Female Muslim subjectivity in the secular public sphere: Hijab and ritual prayer as ‘technologies of the self’

Abstract

This article analyses the formation of multiple subjectivities during the self-cultivation process of Muslim women living in the secular public sphere of Turkey. Through interviews with highly educated, professional Muslim women who aim to build and maintain piety (a deep connection with the divine), it asks to what extent the practices of hijab (i.e. wearing the headscarf) and ritual prayer (salat, or namaz) can be considered as technologies of self-cultivation rather than mere markers and symbols of identity. The article aims to offer new ways to think about the religious-secular divide by providing an empirically grounded contribution to the complex interactions between religious identity and women’s agency in a Muslim-majority country with a secularist state establishment.

Introduction: Deprivatizing religion

Secularism is clearly the fundamental aspect of Turkish modernization and the ultimate determinant in the formation of the modern public sphere in Turkey. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Kemalist ruling elite shared the certainty of the Western secularization theory, that it was a universal process and that religion would be erased from the public sphere totally and be a private matter instead.

Religion actually became a private matter, but this eventually expanded the boundaries of the private sphere to the extent of overflowing into the realm of the public sphere. It means, when religion was a public matter dealt by public institutions it did not have much penetration in the private sphere as much as it had after losing its public and institutional assets. Similar to the unintended consequence of the Protestant reformists who accelerated the secularization process while trying to protect their religion from state intervention (Taylor, 2007: 63), the attempt to privatize religion actually led to the eventual ‘deprivatization’ (Casanova, 1994: 6) of religion in Turkey, as pointed out by Serif Mardin:

As private every-day life has increasingly been given a new richness and variety, religion has become a central focus of life and acquired a new power. Religion has received a new uplift from the privatizing wave; private religious instruction, Islamic fashion in clothes, manufacturing and music, Islamic learned journals, all of them aspects of private life, have made Islam pervasive in a modern sense in Turkish society, and have worked against religion becoming a private belief. (1989: 229)

The expansion of the private sphere was an inevitable result of failing to see the complex nature of religion and reducing it to belief, while, as Judith Butler says, religion is more than a matter of belief and unbelief: ‘very often religion functions as a matrix of subject formation, an embedded framework for valuations, and a mode of belonging and embodied social practice’ (Butler, 2011: 72). As religion gained more power in the private realm and overflowed towards the public sphere in the form of the embodied practices such as dress codes and bodily ritual practices, the secularist authorities tried to protect the borders of the secular public sphere through legislation that banned these embodied practices. In the midst of a political war, these practices turned into symbolic weapons in both the secularist and the Islamist imaginaries as was seen in the headscarf controversy that occupied the political arena from early 1990s, when political Islam gained momentum, until 2013, when the headscarf ban was completely removed in the eleventh year of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule.

I have experienced the headscarf controversy and the challenges of being a pious Muslim woman while pursuing higher-education and a professional career in my own life as I grew up to be an adult in the late 1990s and early 2000s (when the headscarf ban was in full effect). Coming from a conservative family background, I was trying to observe the Islamic dress code and discipline myself to organize my everyday life according to the five daily prayers despite the lack of a space or time allocated for that practice in the public sphere. However, this major struggle of building a pious self in a secular system was overshadowed by the reductionist political accounts that ignored the virtue-making qualities of these embodied practices, and erased the agency of women like me, who constantly negotiated between the secular-liberal and religious ethics and value systems as they moved along their subjective trajectories of piety, in relation to their family background, social class, pedagogical learning, and professional lives.

Becoming a modern, educated, pious woman in secular Turkey

In order to shed light on the everyday manifestations of piety at a self-cultivation level, I examined the various paths of virtue formation taken by Turkish Muslim women, highly-educated and holding active professions within the secular public sphere, via fifteen months of field research in Istanbul. I interviewed twenty women working in different professional areas such as media, academia, civil society organizations, and private entrepreneurs. Their age range was 25–40, meaning that they witnessed the gradual deprivatization of Islam and the backlash from secularism in the 1990s and early 2000s as teenagers and young adults. My main field sites to reach these women were two civil society organizations and one private higher education institution, from September 2010 to December 2011. These institutions attracted intellectuals, scholars and professionals from among the Islamic and conservative background and those who became religious despite their secular upbringing. Some of the women who frequented these places were already my friends from college, but the majority of them became my friends during my research. The women I interviewed included those who did not wear the Islamic headscarf, and those who did not identify themselves with any religious community or movement. In this way, my research differentiated itself from the ethnographies of piety conducted on particular Islamist communities and movements in Muslim-majority countries (Deeb, 2006; Frisk, 2009; Mahmood, [2005] 2012) or Muslim women in Western countries (Bendixsen, 2013; Cesari, 2014; Jouili, 2015).

