly important for this. In this context, sermon cassettes begin to be distributed and older forms of ethical sermon listening are reincarnated in new, mass-mediated forms.

Sermon listener must have ethical-aesthetic aptitude to receive the message from a preacher and reflect that in actions (37).

Listening to sermon as technology of the self: “An orator within this tradition requires not knowledge of audience psychology, so central to Greek rhetorical study, but rather a complete performative grasp of the true word, revealed in the Quran and exemplified in the sunna. Even more, he requires a listener, one whose acts of discrimination-at once moral and aesthetic-embody, extend, and enhance his discourse. This is not to suggest that a skillful khatib is not appreciated for the excellence of his sermon. Rather, I am simply pointing out how a specific view of the means by which words convince has undergirded a certain depersonalization of the utterance, its agency located more in God and in the disciplined ears and hearts of listeners and less in the speaker. The sermon grounds a collective discipline but also provides what Foucault terms a "technology of the self" (see Foucault 1983, 1988, r99o,1997), a set of procedures by means of which individuals can work on their souls and bodies to achieve a distinct ethical or aesthetic form, in this case, one conducive to a proper relationship with God. Through their own efforts, sermon listeners attempt to fashion themselves as auditory receptacles of divine speech. A khatib, in accordance with this tradition, does not shape his audience at will but serves as a mediator, providing the linguistic and gestural resources through which the listener can undertake the ethical labor involved in properly attuning his or her faculties to the word of God. Preachers, in other words, have a mediatory function and are not ultimately responsible for the creation of moral subjects. This task lies with God and the individuals themselves. Within the context of this tradition, the institutions and practices wherein moral action occurs and is assessed presuppose such an aural subject, whose particular sensory capacities, honed through auditory disciplines, give rise to ethical performances. While it is the responsibility of khutaba’ (preachers) to prevent corruption and the spread of erroneous behavior, they are not, properly speaking assigned the task of enforcing a normative morality, as each individual is ultimately answerable to God on the Day of Judgment. Indeed, it is not surprising that the narration of this event, one in which moral responsibility is radically individualized, has always been a staple of ethical preaching within Islam” (39).

Modernization relegates ethical listening to the private sphere (43). Post-1952 dominance of rational, European morality (44). Lots of changes in sermon content from early 20^th century, sermon aimed at forming citizen instead of Islamic ethics before da’wa fights against this (48-49). Also aural comes to be seen as untrustworthy and print is the preferred medium before revival (54). Revival opens space for cassette-based ethical listening, emerging in 1970s (55-8).

The moral authority of this media form derives less from the classical institutions of Islamic learning, now compromised by the secularizing policies of the state, and more from its embeddedness within the broad domain of da'wa, a sphere of religious activity claiming responsibility for the moral direction of Egyptian society in light of the state's failure to perform this role (59)

Chapter 3

Summary

Cassette listening takes place in informal ways and often does not require full concentration but still works to instill Islamic virtue. The tapes can fulfill the dual function of ethics and entertainment. What does ethical listening entail? Physiological responses arise from ethical listening: listening involves the whole body, especially the heart (the ethical center), not just the ears. The Islamic ethical tradition recognizes the importance of the body for ethics and emphasizes somatic (bodily) learning and memory. In the tradition of Quranic recitation, when listening, the body (not just the mind) must respond. Cassette tapes, as a new form of ethical listening, picks up on this tradition. Hirschkind brings in the concept of affect—the unconscious response of the body to listening, by which the body instills the ethical. Even when listening to familiar stories, the bodily performance is key to the ethical. But the body must be experienced/learned in order to respond correctly in the shared, agreed upon fashion. The body must be cultivated to respond correctly. There is concern today that sermon tapes don’t do correct ethical work because people confuse them with entertainment. This is seen as part of the crisis of modernization and the fracturing of the sites of religious authority. People are free from the established practices. There is a fear that people listen to the tapes but don’t bring that into life with ethical action.

