The Pious Self is a Jewel in Itself

Abstract

This article historically situates Ashraf Ali Thanvi’s Bahishti Zewar ( Heavenly Ornaments) as a manual for the production of pious dispositions. Written in 1905 for Muslim women in north India, this Urdu text teaches women how to train themselves to be pious and provides an ideal picture of the well-formed woman, self-reflective of how her actions correspond to the Divine will. Brought up as a Muslim, she has already been socialised into subordination to this will. Becoming self-reflective, linked to a critical rite of passage of an individual’s life, involves more regulated, arduous and deliberate reiterative work on the self. Without advocating that women should be managed through religious idiom, the analysis presented here challenges euro-centric perceptions of modernity and tradition and proposes that we need to think through more carefully what kind of agency is actually involved in consolidating the Muslim subject who submits to Divine will in a framework of ‘ shariatic modernity’. This discussion carries immense relevance for current debates about how Muslim women may address the challenges of living in the West.