What was common about my interviewees was their commitment to being a pious woman as they defined this, while going through different stages of self-fashioning dictated by the secular state in public spaces like the schools they attended, the offices they worked in, or the streets they walked down. By questioning how they negotiate between the dynamics of the body and the mind, along with the different conceptions of agency, freedom, and submission informed by the secular-liberal and Islamic economies of ethical behavior, I wanted to see the tactics they developed in the face of the strategies of the secular state as well as the organized religion that surrounded them (De Certeau, 1984: xx).

The complexity of cultivating Islamic piety in relation to a secular state is clearly seen in the case of these highly educated women living in urban secular settings but also relying on a religious discourse that hardly addresses their everyday life conditions. The greatest challenges for them, as it was brought up in my interviews, were the practices of veiling (Ar. hijab, Tr. tesettur) and performing the five daily ritual prayers (Ar. salat, Tr. namaz). The main complaint they made about these practices was the failure by both the secularists and the Islamists to grasp the inner meaning of these practices for the performer; they said both secularists and Islamists narrow their views down to the outward appearance of a Muslim woman, based on the symbolic meaning of these practices for their own political projects. I do not claim that these Turkish women’s construction of subjectivity is free of any political project; in fact, as Giorgio Agamben says, ‘confronted with phenomena such as the power of the society of the spectacle that is everywhere transforming the political realm today’ the legitimacy and possibility of holding ‘subjective technologies and political techniques apart’ is questionable (Agamben, 1998: 6). However, in their own conception these women’s struggle is a pure attempt to establish a profound faith and connection with God despite all the challenges the state and the society puts on their way. Therefore, this article presents an attempt to look at these bodily practices of veiling and ritual prayer from the perspective of a singular subject who aims to transform herself through the performance of these practices.

The main analytical tool I choose to highlight this perspective is the ‘technologies of the self’: a concept introduced by Michel Foucault in Hermeneutics of the Subject (2005), where he brought the ancient Greek idea of the ‘care of the self’ – i.e. transformation of the subject in order to attain an ideal – to the attention of modern readers, who were more familiar with the idea of ‘knowing the self’ that was considered achievable through ‘knowledge and knowledge alone’ (2005: 17). Moving from ancient Greek ethics to mediaeval Islamic ethics of becoming, I trace the milestones of cultivating piety within the Islamic tradition, particularly through Mohamed Al-Ghazzali’s short treatise On disciplining the self (2011). In this way, I aim to engage classical Islamic thinkers in a dialogue with contemporary anthropologists of Islam, such as Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad, in relation to their conceptions of virtue-making and agency, and portray how Muslim women in modern Turkey negotiate with these ethical guidelines narrated by classical and contemporary theorists, as they seek to build pious modern selves. By examining the practices of veiling and ritual prayer, this article shows how these technologies of self-cultivation create multiple subjectivities in relation to piety, depending on the familial, educational, economic, and cultural backgrounds of Muslim women in Turkey.

Piety as a matter of becoming

In my analysis of piety, I define it as a process of becoming, deriving from the Sufi idea of perfection (kemalât) which ends in a reunion with God. This process, or journey towards perfection, requires the utilization of various devices and tools to move along. In this context, Foucault’s formulation of the ‘technologies of the self’ is a helpful conceptual tool to understand how exactly rituals are performed to cultivate a pious self by Muslims, especially Muslim women in Turkey who are acting on secular grounds.

