Abstract
This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency.
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Notes
Liberalism is of course a complex historical tradition and its relation to the term ‘secular’ no more transparent. In this article, I use the terms ‘secular-liberal’ to refer to a ‘discursive space’, which provides a political and moral language in which to identify and dispute problems; a space to which such ideas as, among other things, individual autonomy, freedom, rule of law and equality are central (see Asad, 2009: 25).
I’m using revivalism for a broad array of Islamic movements whose efforts to ‘revive’, ‘revitalize’ or ‘reform’ Islamic traditions have been variously entangled with colonialism, decolonization, nation-state building and class and gender relations.
One could argue that the binary should be constructed as involving subordination/emancipation, as many approaches within, for example post-structuralist theory would not see resistance as necessarily counter-conceptual to subordination. However, in using subordination/resistance I want to suggest, in line with Saba Mahmood, that also those authors who are critical of what Butler (1995) calls an ‘emancipatory model of agency’ tend to focus on agency in relation to those operations of power that resignify and subvert norms (Mahmood, 2005: 21).
A number of studies have noted this tension between the national and the transnational and between culture and religion with respect to young Muslims in Europe. See for instance Andersson (2005), Jacobson (1998), Roy (2004), Schmidt (2002, 2005).
The ethnographic material I draw on stems from long-term fieldwork (several periods from the end of the 1990s onwards) and interviews with young Muslims in Norway who are active in Muslim youth and student organizations in Oslo.
This notion of ‘piety’ as cultivation of virtues, in the Aristotelian sense, has also been elaborated by Bryan S. Turner (2008), who, drawing on Foucault and Mahmood, argues that piety is par excellence a technology of the self – designed to produce religious excellence or virtues.
This particular conversation took place in 1999. All of these women were members of, or more loosely affiliated to, the two Muslim youth and student organizations where I did my fieldwork. These organizations attract young people between thirteen and thirty-five years with various family backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, nationality, social standing and religious denomination.
Monica Aarset later wrote a Masters Thesis (Aarset, 2006) on the subject.
Lien (2003: 212) bases her discussion mainly on conceptualizations of the self in Punjab in Pakistan, and focuses on the relationship between nafs and ruh – understood as ‘an incorporeal, transcendent and purely moral and spiritual intellect that after death ascends to God’. It is not my intention to dispute how these terms are understood in a Punjabi context, but rather the way in which Lien interprets them in relation to the issues of freedom, power and resistance.
It is interesting to note that Lien, like the young women quoted above, defines, ruh as superego and nafs as ego, in the Freudian sense, but without reflecting upon the potential transference of meaning that might thus occur.
Some would argue on this basis that also illiberal practices are tolerable in so far as they are the result of her own choice and free will (see Gressgård and Jacobsen, 2008).
The relationship between ideas of individual autonomy and authenticity is, despite their constitutiveness for modern understandings of the self and the way in which they both hinge on the opposition of inner/outer, and invoke notions of bodily integrity, also one of potential tension; reflecting, respectively, Enlightenment ideas of sameness and Romantic ideas of distinctness (Taylor, 1989, 1994). The purpose of this article is not to discuss the tensions in modern subjectivities this may engender, and I will speak here of autonomy and authenticity as aspects of dominant modern notions of the self.
The themes of materialism and egoism are not related in any straightforward manner to the ‘non-Muslim’ and the Western, however. Young Muslims often criticize the parental generation for being too materialistic and egoistic.
It should be noted that this latter understanding of the self is profoundly individualizing, in that the Islamic discourses address individuals and call upon them to effectuate a work on the self (e.g. disciplining desires, working on one's intention, doing individual dawa in one's daily conduct).
For a more elaborate discussion of intention, see Jacobsen (2010).
See Jacobsen (2006, 2010). Fadil (2008) makes a similar argument regarding ‘orthodox’ Muslim women in Belgium.
This insistence on choice can be read as an effect of particular forms of governing modern individuals, who, as Rose (1999: 87) notes, ‘are not merely “free to choose”, but obliged to be free, to understand and enact their lives in terms of choice’.
As Fadil (2008) has noted, the notion of ‘happiness’ leads us to a liberal-utilitarian register, one which underlines the primacy of one's own well-being.
In contrast to Lien who views rebellion as the only truly ‘free’ mode of agency for young women of Muslim minority background, the women tended to view ‘rebel’ as a reactive form of agency that was the result of particular conditions; such as coercion from parents and peer pressure, rather than of ‘individual choice’.
This was also the general attitude in the two organizations the young women affiliated with. The hijab was considered a religious obligation, but it was up to each individual to decide if, how and when to wear it.
This is line with the shift, particularly visible from about the 1970s onwards, that Gullestad (1996) has noted in Norwegian discourses on the upbringing of children, from a popular rhetorical emphasis on ‘obedience’ to an emphasis on ‘being oneself’, choice and independence.
Age was particularly important here, as the teenagers more frequently saw themselves as individuals against religious and social norms.
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Jacobsen, C. troublesome threesome: feminism, anthropology and Muslim women's piety. Fem Rev 98, 65–82 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.10