An Enchanted Modern

Gender and Public Piety in Shi'i Lebanon

Lara Deeb

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400840786
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamische Theologie

Based on two years of ethnographic research in the southern suburbs of Beirut, An Enchanted Modern demonstrates that Islam and modernity are not merely compatible, but actually go hand-in-hand. This eloquent ethnographic portrayal of an Islamic community articulates how an alternative modernity, and specifically an enchanted modernity, may be constructed by Shi'I Muslims who consider themselves simultaneously deeply modern, cosmopolitan, and pious.
In this depiction of a Shi'I Muslim community in Beirut, Deeb examines the ways that individual and collective expressions and understandings of piety have been debated, contested, and reformulated.
Women take center stage in this process, a result of their visibility both within the community, and in relation to Western ideas that link the status of women to modernity. By emphasizing the ways notions of modernity and piety are lived, debated, and shaped by "everyday Islamists, " this book underscores the inseparability of piety and politics in the lives of pious Muslims.

PART ONE

Encounters, Approaches, Spaces, Moments

1.1. An orphan sign in front of a mosque in al-Dahiyya.

INTRODUCTION

Pious and/as/is Modern

HAJJEH UMM ZEIN shook her hand at the television and said emphatically, “I can’t believe this! What is this backwardness?!”¹ Her daughter and I were sitting across the living room, talking about a charity event we had recently attended. “What, Mama?” “Look at this! Where in Islam does it tell them to waste their time on something empty/useless (shīfā

ī) like this? This is not Islam!” We turned toward the muted television. An image of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan destroying two large statues of the Buddha filled the screen, the CNN logo at the bottom. I picked up the remote and raised the volume to hear and translate the accompanying commentary, which was expressing the dismay of the world, and especially the West, at this act of destruction. The Taliban were described as Islamic fundamentalists, a characterization with which my companions took issue in a particular way. As they explained to me, the CNN reporter was correct to label them “extremists” (muta

arrifīn), but was wrong to associate them with Islam, because “this backwardness is not true Islam.”²

These two women are pious Shi‘i Muslims who live in the southern suburbs of Beirut,³ an area known as al-Dahiyya, where I conducted field research for twenty-two months between 1999 and 2001.⁴ They are loosely associated with Hizbullah (literally, Party of God), a Lebanese Shi‘i Islamic political party. In the eyes of many North Americans and in the U.S. media, my friends in al-Dahiyya fell into the same general category as the Taliban: religious fundamentalists who are staunchly antimodern. This characterization reflects two of the assumptions I aim to dislodge in the chapters that follow: that Islamism is static and monolithic, and that Islam and modernity are incompatible.

The contemporary moment is one during which public religiosities have emerged across the globe: Christian fundamentalists in the United States,⁵ liberation theologies in Latin America, Hindu fundamentalisms in India, and ultraorthodox Judaism in Israel are but a few of the more prominent non-Islamic examples. Such publicly engaged religiosities have contributed to the collapse of the notion that religion and modernity are incompatible. Yet that notion persists in relation to Islam and was exacerbated after the events of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath. Various formations of “political Islam” or “Islamism” have come to represent the quintessential other, the antimodern antithesis to a supposedly secular West.⁶ Yet many public Islams are part of this contemporary moment, when it has become eminently possible to imagine various modernities (including Christian ones within the United States) as enchanted in the Weberian sense, and as compatible with and potentially even dependent on pieties.⁷ The pages that follow explore the multiple intersections between ideas and practices of modernity and of piety in a Shi‘i Muslim community in al-Dahiyya.

My goals in this book are twofold. First, I aim to unravel the complexity around how pious Shi‘i Muslims understand “being modern”⁸ and how they engage with and deploy various discourses and ideas about modern-ness.⁹ These include discourses that they associate with a singular Western modernity,¹⁰ as well as those rooted in their own emphasis on pious or enchanted ways of being modern. Two major points of confrontation emerge: the opposition between secularity and religiosity and the struggle to define gender roles and ideal womanhood. Rather than points of challenge or rejection, these are points of ambivalence and negotiation, though always in the context of the power of Western discourses and the political stakes of being modern in the contemporary world.

As we will see, the core of this enchanted modern is a dual emphasis on both material and spiritual progress as necessary to modern-ness. Spiritual progress in particular is viewed by pious Shi‘is as the necessary component in providing a viable alternative to the perceived emptiness of modernity as manifested in the West. I suggest that when religiosity is incorporated into modern-ness in this way, the stakes of being pious change. The dualistic notion of progress and the global political context in which it has emerged have consequences for faith and morality on the personal level, on people’s quotidian expressions and experiences of piety. These consequences are related to the notion of spiritual progress as a move “forward,” away from “tradition” and into a new kind of religiosity, one that involves conscious and conscientious commitment.