I use the word ‘ritual’ only for the purpose of incorporating this debate with the larger scholarship known as ritual studies. As Talal Asad suggests in Genealogies of religion (1993), the category of ritual may not be appropriate to non-Western and non-Christian cultural milieus, because of its origin and development in Western Christianity, which, in turn created a shared sense of ritual as a symbolic act in Western religiosity: ‘The idea that symbols need to be decoded is not, of course, new, but I think it plays a new role in the restructured concept of ritual that anthropology has appropriated and developed from the history of Christian exegesis’ (Asad, 1993: 60). Thus, the appropriate concept for the Islamic context is ibadet (‘ibâdât in Arabic), which is a much wider concept than ritual (ritüel in Turkish), for it involves all acts of worship and servitude to God, ranging from praying five times a day to going to work in order to earn one’s living in the world, as the common Turkish saying implies: ‘Çalışmak ibadettir’ (Working is a [form of] worship). In this context, ibadet largely refers ‘to the whole range of appropriate acts for conforming life to God’s will (sharia)’ but ‘it is most often used specifically to designate the legal category in Muslim jurisprudence (fiqh) to which belong the major ritual and religious duties of Muslims’ (Graham, 2010: 94).

Foucault lists ‘technologies of the self’ in addition to three other forms of ‘technologies’ used by human beings to understand themselves: 1) technologies of production, 2) technologies of sign systems, and 3) technologies of power. The fourth one, ‘technologies of the self’ is defined by Foucault as ‘permit[ing] individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (Foucault, 1988: 18). This definition fits very well with the idea of ibadet in Islam, as all kinds of bodily practices including both ritualized and sporadic ones that are done with the aim of receiving the consent of God (rıza-i ilahi), are ideally seen as means of transforming one’s self to a better state.

Seeing Islamic rituals and religious duties in relation to taking care of the self resonates well with Saba Mahmood’s argument that Islamic bodily practices are and should be seen as ‘both an expression of, and a means to, the realization of the subject’ rather than mere symbolic acts, as this is a kind of reading which ‘presumes a different relationship between the subject’s exteriority and interiority’ ([2005] 2012): xi). Mahmood explains that the latter approach stems from the conception of a ‘secular religiosity’ by which she means ‘the Protestant conception [which] presupposes a distinction between a privatized interiority that is the proper locus of belief and public exteriority that is an expression of this belief’ (2012: xi). This conception sees rituals and bodily practices as markers of belief, rather than makers of it. It is heralded also by ‘many contemporary Muslim reformers writing under the rubric of ‘liberal Islam’ …to establish this distinction by grounding it in the resources and scriptures of Islam’ (2012: xv). For example, Amina Wadud (1999: 10) writes in her feminist rereading of the Qur’an, that although ‘the Qur’an acknowledges the virtue of modesty and demonstrates it through the prevailing practices [of veiling and seclusion in the elite Arab tribes]’, what is important is the principle of modesty ‘not the veiling and seclusion which were manifestations particular to that context’.

On one hand, the attempt to separate material culture from universal ideas and principles allows a space for reinterpreting the sacred sources in a way to defy certain bodily practices and actions that are considered to be disadvantageous to women from a liberal standpoint. Yet, it also leads to the creation of a divide between body and mind, following the Enlightenment discourse that elevated the mind over the body; and thus reduces bodily practices to second place, as symbolic acts. When bodily practices such as hijab are divorced from the virtue of modesty for the sake of liberating Muslim women from an ‘oppressive tool of patriarchy’ it ends up giving more power to other potentially oppressive mechanisms such as the state to intervene in the realm of religious freedom and autonomy, as seen in the controversial headscarf ban in Turkey and in France. It also makes it possible for totalitarian religio-political regimes to enforce these bodily practices as a symbol of their distinct identity and power grabbing, without any concern for the virtues intended for those religious practices, as in the case of Iran and Saudi Arabia.

