Pious Practice and Secular Constraints

Abstract

A research study grounded in both anthropology and ethnography, the aim of Jeanette S. Jouili’s Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe is threefold: (1) to explore how women cultivate Islamic subjectivities in secular European contexts that stigmatize and politicize such religious practices; (2) reveal the practical and discursive techniques they have devised to deal with the difficulties that emerge from engaging in pious practices; and, finally, (3) attempts to show how living as a religious minority in a secular-majority society can reshape traditional Islamic discourse and provide an alternative to the dominant language of autonomy, individual rights, and equality. Since the early 2000s, Jouili has come into contact with a wide range of practicing Muslimahs attending courses in various Islamic centers of learning, specifically in Paris and the region around Cologne. These centers are distinctive for their willingness to explore a multiplicity of doctrinal lineages and attempt to transcend cultural and ethnic traditions. In the case of this most recent publication, there is the added value of a much-needed overview of pious women who have been active in Islamic revival circles in Europe, together with perceptive insights into their daily lives. This book, therefore, contributes to a high-profile body of work by Talal Asad (1993, 2003), Saba Mahmood (2005), and Charles Hirschkind (2006) around ethics and ethical self-cultivation, which explores contextual power relations at play in the construction of religious discourses and practices, as well as Armando Salvatore’s work on the public sphere (2007). Jouili’s findings shed light on the incompleteness and unlinearity of these Islamic moral codes, as well as demonstrate how “[t]he individual’s work on herself [is] significantly and long-lastingly complicated by prior habits and by the availability of other sets of moral codes” (p. 15). Drawing on Aristotelian ethics, with its insistence on practice rather than reason, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Jouili investigates how the embodied/practical ethical process molds an Islamic modernity within a secular European context (chapter 1). The subsequent chapters provide an indepth study of these practices, which are aimed at strengthening through the internalization of an “authenticated” knowledge of Islam learned within formal settings (chapter 2) and the specific techniques of self-cultivation, specifically 118 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:2 Book ...