An Islam of Her Own

Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women's Islamic Movements

Sherine Hafez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814773055
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

As the world grapples with issues of religious fanaticism, extremist politics, and rampant violence that seek justification in either “religious” or “secular” discourses, women who claim Islam as a vehicle for individual and social change are often either regarded as pious subjects who subscribe to an ideology that denies them many modern freedoms, or as feminist subjects who seek empowerment only through rejecting religion and adopting secularist discourses. Such assumptions emerge from a common trend in the literature to categorize the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’ as polarizing categories, which in turn mitigates the identities, experiences and actions of women in Islamic societies. Yet in actuality Muslim women whose activism is grounded in Islam draw equally on principles associated with secularism.

In An Islam of Her Own, Sherine Hafez focuses on women's Islamic activism in Egypt to challenge these binary representations of religious versus secular subjectivities. Drawing on six non-consecutive years of ethnographic fieldwork within a women's Islamic movement in Cairo, Hafez analyzes the ways in which women who participate in Islamic activism narrate their selfhood, articulate their desires, and embody discourses in which the boundaries are blurred between the religious and the secular.

1
Introducing Desiring Subjects

Climbing up the stairs to the main hall of the building of alHilal, an Islamic private voluntary organization (PVO) nestled in the suburbs of Cairo,¹ I was met by the reading class’s familiar rhythmic recital of the Qur’an.² Filtering through the animated hum of conversation and the chimes of cell phones ringing from the far corners of the hall, voices rose and fell in perfect unison. The smell of baking wafted through the kitchen door, calling attention to the culinary skills of the cooking team who were preparing their baked goods for sale. Wrapped in cellophane, freshly baked konafa and baqlawa were carried out by a number of unresisting visitors who walked past me as I stepped inside.

Dalia, an activist at the gam’iyah,³ was waiting for me in her workshop where she trained women to produce and market crafts as part of the center’s vocational program. After offering me a cool Pepsi on that hot summer day, Dalia leaned against one of the long tables in the room as she casually chatted about her children. Her oldest son, now seventeen, was graduating from high school that year. “I worry about young people today,” she said. “The school system is in shambles. Parents who have schoolchildren don’t have a clue to what to expect next from the ministry (of education). Throwing her arms into the air, Dalia exclaimed exasperatedly, “The system of education needs to change.” I agreed, and our conversation veered to my own research.

Dalia and I had briefly discussed my work before, but she asked again why I was focusing on al-Hilal’s activism. I explained that I had become interested in women and Islamic activism when I read about Heba Raouf, who is a leading scholar on Islam in the Middle East and a professor of political science at Cairo University.⁴ Dalia seemed interested, though perplexed. Perhaps she needed reassurance that I would find al-Hilal’s activism interesting for the right reasons,⁵—and perhaps this is what prompted her to jump up suddenly and beckon me to follow, suggesting, “Why don’t you talk to Doctora Zeinab about all this? Come, come, she will be very interested.”

I hesitated, wondering whether Doctora Zeinab (doctora means doctor; Doctora Zeinab was a physician) would really be interested in my work. After all, I was there to learn about them, not the other way around, or so I thought, not realizing that only a few minutes later, these roles of researcher and researched would be completely reversed. In any case, I had no choice but to follow Dalia out the door and into the small crowded office of Doctora Zeinab, the director of the PVO. The researcher was becoming the researched, I thought to myself.⁶ Doctora Zeinab sat behind her desk facing the doorway, surrounded by a group of women activists.

My mind raced back to my first meeting with the doctora. At the time, I was working on a book on the notion of empowerment in feminist literature dealing with “Islamic women activists” (Hafez 2003). Laila, a friend of mine, had introduced me to gam’iyat al-Hilal and, after some initial reluctance, took me to meet Doctora Zeinab. Laila’s hesitation was due to the fact that the media had been leading a bitter campaign against the emergence of da’iyat, or “women preachers,”⁷ ridiculing women’s turn to Islam. Newspaper and magazine articles painted a portrait of da’iyat as naïve and misled, accusing them of being mouthpieces for conservative Islamist groups.