Tapes do work on the person to bring about feeling of tranquility (68) or ethical therapy promoting morality within the hustle and bustle of everyday life (78)

Disagreement over the level of concentration needed for ethical listening—one man says you need to concentrate and one says that you didn’t need to concentrate and that repeated listening acts on the body to bring about ethical character (70-71). Conscious and unconscious both at work, major difference from Mahmood

Tapes can work to reorient the self toward virtuous life during the goings on of everyday life (73). Of sermon tapes that work this way to bring about fear: “Here, sermon media sustain one of the primary affective conditions of virtuous conduct, an active fear of God, consumed as both ethics and entertainment. As a device for the reanimation, modulation, and embodiment of pious sensibilities, cassette technology may be seen as a prosthetic of the modern virtuous subject: a mnemonic instrument that both enhances and supplements the capacity for memory, ethical feeling, and moral discernment while providing many of the pleasures of popular entertainment” (74).

There can be a physiological response to listening, especially to sermons eliciting fear or delight (75) work on the body done through sermon tapes, there is a “moral physiology that is invoked and refined” (76).

“I want to think of sermon listening as a practice predicated on the developability of the body as an auditory instrument. To "hear with the heart," as those I worked with described this activity, is not strictly something cognitive but involves the body in its entirety, as a complex synthesis of patterned moral reflexes. Indeed, as I describe below, the imaginative response evoked in the course of sermon audition runs along a progression from full-voiced interjections and dramatic gestural movements, to whispering and subtle postural shifts, to a slight moving of the lips and tongue, to an apparently invisible response, with all gradations in between. Listening invests the body with affective potentialities, depositing them in the preconscious folds of kinesthetic and synaesthetic experience and, in doing so, endows it with the receptive capacities of the sensitive heart, the primary organ of moral knowledge and action. Importantly, Islamic ethical traditions give explicit recognition to this kind of somatic learning, as we see in Badawi's invocation of the faithful listeners whose ‘flesh trembles’ who are seized by ‘a violent angst [that] shakes their backs,’ whose ‘chests are opened and relaxed'. Contemporary sermon listening, in other words, inherits and extends a practical tradition for the formation of a pious sensorium” (79).

Sometimes listener has to “assume the ethical disposition corresponding to the recited or audited verses: humility, awe, regret, fear, and so on” (80) and comport body in certain way, not just understanding the message but making body express its attitude (81) very similar to Mahmood’s picture of ritual

Quranic verse causes ethical response, and ethical situation makes one think to the Quran (81)

Tapes can also work at a more unconscious, passive way:

“Insomuch as sermon tapes are used as a kind of background or environmental sound, attended to in a relaxed manner, often with shifting degrees of focus, their reception needs to be theorized at the level of the somatic more than the programmatic. Instead of the fully elaborated sequences of gesture, speech, and bodily movement that accompany the act of Quranic recitation, tapes produce a modulation of affect registered kinesthetically and viscerally, one experienced as an ethically enhancing form of relaxation. In this sense, what is acquired through the practice are less honed dispositions, moral skills as delineated and organized within disciplinary regimes, than the somatic and affective potentialities from which such dispositions draw sustenance” (82).

Affect is Brian Massumi’s term, referring to “the myriad of emotional movements within the body occurring below or outside of consciousness, the vast sea of emotionally charged perceptual response that traverse the body without being assimilated as subjective content” (82).

“Cassette-sermon listening, I want to suggest, intervenes precisely at the level of what Massumi calls the affective. The relaxed attentiveness of this auditory practice invests the body with affective intensities (Jousse's ‘gesticulations’), latent tendencies of ethical response sedimented within the mnemonic regions of the flesh. The vocabularies of ethical affect, bodily sensation, and moral actions invoked both by preachers and sermon listeners, in this regard, function as instruments for objectifying and organizing sensory material, in accord with long-standing discourses on ethical cultivation. Following Foucault, we might describe the practice as ‘a technology for the constitution of the self that cuts across symbolic systems while using them’” (82-83).

Pushing back at Mahmood: “In their ability to mold both soundscapes and human receptivity, sermon tapes help fashion and sustain the sensory conditions for a modern Islamic ethics. One of my key arguments in this book is that such undisciplined disciplines play a far more pervasive role in shaping traditions, both religious and secular, than their more ‘serious’ (rigorous and systematic) counterparts” (83).