What Mahmood places at the opposite of this approach is the ‘positive ethics’ shaped by the Aristotelian conception of virtue-making, which strictly links bodily acts and virtues. In this conception, character, good or bad, ‘is the result of the repeated doing of acts which have a similar or common quality’ – i.e. ‘habituation’ as Aristotle names it in Ethics. The agent is not left totally out of this process, but its beginning is dependent on guidance. As the Introduction by J. A. Smith suggests, Aristotle believes that the process of virtue-making ‘cannot be entrusted to merely intellectual instruction’ as it is a process ‘of assimilation, largely by imitation and under direction and control’ (Aristotle, 2005: Introduction). At the end of this habituation process, the agent gains a ‘growing understanding of what is done’ and chooses to do it for its own sake since it has by now turned into a habit, easier and more pleasant to be done – like a second nature. At this point, the agent does not need outside guidance anymore, as he/she ‘acquires the power of doing them freely, willingly,’ and from within (Aristotle, 2005: Introduction).

In contrast, modern thought, shaped by Kantian ethics, sees reason itself as determining the will, without the intervention of any bodily experience, ‘only because it can, as pure reason, be practical, that it is possible for it to be legislative’ ([1788] 2004: 17). Contrary to the need for outside guidance, Kant argues that we become directly conscious of the moral law through reason alone. As Charles Taylor suggests, Kant would claim that ‘while we legislate the moral law, this is established by … the nature of reason, which requires that we act on universalizable maxims. We can’t decide what is right, but only will to follow it, acting out of our nature as rational agents, as against beings with desires’ (2007: 580).

So, morality comes from inside, only and only through reason. Kantian ethics make it possible for the liberal reformers to claim that bodily forms are not essential to virtues, as the determination of universal practical laws must take place ‘independently of the matter of the law’ (Kant, [1788] 2004: 21). In other words, virtue-making occurs from interior to the exterior: the subject knows a virtue through reason alone without a need for a transformation of the self or the body.

Virtue-formation in the Islamic tradition: Al-Ghazzali

Neither of these models can be isolated in order to understand Muslims’ rituals and bodily practices, since the Qur’an carries the traces of both. In many verses, the Qur’an invites human beings to use their reason to find the truth, the signs of which are already given to them by God: ‘Thus does Allah make clear to you His verses that you might use reason’ (The Qur’an, 2: 242). Even the performance of bodily rituals is related to the use of reason, because it is the essential faculty God expects human beings to use: ‘And when you call to prayer, they take it in ridicule and amusement. That is because they are a people who do not use reason’ (The Qur’an, 5: 58). However, in line with the Aristotelian model of ethics, the Qur’an also frequently reiterates its order to perform ritual prayers with care and conduct righteous deeds:

Maintain with care the [obligatory] prayers and [in particular] the middle prayer and stand before Allah, devoutly obedient. (The Qur’an, 2: 238)

Indeed, those who believe and do righteous deeds and establish prayer and give zakah will have their reward with their Lord, and there will be no fear concerning them, nor will they grieve. (The Qur’an, 2: 277)

The Qur’an’s emphasis on both the reason and practices has produced theories of self-disciplining and cultivation of piety which carried traces of both models in the Islamic tradition. As laid out in his treatise called On disciplining the self, Al-Ghazzali’s formulation of a pious or perfected self was based on the goodness of four powers in the human self: ‘the power of reason, the power of anger, the power of the carnal appetite, and the power of preserving equilibrium among the other three’ (2011).

In his topography, there are more than two paths along which the virtue-making happens; that is, it is not a ‘from interior to exterior’ situation, nor simply the other way around. The habituation principle, for him, is a self-cultivation method embedded in the Religious Law (Shariah), since ‘a good disposition appears in anyone who has made a habit of good works’ and ‘the inmost mystery of the command of the Religious Law to perform good works is that its purpose is the transformation of the soul from an unseemly form to a good form. Whatever habit a person does by compulsion becomes his nature’ (2011). Good works include both the prescribed rituals as well as good deeds done for the sake of God, or the abstaining from bad deeds, again, for the sake of God. In that sense, ritualized behavior can be considered ‘one among a continuum of practices that serve as the necessary means to the realization of a pious self’ and ‘regarded as the critical instruments in a teleological program of self- formation’ (Mahmood, 2005: 128).

Headscarf and ritual prayer

Now, it is important to explore the bodily practices of hijab and the obligatory ritual prayer (salat in Arabic, namaz in Turkish) in this context of virtue-making. The women I interviewed all had a unique story with the headscarf, whether they wore it or not. This uniqueness also makes it complicated when one needs to decide whether to give a symbolic meaning to the headscarf, or to consider it as an expression and a means to piety.

