Appendix: The Story of Abir

The pursuit of piety often subjected the mosque participants to a contradictory set of demands, the negotiation of which often required maintaining a delicate balance between the moral codes that could be transgressed and those that were mandatory. One common dilemma the mosque participants faced was the opposition they encountered to their involvement in the da’wa activities from their immediate male kin, who, according to the Islamic juristic tradition, are supposed to be the guardians of women’s moral and physical well-being. In order to remain active in the field of da’wa, and sometimes even to abide by rigorous standards of piety, these women often had to go against their male kin, who exercised tremendous authority in their lives, authority that was sanctioned not only by divine injunctions, but also by Egyptian custom.

Consider for example the struggles a woman called Abir had with her husband regarding her involvement in da’wa activities. I had met Abir during one of the lessons delivered in the low-income Ayesha mosque and, over a period of a year and a half, came to know her and her family quite well. Abir was thirty years old and had three children at the time. Her husband was a lawyer and worked two jobs in order to make ends meet. Abir would sew clothes for her neighbors to supplement their income, and also received financial help from her family, who lived only a few doors down from her. Like many young women of her class and background, Abir was not raised to be religiously observant, and showed me pictures from her youth when she, like her neighbourhood girls, wore short skirts and makeup, flaunting the conventions of modest comportment. Abirt recounted how, as a young woman, she had seldom performed any of the obligatory acts of worship and, on the occasion when she did, she did so more out of custom (‘ada) than out of an awareness of all that was involved in such acts. Only in the last several years had Abir become interested in issues of piety, an interest she pursued actively by attending mosque lessons, reading the Quran, and listening to taped religious sermons that she would borrow from a neighborhood kiosk. Over time, Abir became increasingly more diligent in the performance of religious duties (including praying five times a day and fasting during Ramadan). She donned the headscarf, and then, after a few months, switched to the full body and face veil (niqab). In addition, she stopped socializing with Jamal [her husband]’s male friends and colleagues, refusing to help him entertain them at home.

Abir's transformation was astonishing to her entire family, but it was most disturbing to her husband, Jamal. Jamal was not particularly religious, - even though he considered himself a Muslim - if an errant one. He seldom performed any of his religious obligations and, much to Abir's consternation, sometimes drank alcohol and indulged his taste for X-rated films. Given his desire for upward mobility - which required him to appear (what Abir called) “civilized and urbane” in front of his friends and colleagues - Jamal was increasingly uncomfortable with the orthodox Islamic sociability his wife seemed to be cultivating at an alarming rate, the full face and body veil (niqab) being its most “backward” sign. He was worried, and let Abir know in no uncertain terms that he wanted a more worldly and stylish wife who could facilitate his entry and acceptance into a class higher than his own.

Things became far more tense between them when Abir enrolled in a two year program at a non-governmental institute of dawa so she could train to become a daiya [teacher/ preacher]. She had been attending the local mosque lessons, and felt that she would make a more effective teacher than the local daiyat if she had the proper training. Jamal did not take her seriously at first, thinking that she would soon grow tired of the study this program required, coupled with the long commute and daily child care and housework. But Abir proved to be resolute and tenacious: she knew that if she was lax in her duties toward the house, her children, or Jamal, she did not stand a chance. So she was especially diligent in taking care of all household responsibilities on the days she attended the dawa institute, and even took her son with her so that Jamal would not have to watch him when he returned from work.

Jamal tried several tactics to dissuade Abir. He learned quickly that his sarcastic remarks about her social “backwardness” did not get him very far: Abir would retort by pointing out how shortsighted he was to privilege his desire for worldly rewards over those in the Hereafter. She would also ridicule his desire to appear “civilized and urbane,” calling it a blind emulation of Western values. Consequently, Jamal changed his tactic and started to use religious arguments to criticize Abir, pointing out that she was disobeying Islamic standards of proper wifely conduct when she disobeyed the wishes and commands of her husband. He would also occasionally threaten to take a second wife, as part of his rights as a Muslim man, if she did not change her ways. On one occasion, when he had just finished making this threat in front of her family and myself, Abir responded by saying, “You keep insisting on this right God has given you [to marry another woman]. Why don't you first take care of His rights over you?” It was clear to everyone that she was talking about Jamal's laxity in the performance of prayers, particularly since just an hour before, Abir had asked him, as the man of the household, to lead the evening prayer - a call he had ignored while continuing to watch television. Abir had eventually led the prayers herself for the women present in the house. Jamal was silenced by Abir's retort, but he did not refrain from continuing to harass her. At one point, after a particularly harsh argument between the two of them, I asked Abir, when we were alone, if she would consider giving up her dawa studies due to Jamal's opposition. She answered resolutely, “No! Even if he took an absolute stand on the issue, I would not give up dawa.”