Some other listening requires more active response. There some listening experience that require active response by the listener (84-5). Often response relies on disciplined body who knows how to respond based on repeated experience (86-87). This is Mahmood exactly

“What I am pointing to here is that beneath the level of expressed belief and opinion, those I knew who participated in sermon listening shared a common substrate of embodied dispositions of the sort I have described as instrumental to the task of sermon audition. It is these sensory dispositions, I argue, more than a commitment to a normative rationality, that constitute the common ground upon which the discourses of a tradition come to be articulated, the "reflexes" that make arguments about the status of Quranic references meaningful and worthy of engagement” (88).

Concern that sermon tapes won’t lead to ethical action, people will view them as mere entertainment (92). Unlike music, sermon sets off moral response. Doesn’t define moral as opposed to ethical

Ethical works on the heart (97). Hearing not just done with the ears.

“The auditory apparatus consists of an experienced body in its entirety, one learned in the gestural vocabularies by which the sermon's ethical narratives have been woven into the autonomic and motor responses of this compound. Sermons impart not simply moral lessons but affective energies of ethical potential, a background of sensory and motor skills considered by those I worked with to be necessary for inhabiting the world in a manner appropriate for Muslims” (98).

Mahmood’s point too: “Rather, and this is an important part of my argument, an experiential knowledge of the gestural and emotive elements of the story constitutes a condition for its ethical reception. That is to say, one is capable of hearing the sermon in its full ethical sense only to the extent one has already cultivated the particular modes of sensory responsiveness presupposed in the discourse's gestural vocabulary, a vocabulary rich in affective, kinesthetic, and visceral dimensions” (101).

Chapter 4

Summary

Hirschkind introduces the idea of a counterpublic, where deliberation and discipline are interdependent as opposed to either/or. The private/public distinction is not strict, and existing in this counterpublic are the cassette tapes, a new form of soma-ethics. Cassette da’wa exists in a world of everyday people engaged in a common moral project who have informal discussions in public spaces across age, gender, and class lines. The public sphere merged with the traditional umma is a new form of public directed at divinely sanctioned comportment. The public exists in the context of national public life but is concerned with umma, the community beyond the nation. Cassettes, along with the call to prayer, form a soundscape that shapes individual affect, as do activities centered around the mosque. This cultivates virtues for proper moral behavior—the ethical soundscape and activities are ethical and they create a moral space for right action. Da’wa makes this moral order dependent on individual citizens, who shape the normative and deliberative counterpublic.

“Following conventional histories of the Protestant revolution, this scholarship has given particular emphasis to the role of print and other media technologies in propelling a democratization of religious authority. The new objectlike quality of religion and the universal accessibility of religious texts, it is argued, transform ritual speech into individual assertion, oral mnemonics into analytical memory. Equipped with these newfound sophistications and the autonomous reasoning that they facilitate, a growing number of individuals engage with and revise the religious traditions they have inherited. Scholars emphasizing the disciplinary functions of religious media, on the other hand, have stressed the ideological over the dialogic aspects of the phenomenon” (105).

“The resultant public is less a site of discussion than of subjection to authority, part of a project aimed at promoting and securing a uniform model of moral behavior. In short, the public arena constituted by the media practices of religious actors tends to be identified either as a deliberative space of argument and contestation between individuals or as a normative space for education in community-oriented virtue. The assumption is that the more truly deliberative a public, the weaker its disciplinary function, and vice versa” (105-6).

“While clearly structured around some of the assumptions of modern publicity, this idea of a ‘counterpublic’ rests upon a conceptual edifice in which deliberation and discipline, or language and power, are regarded as thoroughly interdependent. In contrast to a space for the formation of political opinion through intersubjective reason, the discursive arena wherein cassette sermons circulate is geared to the deployment of the disciplining power of ethical speech, a goal, however, that takes public deliberation as one of its modalities. Within this context, public speech results not in policy but in pious dispositions, the embodied sensibilities and modes of expression understood to facilitate the development and practice of Islamic virtues, and therefore of Islamic ethical comportment. For contemporary Egyptian Muslims who participate in this sphere of dialogic engagement, the definition and articulation of Islamic ethical norms and their embodiment as practical aptitudes are critically dependent upon the communicative practices and discursive conventions of this public arena” (106-7).

