Abstract
Through an ethnographic account of a social reform project led by Islamic activist women in the village of Mehmeit in rural Egypt, this article analyses women's Islamic activism as a form of worship. Women's experiences of activism are at the centre of this account, which highlights their attempts to economically and socially develop a destitute rural community. Their development ideals mirror the embedded principles of liberal secular modernity and offer a tangible example of the concomitance of these so-called binaries of religion and secularism in women's religious activism. Normative assumptions regarding religion and secularism as two binary constructs have largely dictated a monolithic view of women who engage in Islamic activism as religious subjects primarily devoted to a spiritual, internal faith. Persistent models of religious selves engaged in a continuous exercise of self-fashioning towards a fixed ‘religious ideal’ overlook the complexity and seamlessness of the desires that animate these subjectivities. Moreover, it is inaccurate to represent participants in Islamic activism as homogenized into one overarching group that adheres to standardized religious membership criteria. Discourses of modernity have also constructed separate spheres of what is defined as religion and secularism. Yet, these spheres, in practice, are not always so neatly demarcated as they are in modern principles. Societies shaped by the historical and temporal dynamics of colonialism, modernization, secularization and nation building projects present more complex and heterogeneous forms of subjectivities in their members. This article illustrates how a theoretical concomitance of religion and secularism opens up new possible considerations of women's activism in Islamic movements. The author argues that the desires and subjectivities of Islamic women that inform their activism are ultimately linked to the historical emergence of secularism and state modernization schemes aimed at transforming Muslim subjects into modern citizens of liberal democracies.
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Notes
Private Voluntary Organizations or gami’yat are regulated by the Ministry of Social Affairs (MOSA) by means of Law 32 of 1964. PVOs are considered a sub-category of the larger system of NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations).
Forms of Islamic piety, practice and activism.
Gam’iya (singular feminine; gam’iyat, plural) is an association, like al-Hilal.
Consequently, this paper will primarily deal with the discourses of the activist women Amal and Samira to drive at the desires that animate them. This is not intended to silence the village women or to reinscribe a form of hierarchy over them. An examination of the subjectivities of the village women and the impact of Al Hilal's reform on their lives will have to await future study.
Although Amal and Samira are in many ways similar to the majority of the women activists at Al Hilal (the larger group of women activists who volunteer at Al Hilal reflects a degree of diversity among the ages of the women and their social and educational backgrounds) my intent is not to depict them as a ‘type’.
Middle class families in Egypt do not send their children to public schools which are reserved for the very poor in society. Upwardly mobile, many of these families seek schooling that teaches a foreign language fluently, either English or French and prepares their students for high ranking colleges.
What I mean by ‘desire’ is the multifarious wants and needs that underlie subject formation. Desire here is understood to be an ongoing process rather than an ultimate objective.
Figures from a 2005 study by IFAD, the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
shari’a is Islamic law and fiqh is Islamic jurisprudence.
Water tobacco pipe.
A feddan is a unit of land close to an acre.
A long, wide garment; Egypt's national dress.
‘The righteous women are obedient to their husbands’, the Prophet is quoted by Ibn Katheer after Ibn Abbas. Ibn Katheer is one of the principal sources on Islamic interpretation in Egypt.
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Hafez, S. women developing women: Islamic approaches for poverty alleviation in rural Egypt. Fem Rev 97, 56–73 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2010.38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2010.38