Doctora Zeinab looked up at me as Dalia recounted our earlier conversation to her. I was once again struck by the strength of her presence and her reflective gaze that seemed to miss nothing. When Doctora Zeinab spoke, she had a deep resonating voice that in its clearly enunciated Arabic claimed attention. Articulate with her words, strong in asserting her thoughts, she exuded an air of confidence and self-assurance that was as unassuming as it was impressive. These recollections sped through my mind as I, once again, received her steady gaze. The group of women in the room shifted their attention to our presence. Like Doctora Zeinab, some were dressed in long-sleeved blouses and a long skirt that reached below the ankles, whereas others wore long dresses. Most of the activists at the gam’iyah wore a hijab, or headscarf that covered their hair and neck. The variety in the colors and designs of the hijabs added interest to the otherwise austere surroundings.

Dalia finished introducing me, explaining that I was back to do more work on Islamic activism at al-Hilal. “Kheir … [good],” Doctora Zeinab responded, “the more interest there is in our work, the more awareness of those in need of help in society will grow.” “This is kheir,” she repeated while seeming to be contemplating something in the distance. There was silence as she looked around the room. Then Doctora Zeinab turned to me once again and pointedly asked, “Why do you do what you do?” Aware that something important hinged on my response, I paused, sensing all eyes upon me, and wondered in that split second about that myself. I realized that it was the thrill of unlearning that drives me “to do what I do” and the possibilities of other ways of knowing that brought me here. This prompted me to elaborate on my research and to describe my commitment to understanding al-Hilal’s kind of activism. Doctora Zeinab nodded her understanding and then in her deep voice addressed everyone in the room, “Kol wahid fina ‘ando hadaf [Each of us has a goal]. Wi kol wahid fina biyhaqaq alhadaf dah bi tariqtoh [And each one of us pursues this goal in his or her own way].” She smiled this time as she looked at me, and her face lit up. My journey, though seeking a different destination, was hers, too.

After these few minutes of conversation, I realized with a start that I was now sitting at Doctora Zeinab’s desk, that at some point someone must have offered me her chair in front of the desk, and that I must have sat down on it. The women in the room were now standing around us in a semicircle; they, too, were part of this exchange. It was then that it dawned on me that something in the room had shifted. A palpable bond was established during that brief exchange. During my conversation with her, Doctora Zeinab managed to bring us all together. A new energy encircled us, and this time I was a part of it. I was not merely an observer or simply a researcher, but like the activist women of the gam’iyah who stood with me in that small office, I was a desiring subject.

Subject Production and the Heterogeneity of Desire

The women of the organization of al-Hilal and I, shaped by an array of impulses and yearnings that drive the unstable production of post-modern subjecthood, shared desire as a productive force that makes possible who we are. Desire both creates and, in turn, is created by cultural and social experiences, by historical traditions, by state agendas, and by individual negotiations. In the moment just described at al-Hilal, the acknowledgment of desire for one’s own passions, goals, and needs seemed to speak to all of us in the room, however diverse our ultimate aims may have been.

Desire, a process that is always incomplete, fragmented, often contradictory, and unstable, explodes the analysis of subjectivity beyond the notion of the unitary individual assumed in modern liberal discourse. A focus on the production of desire as embedded in wider imbrications of colonialism, nationalism, and projects of modernization, secularization, and Islamization captures the complex range of subject positions among desiring subjects in women’s Islamic movements today.

An Islam of Her Own examines the desires and subjecthood of activist Islamic women by exploring the inseparability of piety and the political project. It is concerned with destabilization, inconsistency, and impermanence in subject production, identity formation, and cultural transformation in Islamic movements. Its objective is to enable an understanding of the heterogeneity of desire and subjectivity that embedded discourses of religion and secularism make possible, in scholarship on Islamic movements, transnational feminism, religion, and religious activism.

In considering the mutual embeddedness of religion and secularism, An Islam of Her Own builds on a body of literature that has continued to work on describing—albeit in different ways—this vexed relationship, which often takes the seemingly normative shape of polemics between secular modernity and Islam (Asad 2003; Deeb 2006; Mahmood 2005; Özyürek 2006). I extend the questions raised in this literature by asking how a theoretical concomitance of religion and secularism as mutually productive discourses can open new considerations of desire and subject production in Islamic movements. In so doing, my intent is to further the discussion of the mutuality of religion and secularism in the modern Middle East by foregrounding the heterogeneity of desire in my analysis of subjecthood. I ask the following questions: What are the processes that shape, shift, incite, and produce the desires and subjectivities of women in Islamic movements? How do women activists articulate their desires, and how do these desires mirror the complexity of negotiation, inculcation, and inconsistent appropriation and individual experience?