This brings me to my second goal: to explore the new forms of piety—especially publicly performed piety—that have taken root in this community over the past three decades, and the ways that the normativization of public piety affects people’s—especially women’s—lives. It is perhaps no surprise that it is women who claim center stage in this process, as women’s practices and morality have often been constructed as necessary to collective identities.¹¹ In al-Dahiyya, women’s public piety has been incorporated as both necessary to and evidence of the enchanted modern. For this reason, as I depict the daily and seasonal dynamics of public piety, I am especially concerned with the ways that engagement with the question of how to be modern has significant effects for understandings and expressions of women’s piety.

We need ethnography in order to understand the local dynamics of what has been variously called “Islamization,” “Islamic fundamentalism,” “Islamism,” and so on.¹² Much has been made of these terms and movements with regard to their effects on national and international politics. This literature is broad in scope, covering large swaths of time and space, and official political and religious discourses. With the glaring exception of work on women and especially the veil,¹³ less attention has been given to the everyday, to the different ways that new understandings of Islam are a part of people’s lives, and to changes in the ways people pray, interact, mourn, and give—the ways that they practice and perform piety.¹⁴ By maintaining an ethnographic focus on the ways notions of modern-ness and piety are lived, debated, and shaped by “everyday Islamists,” I hope to demonstrate the complexity of those engagements and underscore the inseparability of religion and politics in the lives of pious Muslims. By looking at these complex daily enmeshments of piety and politics, we will see that Islam is not in the service of politics, nor are politics determined solely by Islam. Only by holding both in view—undoing their separation into discrete categories (a separation characteristic of secular notions of the modern)—can we come to a more complete understanding of the pious modern.

The chapters that follow constitute an ethnography of a pious Shi‘i community in Beirut, and the discourses, practices, and understandings that underpin daily entanglements of piety and modernity. In chapter 1, I depict al-Dahiyya, the area of Beirut where the urban heart of the Shi‘i pious modern lies, in order to excavate the visual, aural, and seasonal transformation of this public space into one of piety. Through this introduction to al-Dahiyya we see the ways the pious modern saturates the area, evidence of its visibility on the national stage. I then step back in chapter 2, and provide some crucial history and background, especially concerning the institutionalization of the Lebanese Shi‘i Islamic movement over the past three decades. We will see how religion emerged as a mobilizing factor for Lebanese Shi‘is in response to the failures of the left, the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, and the Israeli invasions and occupation of Lebanon.

The focus of chapter 3 is how religious practices and discourses—in particular those of what I term “authenticated” Islam—permeate daily life in ways that are considered new. I consider embodied and discursive forms of piety, as they emerge as both public markers of personal faith and markers of the spiritual progress of the community. In chapter 4 I take a closer look at one religious season, known as Ashura—the annual commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and one of the most important figures in Shi‘ism. The transformation that has occurred in Ashura and the commemoration’s importance as a contemporary narrative framework for living public piety provides a case study through which to explore the shift to authenticated Islam in all its complexity.

In chapter 5, I take up women’s volunteerism as the vehicle through which women’s piety is most clearly brought into the public realm. Women’s community service activities are discussed as crucial to both material and spiritual progress. I also consider the ways that piety and politics, as well as humanitarian sentiment and historical models like those of Ashura, merge to motivate women’s public participation. Chapter 6 builds on this discussion with an emphasis on the ways gender is implicated in public piety and the pious modern. I explore how public piety is cast as women’s jihād and the implications of its imperative on women’s lives, as well as the relationship between women’s visibility and ideas about modern-ness. Generational differences and the concomitant gaps in public piety are the subject of the final chapter, which concludes with a revisiting of the pious modern ideal in the contemporary context.

In the remainder of this introduction, I provide the setting for the chapters that follow—not in terms of the spatial or temporal terrain, but in terms of a conceptual geography, the methodological, theoretical and positional grounds on which this book rests. It goes without saying that readers bring different backgrounds and desires to texts. While this book can be read as a depiction of life in an Islamist community, it is the conceptual deployments around the notion of being pious and modern that most interest me. Indeed, it is those deployments that constitute the boundaries of the community itself.

A “COMMUNITY” BOUND(ED) BY PIETY

One of the complexities of urban fieldwork is that the research population is often defined in nongeographical and rather imprecise ways. The Shi‘i pious modern is not a community clearly bounded by space. My interlocutors could generally be described based on residence or work in al-Dahiyya; however, that characterization erases the diversity of that area of Beirut. “Al-Dahiyya” also encompasses many neighborhoods in the southern suburbs of Beirut, and my research was especially concentrated in four of them. As such, it is not accurate or useful to characterize this study as one of “al-Dahiyya” as such.

Other Lebanese often refer to pious Shi‘i Muslims—or all Shi‘i Muslims for that matter—as a “community.” In the latter case, this denotes a sectarian group in the country, while in the former it frequently involves inaccurate generalizations about the political party Hizbullah as representative of all pious Lebanese Shi‘i Muslims. A...