“As mosques in Egypt over the last fifty years became the site for new kinds of social and political organization and expression, everyday practices of pious sociability gradually came to inhabit A new political terrain, one shaped both by the discourses of national citizenship and by emerging transnational forms of religious association. In the course of this shift, forms of practical reasoning led to the tradition of the virtues became oriented not simply toward a notion of moral community (an umma) but toward what we would recognize as a public as well: the practice of the virtues and the deliberation of issues of public concern were fused together in a unique manner. The cassette sermon has provided the discursive vehicle wherein this interdependency has been most extensively and intensively worked out” (107).

“This public is a fragile and unstable accomplishment, the contingent product of the way embodied forms of historical memory have congealed within new social and political spaces as the visceral substrate for a modern Islamic ethics. I say fragile because the practices that constitute this arena are continually subject to rival and more powerful discursive framings that are tied to the market, the regulatory institutions of the state, and conditions of governance more generally” (108).

Deliberation and dialogue in public spaces about ethical issues (110)

Can listen to cassettes while doing other things and without having to concentrate like you would with a text (112)

“What joins the practice of delivering or listening to a sermon with that of arguing with a neighbor is a conception of the rhetorical force of ethical speech to shape character, as I outline in the preceding chapters. in other words, if in the earlier tradition the ethical mediation of divine speech required the voice of either the Quran reciter or the khatib in the mosque, now a deliberative public also performs this function. Deliberative and disciplinary moments, in other words, are thoroughly interwoven and interdependent within this arena” (113).

“To gather up the threads of my argument so far, the media and associational infrastructure put into place by the da'wa movement has created the conditions for a kind of publicness grounded in the deployment of certain classical Islamic concepts within a context increasingly shaped by the normative modes of discourse of a modern public sphere” (116).

“Deployed in a political context structured by the discourses of citizenship and nation, da'wa has come to fuse what are in effect two models of agency: one ethical, grounded in the Quranic moral psychology I discuss in chapter 3, the other embedded in the liberal notions of public that accompanied the states attempt to fashion a modern political order. A discourse on the ethical impact of pious speech on the sensitive listener provides the interpretive frame for a public sphere geared to the deliberation of the common good” (116-117).

“[W]hile the Islamic umma is fundamentally a moral space, the types of action it encompasses and that serve to delineate and sustain it have come to be structured by the normative mode of articulation of the public sphere. Inflected by the discourse on moral action organized under the rubric of da'wa, the new form of public is grounded in the tendency of ethical public discourse toward self-correction, toward an approximation of what is understood to be divinely sanctioned comportment. As politics, both national and global, impinge on the structures of moral life, the ethical discourses of da'wa necessarily extend to political topics. As a type of activity aimed at both revealing and realizing Islamic ideals of moral life through persuasion, exhortation, and deliberation, it is fundamentally a political practice. Indeed, da'wa emerges not at a point of commonality but precisely at one of difference, where a discrepancy in practice makes argument necessary” (117).

“The practice of da'wa does not take place within or serve to uphold that domain of associational life referred to as civil society. When the state acts in ways that foreclose the possibility of living in accord with Islamic standards promoted by the movement-such as forbidding schoolgirls from wearing headscarves, broadcasting television serials that show behaviors that are considered indecent, or cutting back on the amount of time dedicated to learning the Quran in schools-khutaba' use the mosque sermon to publicly criticize these actions, a critique that is then quickly distributed on tape. On some occasions, the broad mobilizations that have ensued have led the state to reverse a decision (as happened with the ruling banning the use of headscarves in public schools). Having said this, it is important to recognize the extent to which the nation is a political condition of the da'iya's speech: the position of utterance he inhabits and the contestatory discourse he articulates have been shaped by the concepts and institutions of national political life” (117-118).

“While the nation inhabits the da'iya's discourse as a necessary object of reflexive self-identification, it is as an object embedded in (and subordinate to) the broader moral project of an Islamic umma. As performatively enacted within da'wa discourse, the nation's claims on loyalty and identity are relativized in light of the demands of this moral project, a project understood to be irreducible to the concepts of territory, ethnicity, and collective historical experience upon which the nation is founded. The da'iya's narrative locates itself within the temporal frame of an lslamic umma and in relation to the succession of events that characterize its mode of historicity” (118).