Zeliha is a highly educated, professional young woman, who is a discussion program host at a private national TV channel in Turkey. In her case, it is hard to see the headscarf only as an exterior symbol, equivalent to the cross worn by Christians or the kippa worn by Jews – considering how the headscarf has acquired an existential meaning for Muslim women, unlike any other religious symbol in Christianity and Judaism have attained so far. The headscarf in general has multiple meanings for people; some see it as a symbol of religiosity; some see it as a fashion; and for some people it is much more complex than both of them. Because of all these complexities, wearing the headscarf is loaded with a much longer list of meanings and implications than what wearing the cross or the kippa are entailed with. Zeliha had to go to her classes for four years by uncovering her hair each time at the campus entrance. She could not bear the curious and mostly unfriendly eyes around her, as she had to take off her scarf in public. She fell into depression, and received medical help for some time; and during this process she had her hair – which was previously down to her waist – cut very short.

Would it create such a traumatic effect if it were only a symbol, religious or political? It might be argued that she saw the headscarf as indispensable to her religious identity; but this is not true, as she told me that she did not see the headscarf as her dava (da’wa) or mission. The headscarf, for Zeliha, was one of the techniques that she used to attend to herself and transform herself into an ideal model of piety; and the forceful loss of it created a fragmentation in her conception of the self, which pushed her to the edge of mental breakdown.

It is generally thought that the victims of the headscarf issue have been women who wore it, while those who did not wear it remained unaffected by the political storms created around the headscarf. Gül, a professor of Turkish literature at a private university in Istanbul, has also suffered from the headscarf debates because she did not wear it. She worked at an imam-hatip school (public secondary schools that combine secular and religious curricula) for a short while in the beginning of her career. She says people around her did not believe in her sincerity when she went to the mescit to perform the ritual prayer:

They told me that I was praying to show off, so I stopped praying after that incident. They cannot associate performing the ritual prayer with not wearing the headscarf. They thought that I was not pious because my head was uncovered. An uncovered woman for them is uncovered in all aspects.

‘They’ in this context refers to the self-acclaimed religious people, as she cannot see herself belonging to that group. She feels in-between, in limbo, as she is not accepted by the religious-conservative section or the ‘modern’ section, as she describes the secularists:

– The modern section thinks that you are just like them: one who drinks alcohol, and has no (religious) restrictions. And the covered ones directly say that ‘you are not one of us’ when they see me. I feel really torn apart in that matter.

– Do you think you can appear as you are?

– No, this appearance is not me.

– What prevents you (from appearing as you are)?

– My education, my career. The secular environment does not let you to realize what you believe in.

Interestingly, the covered women that she was around shared the view of the secularists that headscarf was a symbol, not political, but a religious symbol. So, they did not consider Gül a pious person. Then I thought about my own astonishment at seeing Rüya, a clinical therapist and researcher at the same university, praying in the school mescit. Because of her appearance, I had not expected her to be a regular performer of the namaz. I realized that the political indoctrination from both the Islamist and the Kemalist parts for the last thirty years had planted the seeds of this modernist view into my mind. Seeing the headscarf as an end result of an inner piety, rather than a means to it, had actually been the dominant view in the popular imagination, giving way to the claim that those who wear the headscarf are pious and those who do not wear it are not.

For Esra, a financial analyst and also a researcher at the same institution, wearing the headscarf is only a part of a broader concept of tesettür (covering), which has two aspects: attitude and outfit. And the headscarf is just a part of the outfit, as she still tries to follow the rules of tesettür without covering her hair: She never wears short-sleeves, nor shorts or mini-skirts. She doesn’t swim in the mixed-gendered places even with the Islamic bathing suit. She only goes to a women-only swimming pool, and even there she covers her legs down to her knees. But in the popular imagination, the attitude of tesettür is not conveyed to outsiders without the headscarf, which can be imagined like the cap of a bottle: no matter what you fill in that bottle, it will all be spilt without the cap. So, no matter how much she cares about embodying tesettür with her behaviors, it is not seen by the others:

I don’t shake hands with men unless they initiate it. If you and I are standing side by side, a man would not attempt to shake your hand, but he would attempt to shake mine.