I argue that the desires of women activists in Islamic movements in Egypt today cannot be fully grasped through a focus on unitary ethical subjects based only on religious practice. Instead, I contend that subjecthood is varied, heterogeneous, and unstable. Subject making cannot be understood as a continuous process within a single paradigm. Whether inculcated through social and cultural processes or cultivated through self-directed and embodied practices, subject making should be considered as deeply embedded in wider, complex, and imbricated social and historical processes. As my point of departure, I take the situatedness of subjectivity and desire in the complex debates of Islamic practice, modernity, postcoloniality, and nation-state building processes in Egypt. My approach relies on an understanding of “desire” as the multifarious wants and needs that underlie subject formation. I understand desire to be an ongoing process rather than an ultimate objective. In this, I follow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (2004) notion that desire enables productive social change and, in so doing, undermines systems of power. This understanding enables the analysis to take account of subjectivity as a perpetual state of becoming. I adopt the metaphor of the “rhizome” in this book to describe heterogeneous and multifaceted desires. Rhizome is a term for directions in motion that are not necessarily linear (Deleuze and Guattari 1983). Because the rhizome has no center and no end, it can represent the desires of post-modern subjecthood, which defies boundedness, unity, and continuity.

My findings are based on six years of ethnographic research and observation of women’s Islamic activism in Egypt between 2000 and 2003 and between 2005 and 2008, which suggest that Islamic women activists are complex, multifaceted subjects whose desires take shape through imbricated notions of pious self-amelioration and secular political values. (My use of the term imbricated does not mean that Islamic discourse and secularism were at some point separate and have become imbricated. In fact, I begin with the assumption that religion and secularism are seldom distinct or separate.)

In my conversations with the activist women of al-Hilal, I became aware of how they privatized their views of Islamic faith and practice. To them, religion was defined as a personal relationship with God. Politics was understood to be beyond their realm. Clearly, they desired an Islamized Egypt, yet they saw the means to achieving that goal to lie within themselves. They thus used their own understanding of Islamic teaching and practice to determine how they conducted themselves in their communities, raised their children, related to their families, and implemented sustainable projects for the underprivileged. Desires informed by mutually productive discourses of secularism and religious ideology drove their Islamic social reform projects and their vision of an Islamized society. Despite their agendas for social change, al-Hilal’s activists did not view their activism as political or challenging to the hegemony of the state. Although they discursively expressed views that assumed a separation between the religious and the political, in practice their activism did not reflect these distinctions.

As desiring subjects, the activist women of al-Hilal that I came to know mirrored the projects of modernizing liberal secularism, nationalism, state-building agendas, and Islamic discourses in their own understanding of themselves and the world around them. Their narratives described personal pious journeys to self-realization. Listening to these narratives, I could not help but be struck by how unilineal and well rehearsed they sounded and, more specifically, how these stories harked back to the modern national discourses common in episodes broadcast by Egyptian television.

Lila Abu-Lughod calls these highly popular melodramas “dramas of nationhood” (2004). She argues that these television series foster a modern sense of self-awareness and interiority that emphasizes individuality in the general population of Egyptian viewers. Although they were originally conceptualized as encouraging secular modern thought, Abu-Lughod believes that television pedagogies of modern selfhood often feed into the modern identity politics of Islamism. Islamic activist women are grounded in these sociopolitical processes, and they are influenced by the media, globalization, and world events. They are living, breathing human subjects who are unbounded, temporal, and desirous and thus defy notions of unitary, fixed essences.

Centering on the narratives of stories to explore the desires that drive Islamic women activists, An Islam of Her Own examines the assumption that subjectivities are uniform entities consistently and separately formed apart from the constituting discourse of history. This book focuses specifically on the processes of modernization and postcolonial nation-state building to expound on the embedded, fragmented, and contradictory subject positions that individuals assume in particular historical moments and contexts.

Subjects of Islam and/or Feminism

The women of the al-Hilal private voluntary organization belong to a multifaceted movement of Islamic activism in Cairo.⁸ Their version of Islamic activism reflects an array of social reform projects ranging from sustainable ventures to erase poverty to pursuing the Islamic transformation of Egyptian society. They teach literacy classes, provide health and vocational services, deliver public sermons, and widely disseminate Islamic teachings and ethics among women and children in urban and rural centers. For the first time in Egypt’s history, women from various socioeconomic classes are working together on social reform movements on such a wide scale. Remarkable yet obscure initiatives have set into motion a social, political, and economic dynamic that has propelled these Islamic activists into the Egyptian public space where Islamists and secularists alike vie for control.