“By dislodging print from its privileged position within the national imaginary of publicness, the cassette sermon, I want to suggest, introduces a rupture into da'wa's mode of articulation with the normative structures of public discourse. Tapes allow listening to go public, not simply as the figure of an ideal receptivity but as a model on which an emergent notion of the public could be conceptualized and imagined. By replacing print and the image of the private reader with resonant sound and sensitive hearts, the cassette gives new purchase to a history of reflection upon the virtues and specific agency of sound” (121).

“The common practice of playing Quran and sermon tapes in shops, cafes, taxis, and buses has also reshaped the moral architecture of such places. Sermon and Quran tapes tend to bring with them some of the norms of sociability associated with the mosque: when they are played in a public location, such as a store or a bus, they produce an environment wherein certain styles of speech and comportment become marked as inappropriate and are likely to draw public censure from others present” (124).

“Viewed in this light, cassette sermons emerge as more than just a technology of ethical self-fashioning. Such tapes contribute to the creation of a sensory environment from which the subject draws its bearings, an environment that nourishes and intensifies the substrate of affective orientations that undergird right reasoning” (125).

“According to many khutaba' in Egypt, most of the programs presented on state-controlled television engage and direct the senses toward moral dispositions, states of the soul, that are incompatible with the virtues upon which an Islamic society rests. In response, proponents of da'wa have sought to develop and encourage the use of alternative, Islamic forms of popular diversion” (127).

“As Beha's remarks suggest, one of the most pronounced effects of this agglomeration of activities and associations around the mosque in popular quarters has been the reinforcement of a normative civility, one grounded in the sort of ethical sensibilities foregrounded by popular khutaba' but also embodied in a variety of publicly enacted expressive forms” (129).

Smellscape also exists and shapes da’wa counterpublic (130)

“Virtuous conduct, in other words, is seen by the movement both as an end in itself and as a means internal to the dialogic process by which the reform of society is secured. Although a concern for individual salvation continues to inform the disciplinary exercises of the movement, it is coupled with an emphasis on the construction of an ethical sociability conceived as a vehicle of moral and political reform” (130).

“The da'iya, as figured here, must be an active and concerned citizen, one who, having honed the skills of public concern and careful listening, is able, through example and persuasion, to move fellow Muslims toward correct forms of comportment and social responsibility” (131).

“The prior cultivation of such virtues as friendliness, temperateness, and gentleness of speech ensures that da'wa, as a public act, is conducted in a calm, respectful manner, protected from the kind of passions that would vitiate the act and the social benefit that it seeks to realize. The adab of da'wa, in other words, entails not a simple suppression of the passions but their moderation or attunement in accord with an authoritative model of the virtues” (132).

Virtues and ethical dispositions create a moral space (136)

Da’wa makes moral order depend on ordinary citizens (137)

“The kind of public arena that has been created by the da'wa movement in Egypt is both normative and deliberative, a domain for both subjection of authority and the exercise of individual reasoning. As I have argued, it is less an empirical structure than a framework for a kind of action, one intertwining moments of learning, dialogue, and dispute as practices necessary for the moral guidance of the collective” (139-140).

“My argument is that we should not view da'wa as simply an Islamic rendition of the normative structure of the public sphere, one enabled and produced through an incorporation of Islamic symbols and culturally grounded frames of reference” (142).

Chapter 5

Summary

There are doctrinal requirements and traditional modes of oration, but sermons today are quite heterogeneous in style. This chapter highlights the extent to which mass media has affected sermon style. It goes through examples of how there have been shifts in khatib-audience relationships, the authoritativeness of the khatib, the relation of sermon to calendar date, etc. Also, new regimes of visuality and cinematic style have been absorbed by sermons: narration mirrors television news anchor’s narration. There are also various Sufi techniques incorporated. In addition, there is a new focus on contemporary political issues in the sermons.

“This refashioning of the sermon in commodity form and the increasing recourse to conventions used in the production of other media products have had an impact on the oratorical performance itself in a variety a ways” (144).