Contrary to the popular imagination, the headscarf does not have a monolithic function and meaning for women who wear it, or who have worn it for some time. To some extent, it might be claimed that the public image of the headscarf had gained its own identity as an object independent of the private experiences of the ‘subjects’ who appropriate it as a bodily practice. The public image in the eyes of the religious-conservatives says that all covered women believe that it is an order of God, and they believe that uncovering is a sin. On the other hand, the headscarf speaks to the secularists in a different language and tells them that it is a symbol of Islamism and the secret desire to bring back the Shariah rule.

Yet, what my friend Sena, a researcher on Ottoman history, wanted when she covered her hair in college was completely far from both of these public images. I met Sena in college as a veiled woman, with non-fashionable modest clothes. For four years, she was a typical observant Muslim girl, who had a special interest in history and philosophy rather than Western literature and criticism that we were studying in our classes. She went to a Western country for her master’s degree, and there she had a striking transformation, by taking off her headscarf and wearing fashionable, slightly body-revealing clothes.

We, as her former classmates, were surprised at this transformation, since we had known her to be like any of us. Some friends clearly showed their discontent at her change in their Facebook comments. The problem was that we did not really know her; we had never known her. We just had assumed her to be the person we wanted her to be. Years later, I reached her for this research, and asked her to tell me about her story of piety:

My mother is of Circassian origin, and they are traditionally on a very friendly basis with religion – a relationship established on love rather than commands and prohibitions. And my father was of a traditional Western Anatolian family, who had always followed the mainstream line of religiosity, driven by the state: Sunni, nationalist, and believing in privatized religion. My interest in the Ottoman-Turkish history from my childhood, created a desire in me towards religion. I made my college choice with a religious motivation, as I wanted to be in a pious network. So, I wore the headscarf at college by my own choice. Not because I believed that uncovering was a sin, but because I wanted to become more pious … I do not care about reward or punishment. I do not like doing something without believing simply because I am afraid of the Creator.

‘Too much data entry’ she thinks, is the reason why she lost the initial excitement about religion and piety, ‘because when you come across different views, and different religious conceptions, you realize that you are not special’. In summary, the headscarf did not help Sena cultivate a pious self, even though she meant it to do so.

Another aspect of the headscarf issue that must be brought to surface is the ease or difficulty of wearing the headscarf, with the practical aspects and the socio-political complications. To some, the headscarf is/must be worn with pride and pleasure as it is ‘a verse of the Qur’an’ as some Islamists claim, while another section of the society thinks that it is an oppression on women, and wearing it must be like a torture for these women (especially in the summer). So, what is it really like to wear the headscarf?

Interviewees often compared it with performing the ritual prayer. It is not surprising that for Zeliha, wearing the headscarf, or covering (tesettür) in general is much harder than regularly performing the ritual prayer:

I cannot think of a veiled woman who is not performing the daily prayers. Veiling is a much harder practice than prayer, actually the hardest one in Islam. I find it hard to understand those who do not perform such an easy practice as prayer but wear the veil.

A similar argument can be traced in Esra’s insistence on performing her prayers in every situation, while she cannot find the courage to cover her hair, and become a başörtülü (headscarved) woman that would come with a package. In other words, wearing the headscarf is strictly tied to a distinct identity of a veiled Muslim woman indicating a lower social status in the secular public sphere as well as a set of ethical, religious, and political expectations that are attached to this identity. Despite the fact that she is the only one not wearing the headscarf in her close circle of pious friends, and despite the guilt she feels for not wearing it, she cannot run the risk of the social pressure it will bring. She cannot risk upsetting her parents by donning a ‘symbol’ that is unbearable for her family members, mostly because of its social implications. In this sense, the inevitable visibility of the headscarf makes it more difficult than praying, which can be always done in a private place without being seen by anyone else:

In all places I went for job interviews, I used to search for a spot where I could perform my prayers. In my previous workplace, I was using one cup of water to have ritual ablution, and I was praying in the room which was used for breastfeeding. I have never had an alternative like not performing the prayers. Even when I cannot do anything, I will still perform the prayer merely with my eyes.

