Abstract
Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe by Jeanette Jouili is a compelling exposition of the struggles of young European-born Muslim women to implement Islamic practices in secular Western societies. This book draws from the field of anthropology, inspired by the ethical turn in the field.
It is a meticulous text of seven chapters, each dealing with different arenas of women’s struggle for pious practices ranging from Islamic institutions, virtues, to negotiating presence in the public sphere. It weaves in discussions of pious practices, ethics, and ‘counter knowledge’ of Islamic revival institutions. This ethnography attempts to offer a nuanced account of how religious Muslims practice religion within the national secular regimes of France and Germany. The book provides more than a case study comparing Islamic revival in France and Germany, and offers a kind of depth that would be missing were we to look only at one period or country.
The central concern of this book is how Muslims can reconcile Islamic practices and worship with an active life in a secular society. The underlying theme can be said to be the relationship between religion and ethics, whereby religion could be one of the possible foundations for ethical citizenship. It unveils the everyday struggles that pious Muslim women face in their quest to live by their religious principles within European secular societies. The two main objectives of the book are to explore how young European-born Muslim women cultivate (orthodox) Islamic subjectivities in a context where Islam is stigmatized. Second, it investigates how these women cope on a practical level with the everyday difficulties of living a religious life in a society that is ever more hostile to visible forms of Islamic piety.
There is extensive literature on Muslim women’s piety and their role in Islamic revival. Most works on women’s participation in Islamic revival have been confined to the binaries of subordination and resistance of women. Jouili’s work recognizes the aspect of women’s agency. The author has emphasized the different modes of agency, reflexivity, and subjectivity of these women.
For the greater part, this book is preoccupied with the issue of ethics. The discussion of ethics centers around political consequentiality, nonlinearity phronesis, and the ethics of citizenship. First, the practices of the women studied here reveal that although it was important to adhere to one’s religious duty, it was not without consideration of the social consequences of such acts. Jouili points to the fact that it is less about individual practice but more about one’s duty to represent the Muslim community properly within European society. A significant aspect revealed is that European Muslims’ virtues, duties, and rights within the Islamic tradition tend to be embedded in moral struggles over representation. Second, in this study of the ethical struggles of pious practitioners, the author is inspired by Aristotelian ethics and argues that practices of self-cultivation, which often appear to be linear, are not and there may be several obstacles whereby practitioners are involved in a never-ending jihad al-nafs (struggle against the lower self). In other words, the book discusses not only the external struggles but also inner struggles with one’s lower self in becoming more pious. This book, although it takes account of pious self-reform, does not ignore the impediments Muslims encounter in that process. Hence it relies more on Aristotle’s ideas of incomplete ethical struggles. Third, ethics is not merely about self-cultivation, but is relational and more about an ethics of intersubjectivity based on responsibility and care for others. The author also borrows from Aristotle’s concept of phronesis (moral reasoning), which means doing the right thing not only for the individual but also for the polis.
Lastly, the ethics of citizenship is discussed. These ethics require citizens in liberal pluralistic democracies to remain at a critical distance from their personal identity, histories, and traditions in order to be modern citizens. Such an understanding would render pious Muslim women as less likely to fit the category of modern citizens, but the author points to the modalities of reflexive distancing, which are part of Islamic tradition. The author has shown a range of modalities of detachment that are persistent within discourses – modes of reasoning that are enacted by the respondents.
Although the book is informed by philosophical reflections built with Aristotelian ethical terminology, it does not subscribe to his metaphysical assumptions. The author refers to the works of such philosophers as Aristotle, Webb Keane, and Max Weber. However, Jouili does not subscribe to a single theoretical framework, rather she holds notions of multi-paradigmatic ways of applying theory.
The methodology of this book is based on an ethnographic inquiry, the fieldwork for which was conducted over several stints between 2002 and 2010 in Paris and Cologne. The author gained relatively easy entry into the field and developed close relations with Muslim women due to her own German-Tunisian background. The author visited local institutional structures like CERSI and IESH in Paris and BFmF (Begegnungs- und Fortbildungszentrum muslimischer Frauen) in Germany. She restricted her fieldwork to institutions that were not dominated by one school of Islamic thought. Contrary to appearances, the work is far from being an ethnography of institutions.
As for the substantive aspect, the book begins by offering a background of French and German secularities and Islamic revival movements of the 1980s and 1990s in Europe. This is followed by a discussion of ‘learning’ and how it is the most basic technique for cultivating an Islamic habitus. The author points out that it is through learning and the quest of young Muslim women for ‘true’ Islamic knowledge from which emerge binaries of ‘traditional’/‘knowledgeable’ Islam: lived Islam/one based on text. The author not only seeks to comprehend the epistemological status of Islamic knowledge but also how learning was expected to convey an emotional experience in terms of triggers and motivations for the pursuit of knowledge. Jouili brings out the key role played by Islamic institutions in teaching about Islamic piety as well as the establishment of communities of learning. She also deals with the relationship between faith and knowledge; how faith emerges and grows through knowledge. Knowledge (ilm) has often turned into a central Islamic idiom.
Jouili elaborates on the efforts of interlocutors in their pursuit of piety through prayers (salat), implementation of feminine modesty through dress and conduct, and how Muslim women negotiate their presence or visibility in the public sphere. The book documents how these women oscillated between higher and lower degrees of visibility in the enactment of their pious practices. Negotiations included veiling part of the time, opting for one prayer session, and praying in a seated rather than prostrate position. Emphasis is laid on the aspect of performance of (embodied) Islamic practices that occur at the nexus between the increasingly exclusionary regulatory regimes of German and French secular public spheres and the disciplinary regimes of evolving Islamic traditions.
The author has discussed two important issues of women’s education and their rights. She points to the importance laid on education in contemporary Islamic discourse and how women did not merely regard their pursuit of higher education as a prerequisite of life in a Western society but articulated it as a specific Islamic requirement. Here is an implicit conflict in a twofold definition of women’s roles in service to the family and to the broader society. The book documents the practical ways in which women negotiated two ethical commitments, motherhood and professional career. Jouili also argues a close link between piety and women’s rights because knowledgeable pious women demanded their rights to choose their husbands, to work, to spaces in mosques, etc. by invoking the Quran, hadith, and the Sunna.
The author makes some insightful observations in the book, for instance the fact that the practitioners did not intend to adapt Islam to liberal sensibilities, rather they emphasized the obligation to be in accordance with orthodoxy. One of the strengths of this book is that though the author often noted patriarchal assumptions on the part of the respondents, she did not place the statements of her respondents against the parameters of liberal or progressive standards. A limitation the book is that it is largely about women actively involved in Islamic revival circles. A discussion of the piety of women outside these institutions and revival circles would have offered a broader picture. Nevertheless, Pious Practices and Secular Constraints is an engaging, rich ethnography. It succeeds in documenting a balanced account of pious practices of Muslim women and Islamic revival in Europe.