Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject Read Online Free PDF Page A

subaltern gendered agency. Boddy conducted fi ldwork in a village in an Arabic-- peaking region of northern Sudan on a women's zar cult-a widely practiced healing cult that uses Islamic idioms and spirit mediums and whose membership is largely female (1989 ). Through a rich ethnography of women's cultic practices, Boddy proposes that in a soci- ety where the "offi ial ideology" of Islam is dominated and controlled by men, the zar practice might be understood as a space of subordinate discourse-as "a medium for the cultivation of women's consciousness" ( 1989 , 345). She ar- gues that zar possession serves as "a kind of counter-- process . . . : a feminine response to hegemonic praxis , and the privileging of men that this ideo- logically entails, which ultimately escapes neither its categories nor its con- straints" ( 1989, 7; emphasis added). She concludes by asserting that the women she studied "use perhaps unconsciously, perhaps strategically, what we in the West might prefer to consider instruments of their oppression as means to assert their value both collectively, through the ceremonies they organize and stage, and individually, in the context of their marriages, so insisting on their dynamic complementarity with men. This in itself is a means ofresisting and set.. ting limits to domination . . .. " (1 989 , 345 ; emphasis added).
    The ethnographic richness of this study notwithstanding, what is most rel- evant for the purposes of my argument is the degree to which the female agent in Boddy's work seems to stand in for a sometimes repressed, sometimes active
    11 It is not surprising, therefore, that in addition to seeking to restore agency to the peasantry, Ranajit Guha, one of the founders of the Subaltern Studies Proj ect, also called for historians to treat women as agents, rather than instruments, of various movements (Guha 1996, 12 ).

    feminist consciousness, articulated against the hegemonic male cultural norms of Arab Muslim societies. 12 As Boddy's study reveals, even in instances when an explicit feminist agency is diffi to locate, there is a tendency among scholars to look for expressions and moments of resistance that may

    suggest a challenge to male domination. When women's actions seem to rein.. scribe what appear to be "instruments of their own oppression," the social an.. alyst can point to moments of disruption of, and articulation of points of opposition to, male authority-moments that are located either in the inter.. stices of a woman's consciousness ( often read as a nascent feminist conscious.. ness), or in the objective effects of women's actions, however unintended these may be. Agency, in this form of analysis, is understood as the capacity to realize one's own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcen.. dental will, or other obstacles ( whether individual or collective). Thus the humanist desire for autonomy and self..expression constitutes the substrate, the slumbering ember that can- spark to flame in the form of an act of resis.. tance when conditions permit.

    Lila Abu..Lughod, one of the leading fi among those scholars who helped reshape the study of gender in the Middle East, has criticized some of the assumptions informing feminist scholarship, including those found in her own previous work (Abu..Lughod 1 990b, 1 993 ). In one of her earlier works, Abu.. Lughod had analyzed women's poetry among the Bedouin tribe of Awlad eAli as a socially legitimate, semipublic practice that was an expression of women's resistance and protest against the strict norms of male domination in which Bedouin women live (Abu.. Lughod 1986 ). Later, in_ a refl ive es.. say on this work, Abu.. Lughod asks the provocative question: how might we recognize instances of women's resistance without "misattributing to them forms of consciousness or politics that are not part of their experience something like a feminist consciousness or feminist politics?" ( Abu..Lughod 1990b, 47). In exploring this