Normally the gestures and body movements in the ritual prayer are obligatory, but it is allowed to perform while sitting if the person cannot stand upright, or while lying down if the person cannot even sit, and even with moving the eyes if one cannot move his or her body at all. Although these accommodations have been developed for health reasons, some people like Esra appropriate these to situations where they cannot perform the ritual prayer publicly because of social and political restrictions.

However, for Neslihan, a young journalist, who covered herself at the age of twelve, tesettür is easier than namaz (ritual prayer); because ‘tesettür turns into a lifestyle, it becomes a habit’ while ‘there is no habituation of namaz, because the Satan pokes you each of the five times … Namaz is your visa to enter the Paradise, that’s why Satan fights with you more on this issue’.

Although the ritual prayer is the condition for entering the Paradise after death, it is not necessarily seen as the ultimate point of piety – because, ideally they think piety should not be equated with the desire to earn the Paradise. Ritual prayer, in and of itself, does not make one a pious person, ‘unless’ says Gül, ‘one can internalize the meaning of the prayer, and can establish a connection with God each time she bows down her head.’ In other words, the bodily practices of standing upright, bending down, and prostration, should transform the self to a better condition in order to be considered a sign of piety. In her imagination, each prayer is like a rite of passage. Each time the believer must come out as a different person. In other words, for Gül, the ritual prayer should be both the expression of and the means to piety, which is manifested with good disposition (güzel ahlak): ‘Of course Islam has five pillars that everyone must be doing; so this (namaz) is not an extra deed, unless it is embellished with good disposition’.

I was surprised to hear the same comment from Firuze, a covered woman working as a newspaper editor, who is actually a hafız (someone who recites the entire Qur’an by heart). In the standards of the society, she would definitely be considered a pious woman. Yet she had different standards of piety in her mind:

Piety means being close to God, having a good relationship with God, and doing everything for God, not his slaves. The role of worship and prayers (ibadet) is to keep the connection uncut. How would God measure our piety if he did not prescribe these practices of worship? They empower one’s faith, but they are not the essence of piety. Good disposition is the essence of piety for me.

The difference of this approach from the ‘what only matters is the belief’ argument is that it does not negate the necessity of the bodily practices; indeed, it connects it to a system of bodily acts that can be determined as the components of a good disposition. It is not regarded as a replacement of prescribed ritual practices, but as an enhancer of them. As Al-Ghazzali suggests, ‘With a good disposition, a person achieves the level of him (sic) who fasts by day and prays by night. He attains great degrees in the Hereafter, even though his worship is weak’ (2011). In other words, an agentive performance that transforms the self to a better position is much more rewarding than mere performance of the rituals.

The subject between submission and agency

The awareness of the soul mentioned by Al-Ghazzali in his treatise on disciplining the self is an important window to see the conception of agency in the classical Islamic ethics. He claims that any action without the awareness of the soul is in vain, as exercise of freewill is essential for a human being to be considered an agent:

The beginning of all (spiritual) happiness is taking pains in (the performance of) good deeds. The fruit of this is that the soul internalizes good qualities. Then, their light shines outside and good deeds begin to be accepted naturally and voluntarily. The secret of this is that connection which is between the soul and the body, for one affects the other and vice versa. It is for this that any act done negligently is in vain, for the soul has not given that act any part of its attributes because the soul was unaware of it. (2011: Excursus I)

In this economy of the self, the freewill is essential in becoming a pious subject, or a test-taker in this world in order to be rewarded or punished in the Judgment Day. That is why states of unconsciousness are excluded from this test by the jurisprudents. Hence, the subject in Islam is a test-taker.

Although awareness and consciousness are key to the classical Islamic concept of agency and subjectivity, this differs from the secular viewpoint held by many including anthropologists, according to Talal Asad, who tend to reduce agency to ‘having both the capacity and the desire to move in a singular historical direction: that of increasing self-empowerment and decreasing pain’ (2003: 79). Al-Ghazzali’s suggestion of self-cultivation expects the subject to discipline her ‘evil-commanding’ self by disempowering it, or giving it the opposite of what it wants. It means that decreasing pain is not necessarily the goal of the agentive action, since pain itself might be sought in order to discipline the self: ‘Know that for whoever desires to expel his bad disposition from himself, there is only one way, and that is that he do the opposite of whatever that (bad) disposition commands him (to do)’ (2011).