“In short, to the extent that the standards of sermon audition were (and continue to be) modeled on the Quran, with the sermon itself incorporating its verses, the benefits that accrue to the listeners (the positive effects on their souls) are not entirely limited to the particular kind of cognitive process we conventionally associate with ‘understanding.’ Sermon oratory works itself into the human compound, much like the stories of Benjamin's storyteller worked themselves into the flesh and spirit of their laboring audiences” (153).

Shaykh Kishk is famous for his use of visual realism in his sermon (“word as camera” style) (156-7).

“Kishk builds the sense of terror and the macabre so important in Islamic exhortation, but does so through a rhetorical form that presupposes a very different kind of ‘literacy’ and concentration from its audience, one tied to modern technologies of the image and a national public sphere” (161).

“The core of Shaykh Kishk’s art lies in his ability to render Islamic textual traditions into drama staged through such rhetorical devices as the theatrical curtain and the on-site investigative reporter” (162).

Tapes prompt listeners to discuss the relationship between preachers and the nation-state (167).

Sermon topics aimed at critique of contemporary life (168).

Chapter 6

Summary

Death is key to the ethical tradition. One must live in the shadow of death, “tasting” death during life. Death reminds people to live morally. Life should be lived as if death were now—eschatology should be brought into the present. This is cultivated in part by physical weakness and sickness, but also through sermon techniques, which bring spatial and temporal aspects of death into life but re-situated on the living body. The khatib reorients forms of popular media for the purpose of ethical instructuon. Sermons on death (which is part of daily life in Egypt) are mixed with calls for social reform.

“[A]n experiential knowledge of death is a condition of moral agency” (176).

Death reminds people to live morally (179)

Knowledge of death is epistemic condition for correct reasoning and acting, not supposed to acquire intellectual knowledge but to reform sensory experience to see with “dead eyes” (180).

Fear of death is ethical, imprints on the heart, allows for performance of moral acts (181)

Life lived as if eschatology were now. Individual bears moral responsibility, but it is mediated by the sensory landscape (184)

Suffering and physical ailment bring ethical benefit (186-7) body connects one to morals of eschatology

Judgment day—radically individualized moral responsibility (189)

Cassettes are a tool to “reflect on death” (203)

Epilogue

Purpose of epilogue is to preempt responses to his work that the Islamic Revival is fundamentalist and leads to violence. He reiterates that the Islamic Revival is “not a given socio-ideological formation but a contingent and shifting constellation of ideas, practices, and associational forms” (207). One shouldn’t discount da’wa as incompatible with interreligious cooperation. Da’wa tries to make the inherited tradition relevant in the present. He ends with a moral call to the reader to dislodge the entrenched negative attitudes about Islam.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe

--I have more detailed notes and extensive quotations from the Introduction and Chapter One; ask me if you want any of those citations. I got kind of lazy after that, and skipped Part Two (Ch. 5-8) because it's pretty superfluous in terms of Theory. Unless you're really into literary modernism in the Bengali middle class...So only the summaries from Intro-Ch.4 + Epilogue are up here. Also worth reading is Zizek's (admittedly selective and polemical) summary and critique of the book: cf. Living in the End Times, pp. 280-5--

Introduction

Summary: The way in which we write history, and indeed engage in social-scientific theoretical thinking on the whole, is fundamentally compromised by the silent, often unacknowledged and unavoidable referent of an imagined “Europe.” The project to provincialize this Europe is about articulating the non-unitary experience of political modernity which especially characterizes the postcolonial paradox: to be formed and to form the self as a modern political subject yet to remain in the waiting room of a history that has already been foretold (eg. in the case of India, constitutionally recognizing universal adult franchise from the nation's inception, without the prior guarantee of universal education). In order to write back a plural history of power into this unitary historicist narrative, which is inextricably linked to the idea of the political, we need first to question the universal nature of secular, homogeneous historical time, and reject the facile sociological explanation for gods and spirits as agents. Religion, to recall Mandair, mediates India's entry into political modernity; this book only partially touches on this idea, preferring to articulate alternatives in terms of the Heideggerian hermeneutic tradition, which pays close attention to the diversity of particular life-worlds, and acknowledging the indispensability of but moving beyond the Marxist analytic tradition, which deals in abstract universals.

