Between Islamic piety, agency and ethical leadership: paradoxes of self-transformation

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the face of the huge expansion in the number of women preachers throughout the Muslim world and beyond it, the paper proposes the need to theorise female ethical leadership – the subtle detour that Muslim women have been making to claim rights, including the right to leadership, within Islam, through their extraordinary acts of ascetic self-discipline (askesis). Building on Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, the paper draws further on Foucault’s theory of the ethical subject, particularly in Volume III of The History of Sexuality, to demonstrate that it is women’s everyday asceticism coupled with their scholarly hermeneutical knowledge that is enabling these women to breach the citadel of male Islamic scholarship and leadership. In effect, they are foregoing certain personal freedoms in order to gain power and influence in religious spheres previously closed to them. In this their movement resembles feminist movements in Judaism and Christianity.