Pious Practice and Secular Constraints

Abstract

A research study grounded in both anthropology and ethnography, the aim ofJeanette S. Jouili’s Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the IslamicRevival in Europe is threefold: (1) to explore how women cultivate Islamicsubjectivities in secular European contexts that stigmatize and politicizesuch religious practices; (2) reveal the practical and discursive techniques theyhave devised to deal with the difficulties that emerge from engaging in piouspractices; and, finally, (3) attempts to show how living as a religious minorityin a secular-majority society can reshape traditional Islamic discourse and providean alternative to the dominant language of autonomy, individual rights,and equality. Since the early 2000s, Jouili has come into contact with a widerange of practicing Muslimahs attending courses in various Islamic centersof learning, specifically in Paris and the region around Cologne. These centersare distinctive for their willingness to explore a multiplicity of doctrinal lineagesand attempt to transcend cultural and ethnic traditions.In the case of this most recent publication, there is the added value of amuch-needed overview of pious women who have been active in Islamic revivalcircles 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) aroundethics and ethical self-cultivation, which explores contextual power relationsat play in the construction of religious discourses and practices, as well as ArmandoSalvatore’s work on the public sphere (2007). Jouili’s findings shedlight on the incompleteness and unlinearity of these Islamic moral codes, aswell as demonstrate how “[t]he individual’s work on herself [is] significantlyand long-lastingly complicated by prior habits and by the availability of othersets of moral codes” (p. 15).Drawing on Aristotelian ethics, with its insistence on practice rather thanreason, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Jouili investigates how theembodied/practical ethical process molds an Islamic modernity within a secularEuropean context (chapter 1). The subsequent chapters provide an indepthstudy of these practices, which are aimed at strengthening through theinternalization of an “authenticated” knowledge of Islam learned within formalsettings (chapter 2) and the specific techniques of self-cultivation, specifically118 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:2Book ...