Chapter 1: Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History

Summary: This chapter is a reworking of Chakrabarty's programmatic statement on provincializing Europe from 1992. The idea is simple enough: imperalist and third-world histories are written into a narrative of transition, which reproduces European archetypes of political modernity. Even in the case of Indian subaltern studies, the political subject is perceived in terms of lack, absence, incompleteness, which echoes an old Orientalist trope. The “Indian” subject is a paradox: split between a modern elite and to-be-educated peasantry, yet folded into a prefigured narrative of the cohesive nation-state; the violence and ambivalences which have accompanied these conflicts are too numerous in post-1947 history to recount. Rather than maintain this narrative of lack, we should attempt to read plenitude into the formation of the modern Indian subject, inasmuch as it is frequently articulated (through the quintessentially modern media of biographies, novels, etc.) in antihistorical, nonmodern ways—articulations which do not conform themselves to the metanarratives or teleologies of (European) history. A final insight of this chapter is that the project to provincialize Europe is grounded on a critique and transcendence of liberalism, which combines late Marx, poststructuralist thought, and feminist philosophy.

Chapter 2: The Two Histories of Capital

Summary: “Capital” in Marx is a philosophical-historical category, constituted by two histories. History 1 is a past posited by capital itself as its precondition, while History 2 consists of “antecedents to capital” which do not necessarily contribute to the self-reproduction of capital (63-4): in other words, the particular, diverse life-worlds of the worker. This latter history does not represent an alternative narrative to capital—that is, it does not occupy the position of a dialectical Other—but rather punctuates the totalizing thrust of History 1 (66). Through the reading of “abstract labor” in this chapter, the very category “capital” becomes a site where both the universal history of capital and the politics of human belonging are allowed to interrupt each other's narrative (70).

• "The idea of “abstract labor” also leads us to the question of how the logic of capital relates to the issue of historical difference. As is well known, the idea of “history” was central to Marx’s philosophical understanding of “capital.” “Abstract labor” gave Marx a way of explaining how the capitalist mode of production managed to extract from peoples and histories that were all different a homogenous and common unit for measuring human activity. “Abstract labor” may thus be read as part of an account of how the logic of capital sublates into itself the differences of history. In the second part of this chapter, however, I try to develop a distinction that Marx made between two kinds of histories: histories “posited by capital” and histories that do not belong to capital’s “life process.” I call them History 1 and History 2, and I explore the distinction between them to show how Marx’s thoughts may be made to resist the idea that the logic of capital sublates differences into itself. I conclude this chapter by trying to open Marxian categories up to some Heideggerian ruminations on the politics of human diversity." (50)

Ch. 3: Translating Life-Worlds into Labor and History

Summary: The politics of translation assumes a higher third term—such as the scientific H²O between pani and water—a measure of equivalence which makes generalized exchange possible. But reading historical difference back into, say, narratives of labor—the History 2 of Chapter 2—requires the abandonment of the third term: to think of translation as a process of barter rather than exchange. This chapter examines the academic, social-scientific writing of secular history as involving translations of the first kind, which are complicated by such practices as constitute a History 2: the participation of gods and spirits in subaltern histories, in which humans are not the only meaningful agents.

The subject here is the academic discipline of history, which, as a code, “invokes a natural, homogeneous, secular, calendrical time without which the story of human evolution/civilization...cannot be told” (74). The modern social sciences share this take recourse to this idea of time as “a basic building block,” and hence belong to the Newtonian model of “a higher, overarching language...a structure of generality, an aspiration toward the scientific” (75-6). However, the realm of “the religious, the supernatural, the divine, and the ghostly” challenges the disenchanted prose which social science seems to take for granted, as though particular gods could be explained by the universal language of contexts (76). The problem of translating “specific life-worlds into universal sociological categories” (78) is a specifically postcolonial one: one embedded in the Subaltern Studies collective's engagement with the question of social justice in capitalist societies. Chakrabarty singles out for critique the academic social sciences, because they participate in “a general economy of exchange made possible through the emergence of abstract, generalizing categories,” thereby obliterating “the tensions of irreducible plurality” which may be possible in such non-secular histories of labor as those of Richard Eaton's Sufi weavers (81). In other words, the very language of social-science writing is permeated by the impulse to generalize, whereas the gods and spirits (in this case, Tio and malik devata) defy this impulse by way of their singularity (83).