In response to Jamal's increasing pressure, Abir adjusted her own behavior. Much to her family's surprise, she became uncharacteristically gentle with Jamal, while using other means of persuasion with him. In particularly tense moments, she would at times cajole or humor him, and at times embarrass him by taking the higher moral ground (as in the scene just described). She also started to pray regularly for Jamal to his face, pointedly asking for God's pardon and blessings, not only in this life but in the Hereafter. The phrase “rabbinna yihdik, ya rabh!” (May our Lord show you the straight path, O Lord!) became a refrain in her interactions with Jamal. Sometimes she would play tape recorded sermons at full volume in the house, especially on Fridays when he was home, that focused on scenes of death, tortures in hell, and the day of final reckoning with God. Thus, in order to make Jamal feel vulnerable, Abir invoked destiny and death (reminding him of the Hereafter when he would face God), urging him to accord these their due by being more religiously observant.

All of these strategies eventually had a cumulative effect on Jamal and, even though he never stopped pressuring Abir to abandon her studies at the dawa institute, the intensity with which he did so declined. He even started to pray more regularly, and to visit the mosque occasionally with her. More importantly for Abir, he stopped indulging his taste for alcohol and X-rated films at home.

What is important to note in this account is that none of Abir’s arguments would have had an effect on Jamal had he not shared with her some sort of a commitment to their underlying assumptions—such as belief in the Hereafter, the inevitability that God’s wrath will be unleashed on those who habitually disobey His commands, and so on. Abir’s persuasion worked with Jamal in part because he considered himself to be a Muslim, albeit one who was negli-gent in his practice and prone to sinful acts. As an example of this, even when he did not pray in response to her repeated enjoinders, he did not offer a rea-soned argument for his refusal in the way an unbeliever might have when faced with a similar situation. Certain shared moral orientations structured the possibilities of the argument, and thus the shape of the conflict, between them. When confronted with the moral force of Abir’s arguments, Jamal could not simply deny their truth. As Abir once explained to me, for Jamal to reject her moral arguments would be tantamount “to denying God’s truth, something even he is not willing to risk.” The force of Abir’s persuasion lay partly in her perseverance, and partly in the tradition of authority she invoked to reform her husband, who was equally—if errantly—bound to the sensibilities of this tradition. In other words, Abir’s effectiveness was not an individual but a collaborative achievement, a product of the shared matrix of back-ground practices, sensibilities, and orientations that structured Jamal and Abir’s exchanges.

Secondly, it is also important to note that Abir’s enrollment in the da’wa institute against the wishes of her husband would not be condoned by major-ity of the da(iyat and Muslim jurists. This is because, as I explained in chapter 2, while da’wa is regarded a voluntary act for women, obedience to one’s husband is considered an obligation to which every Muslim woman is bound. Abir was aware of the risks she was taking in pursuing her commitment to da’wa: Jamal’s threats to divorce her, or to find a second wife, were not entirely empty since he was within his rights as a Muslim man to do so in the eyes of the shari’a. Abir was able to hold her position in part because she could claim a higher moral ground than her husband. Her training in da(wa had given her substantial authority from which to speak and challenge her husband on is-sues of proper Islamic conduct. For example, as she learned more about the modern interpretation of da(wa from the institute where she attended classes, she started to justify her participation in da(wa using the argument, now popular among many Islamist thinkers (see chapter 2), that da’wa was no longer considered a collective duty but an individual duty that was incumbent upon each and every Muslim to undertake—a change that had come about precisely because people like Jamal had lost the ability to know what it meant to live as Muslims.[1] Paradoxically, Abir’s ability to break from the norms of what it meant to be a dutiful wife were predicated upon her learning to perfect a tradition that accorded her a subordinate status to her husband. Abir’s divergence from approved standards of wifely conduct, therefore, did not represent a break with the significatory system of Islamic norms, but was saturated with them, and enabled by the capacities that the practice of these norms endowed her with.

It is tempting to read Abir’s actions through the lens of subordination and resistance: her ability to pursue da(wa work against her husband’s wishes may well be seen as an expression of her desire to resist the control her husband was trying to exert over her actions. Or, from a perspective that does not privilege the sovereign agent, Abir’s use of religious arguments may be understood as a simultaneous reiteration and resignification of religious norms, whereby patriarchal religious practices and arguments are assigned new meanings and valences. While both analyses are plausible, they remain inadequately attentive to the forms of reasoning, network of relations, concepts, and practices that were internal to Abir’s actions. For example, what troubled Abir was not the authority Jamal commanded over her (upheld by divine injunctions), but his impious behavior and his attempts to dissuade her from what she considered to be her obligations toward God. For Abir, the demand to live piously required the practice of a range of Islamic virtues and the creation of optimal conditions under which they could be realized. Thus Abir’s complicated evaluations and decisions were aimed toward goals whose sense is not captured by terms such as obedience versus rebellion, compliance versus resistance, or submission versus subversion. These terms belong more to a feminist discourse than to the discourse of piety precisely because these terms have relevance for certain actions but not others. Abir’s defiance of social and patriarchal norms is, therefore, best explored through an analysis of the ends toward which it was aimed, and the terms of being, affectivity, and responsibility that constituted the grammar of her actions (Mahmood 2005, 175-180)

[1] Jamal could have countered this argument by pointing out that most proponents of da’wa consider it to be a woman’s duty only if da’wa does not interfere with her service to her husband and children. But since Jamal was unfamiliar with these debates about da’wa, he was unable to make this argument.