When pain is afflicted on the agent, he/she is expected to show patience and thus convert that pain into pleasure in the Hereafter. With all the traumatic experiences she had, Zeliha confesses that ‘the headscarf is not something that you wear with pleasure’ yet she wears it because she believes that it is an order of God, ‘and it is worn to get closer to God’. Even though it is not a bodily pain, there is suffering caused by a bodily practice; for the conventional theory of agency in the secular-liberal realm, she must choose to end that suffering by not wearing the distressing object in order to display an agentive action. The other ways of action are not considered by the secular-liberal theorists as agentive in the way Asad (2003) puts it, but manifestations of victimization either by the society or a higher power. However, that pain coexists with pleasure, as she thinks that ‘suffering gets to be pleasurable as you remember why you are suffering’.

Asad gives the example of sadomasochism to argue for the simultaneous existence of pain and pleasure in a bodily act, and asks ‘Why is sadomasochism not rejected by all moderns who condemn pain as a negative experience?’ (2003: 119). Asad uses that example to challenge secular-liberal views which reject religious pain and suffering on the grounds that it hinders agency since these religiously observant women are forced to inflict pain on themselves by a religious authority. All the religious restrictions such a woman sets for herself in her day-to-day life can be considered an example of pain and pleasure coexisting in a bodily practice; and if there needs to be a calculation made, the amount of pleasure in return for the amount of pain in sadomasochism is actually quite insignificant, compared to the infinite pleasure the religious subject is promised in return for a finite pain.

Furthermore, the habituation process complicates the idea of agency and being aware of bodily practices, because habits, by their very nature, happen without the control of the subject, and transform the subject in return for its agentive action. For example, when I asked Hilal, a news magazine editor, who grew up in a conservative family and wore the headscarf from an early age, to what extent religion restricts her life, she answered that living within the lawful circle (helal daire) has made her happier in the long term.

The headscarf seems to be restrictive, but it is not. When you are conditioned in a certain way, your desires and aspirations are also shaped accordingly. I do not desire to drink alcohol, or go out at night, anyways.

But overall, it can be claimed that the transformation of the self from a stage of imitative piety to an authenticated piety is based on the use of agency, which is associated with awareness, consciousness, reasoning, and responsibility.

Conclusion

The direction of the virtue formation from interior to exterior or otherwise constantly and simultaneously takes place in the context of the secular settings that these Muslim women must act on. Most importantly, the technologies of the self, i.e. a particular form of dressing up, and regularly performing a particular set of motions, do take different shapes, effects and functions in each individual in their journey towards their aspired definition of piety. This is because these bodily practices are accompanied by specific physical, social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, which renders a failure any attempt to consider these Muslim women as a distinct and monolithic group who are the others of a normative secular-liberal subject. A close look at the everyday manifestations of piety and the course of its realization shows the complexity of subjecthood, which is, as Sherine Hafez says ‘varied, heterogenous, and unstable’ (2011: 5). Therefore, Hafez continues, ‘whether inculcated through social and cultural processes or cultivated through self-directed and embodied practices, subject making should be considered as deeply embedded in wider, complex, and imbricated social and historical processes’ (2011: 5).

Seeing the Islamic embodied practices of hijab and ritual prayer as technologies of self-cultivation can open up new ways of responding to the controversies in the public sphere, creating a deeper awareness of the motivations of the performers of these actions beyond symbolic and politically assertive acts. For the highly-educated, middle class, professional Muslim women in this research, the boundaries between religion and secular, private and public, oppression and freedom, or submission and agency are constantly challenged in their greater struggle for cultivating a pious self in the way they conceptualize it. Considering piety as a journey of becoming allows us to be aware of these everyday life challenges and Muslim women’s unique ways of responding to them by drawing from multiple sources reaching across the boundaries of traditional and modern, religious and secular, conservative and liberal, and many others. What I suggest in this article is a balanced approach to the relationship between body and mind. Scholars should avoid choosing one over the other, as doing so would erase the complexities of becoming a subject and the uniqueness of each journey, replacing totalistic accounts of religious identity with a distinct secular-liberal one.