Since their appearance as interspersed groups in the early 1990s, women’s Islamic movements in Muslim societies around the world have occupied a rather ambiguous space in the feminist literature about women in the Middle East.⁹ Scholars have debated the extent to which women’s Islamic activism can improve their status in society; that is, whether “Islam”—as a religious ideology—can empower women. A paradigmatic divide separates two major strands that have grappled with this issue. The first strand argues that an Islamic emancipation of women is possible (Badran 1996; Cooke 2001; Fernea 1998), whereas the second is suspicious of an agenda for emancipation couched in religious terms (Moghissi 1999; Mojab 2001; Shahidian 2002).

The debate soon came to revolve around whether or not activist Islamic women could be considered feminist. Haideh Moghissi (1999, 146) posed the question that epitomized this development: “Is Islamic feminism a brand of feminism or a brand of Islamism?” To Moghissi, an Islamic feminism can be only an arm of Islamic fundamentalism and thus impedes, not enables, liberation. She reasons that women who participate in Islamic movements are the misled victims of a religious ideology. The underlying belief here is that religion—and particularly fundamentalist religion—is, by its very nature, oppressive. According to Moghissi, one therefore cannot be both feminist and religious. Deniz Kandiyoti (1996), discusses the futility of theory that attempts to join feminism to Islam. She contends that since feminism and Islam emerge from distinct historical and ideological trajectories, they cannot simply be rationalized as one phenomenon.

In sum, the approaches employed to discern the liberatory potential of women’s Islamic movements have tended to rely primarily on normative assumptions that binarize religion and secularism. Consequently, women who subscribe to an Islamic agenda are viewed either as pious subjects who belong to a traditional ideology that denies them the rationality and freedom accorded to modern secular subjects or as feminist subjects whose empowerment is contingent on their success in adapting their religious agenda to a liberal secularist one. The absence of a clear problematization of the imbricated relationship between Islamism and secularism obscures women’s desires in Islamic movements. The location of these activists in the matrices of power in postcolonialist processes of nation-building, modernization,¹⁰ and secularization projects¹¹ represents individuals engaged in religious movements as unitary ethical subjects. They are either resistant or oppressed, feminist or not, modern or traditional. Exceptions to these approaches include Minoo Moallem (1999), who offers a nonbinary approach; Salwa Ismail (2006), who places the largest emphasis on the need to historically, socioeconomically, and spatially contextualize Islamic activism; and Carolyn Rouse (2004), who offers an example of a well-contextualized approach to studying subjectivity in conversions to Islam in the United States.¹²

Because I view desire as heterogeneous and inconsistent, I acknowledge in this book the complexity of women’s subjectivities in their engagement with Islamic movements. Rather than beginning by ascribing a “religious” or “secular” nature to these desires, let us consider how processes of subjectification are always negotiated and incomplete. My analysis situates the discussion of subject production in religious movements—in our case, Islamic movements—within concomitant, embedded, and imbricated notions of secularism and religion.

What would these subjectivities look like if we dispensed with the dichotomous analytical categories of “Islam” and “secularism”? How would we articulate the desires underlying subjecthood that are part of Islamic movements in Muslim societies today? To overcome the binary between Islam and modernity that persists in discourse—both in the media and among Islamists and state political mouthpieces—Lara Deeb (2006), an anthropologist of Islam and modernities, proposed the idea of “the enchanted modern” as a useful theoretical idiom. Debunking these dichotomous views at the level of subjectivity, Deeb offers the “enchanted modern” as a metaphor for the pious Shi’i Lebanese, who are capable of grappling with the complexities of modern life by merging piety and “modern-ness.” This term is helpful in breaking down the binary assumption of an “antimodern” Islam and a “modern” West. But how can we explain the slippages, inconsistencies, and conjunctures in subject formation that the complex histories of colonialism, modernity, Islamization and state formation make possible?

In this book, I problematize the yearnings, wants, and “desires” of subjects engaged in Islamic movements as multifarious heterogeneous and discontinuous processes of subjectivity. My intent is to take the discussion of desire beyond dualities, to allow desires to speak through their subjects and not through the analytical ca...