At this point, Chakrabarty appeals to “models of cross-cultural and cross-categorical translations that do not take a universal middle term for granted” (83). The “implicit universals that inhere in the sociological imagination” (85) results in a historicism which carries a “modernist elitism that silently lodges itself in our everyday consciousness” (87), and displays itself in bureaucracies and institutions of all kinds; yet even if their critique has to be secular, as Chakrabarty asserts, the disenchantment inherent in such critique places limits on how we narrate the past (89). Thus part of the project to provincialize Europe, and consequently, punctuate the universalizing, homogenizing thrust of global capital, involves being aware of the “scandalous aspects of our unavoidable translations” (91).

The chapter's conclusion is a kind of self-critical attempt to write “'difference' back into Marx” (92). Chakrabarty mobilizes his earlier exegesis of Marx's concepts of real and abstract labor to show that the world of heterogeneity to which “real labor” belongs cannot be captured within a secular historical narrative of commodity production, constantly challenging the “unity and universality” of capital and commodity (93). The subaltern historian therefore holds in his/her writing the subject of this alternative narrative, this “figure of difference that governmentality...all over the world has to subjugate and civilize” (94). Subaltern histories are still Marxist histories, since they happen “within the time horizon of capital,” but they always gesture at “something which disrupts the unity of that time” (95). In this sense we can read Chakrabarty as making the subaltern the agent of history, by questioning the limits of history itself.

Chapter 4: Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts

Summary: Minority histories, or “histories from below,” are basic elements of liberal-democratic struggles for inclusion and representation (97). They don't fundamentally question the discipline of history, which does not allow for non-historicist forms of historical consciousness to affect the nature of historical discourse. This is because “good histories,” or once-oppositional narratives which are molded to participate in democratic (or nationalist, or socialist) teleologies, have to have some minimal ground in “rationality” (99). However, “minority” itself is a difficult term, since it need not be measured numerically; we should have instead to deal with “subaltern pasts”: nonmodern relationships to the past, particular life-worlds not necessarily of the “minority,” which are subordinated to the modern impulse to historicize (100-1). Exemplary is Ranajit Guha vs. the Santal Rebellion: the anthropologist recourse to respectful distance (or Marxist reasoning of false consciousness) vs. the gods and spirits as real agents (102-5). No third voice can mediate between these two; they must both be held within “the gap...that signals an irreducible plurality within our experience of historicity” (108).

Does nonmodern way of being give us life possibilities for the present? Subaltern pasts, insofar as they are always our contemporaries, make us recognize the “disjuncture of the present within itself” (109). They are “signposts of the border” between the modern and the medieval, which we at once historicize and make contemporary (110). In fact, we are allowed to historicize only because we have the experience of the present as noncontemporaneous with itself: those medieval worlds are never completely lost (112). Disenchantment is not the only way of being in the world.

Epilogue: Reason and Historicism

Summary: The rational outlook of historical or anthropological consciousness does not allow the subject to investigate him/herself. Secular, historicist narratives, infused with the progressive ideals of Enlightenment thought, have relegated the premodern to the realm of irrational superstition, overemphasizing the chasm between the modern and premodern, and basically resulting in teleological, “uneven development” accounts. This tension can be observed in the writings of postcolonials such as Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Appiah, and D.D. Kosambi: “They refer us to the plurality that inheres in the “now,” the lack of totality, the constant fragmentariness, that constitutes one’s present” (243). Modern historical consciousness, the very condition of political modernity, speaks a desire to objectify the past as well as to be liberated from it (244). Historicism largely follows this relationship to the past: a sense of autonomy with respect to history. “Decisionism,” on the other hand, both involves freedom from history as well as respect for its constructive aspects (247). These are not mutually exclusive options. Something something Heidegger. We need to move away from vulgar historicism to the radical, irreducible, un-totalizable plurality of the “now” and of historical experience: to provincialize Europe by holding the European analytic and hermeneutic traditions together in an anticolonial gesture of gratitude (251-5). Fin.