gender - politics of piety, mahmood Flashcards
why have scholars dismissed bodily rituals
partly due to the fact that post-Enlightenment Western thought has focused on the ethical theories of philosophers such as Kant who presents an abstract form of morality that in being focused on duty and the categorical imperative, tends to ‘disregard the precise shape moral actions take’. On this view, the ‘form of an ethical practice does not help elaborate the substance of a moral system’
da’wa movement and Aristotelianism
The Da’wa movement objects to these ideas. Mahmood suggests that the Da’wa movement follows a different ethical system, one of “positive ethics”. This model, Mahmood argues, is Aristotelian - in this formation ‘moral virtues…are acquired through a coordination of outward behaviours…with inward dispositions…through the repeated performance of acts that entail those particular virtues’. This process is known as ‘habitus’ – the moral virtues are acquired through practicing a behaviour habitually.
2 disavowals - chapter 5
o first = ‘evident in my exploration of certain notions of agency that cannot be reconciled with the project of recuperating the lost voices of those who are written out of ‘hegemonic feminist narratives’’ (154)
o second = does not want to portray members of mosque as ‘subaltern feminists’ or ‘fundamentalist Others’
5 - agency
- need to understand how practices lead to attachment to patriarchal forms of life and how this produces the ‘necessary conditions for both their subordination and their agency’ (154)
- should view agency as ‘not simply a synonym for resistance to social norms but as a modality of action’ (157)
5 - al haya (wearing veil) and interiority
- ‘a feminist strategy that seeks to unsettle such a conceptualisation cannot simply intervene in the system of representation that devalues the feminine body, but must also engage the very armature of attachments between outward behavioural forms and the sedimented subjectivity that al-hayā enacts’ (159)
- for the women that Mahmood spoke to, wearing a veiling ‘did not simply express the self’s interiority but was the means by which it was acquired’ (161)
5 - performativity
- e.g. Butler’s example of drag queens
o drag queens are imitating the ideals laid out in heteronormativity and hegemonic gender
when performance ‘fails to approximate the ideal of femininity, Butler reads this failure as a sign of the intrinsic inability of the performative structure of heteronormativity to realise its own ideals’ (164)
intro - why we take a secularised conception of religiosity
‘This has to do not so much with the “superior” conception of religiosity that Protestantism embodies but with the inequality of power relations that characterizes the relationship between Western Christendom and its Others, the West and the non-West – an inequality that sets up the history of Protestant Christianity as the entelechy that all other religious traditions must emulate in order to become truly modern’
veiling as challenging Protestant ideas
• DW movement challenges ‘many aspects of secular religiosity’ such as the ‘Protestant conception’ that there is an internal and external religiosity and that whilst the external religious practices ‘might represent belief, they are not essential to its acquisition or expression’ xv
link between islamism and nationalism in veiling
- ‘The increasing interest of Muslims in Islamic rituals and practices such as donning the veil, performing collective prayers, and listening to sermons is understood to enfold existent forms of Arab nationalism into particularistic forms of religious belonging’ 118
- ‘continuity between Islamism and nationalism’ also concerns women – ‘both ideologies seem to cast women as the repositories of tradition and culture, their bodies made the potent symbol of collective identity’ 118
response to Kantian ethics
• Opposes this form of morality – instead proposes “positive ethics” where ethics is ‘not a contingent but necessary aspect of understanding its substantive content’ – looks at relationship between ‘elements of the self’ and ‘a particular norm’ so that ‘the specific gestures, styles, and formal expressions that characterize one’s relationship to a moral code are not contingent but a necessary means to understanding the kind of relationship that is established between the self and structures of social authority, and between what one wants, and what kind of work one performs on oneself in order to realize a particular modality of being and personhood’ 120
ritual - crying
- Important example is ‘the considerable attention mosque attendees paid to the act of crying during prayer as a mark of one’s devotion to God’ – crying during prayer is seen as ‘the ultimate sign of salat performed with consummate excellence’ – it does not ‘come naturally to the mosque participants, and they often discussed various ways of inducing this emotion in themselves while performing the prayers’ 129 (khushu)
- E.g. ‘many of the women…advised one another to envision that they were being physically held between the hands of God during prayer’ 130
hilmi on rituals
• For Hilmi, the ends (‘the goal of creating modern autonomous citizens’) ‘remains independent of the means she proposes (Islamic rituals)’ – rituals are ‘contingent acts in the process’ (could use other means) 133 and so she distinguishes between ‘essence and form’ (like the previous anthropologists – ‘that is, between an inner meaning conceptually independent from the outward performances that express it’ 133
mona on rituals
• Mona, by contrast, expresses that ritual actions are necessary means to achieving the end of ‘forming pious dispositions’ 133
mona vs. hilmi
• ‘Hilmi and Mona’s understanding of ritual action entail very different articulations of interiority and exteriority, despite their shared reliance on this dichotomy’ 133
Aristotelian model of ethical pedagogy
• Looks specifically at ‘Aristotelian model of ethical pedagogy…in which external performative acts (like prayer) are understood to create corresponding inward dispositions’ 135
• ‘habitus’ (‘adopted by early Christians as well as Muslims’) ‘is concerned with ethical formation and presupposes a specific pedagogical process by which a moral character is secured’ 135
According to this method ‘moral virtues…are acquired through a coordination of outward behaviours…with inward dispositions…through the repeated performance of acts that entail those particular virtues’
