Women’s Mosque

Movement
Index

• What is the Mosque Movement?

• Question about the subject
• Da‛wa
• Positive ethics and the Mosque Movement
What is the Mosque Movement?

• Located in Cairo, Egypt.

• Part of the Piety Movement and the
Islamic Revival.
• Response to the “Secularization” or
“Weternization” of Islam in Egypt.
• Women teaching other women –
religious practices and daily life.
• Ethnographic research from1995-97.
How to interpret this movement beyond the
conception of women’s subordination in Islam?

• Question about the subject

• Agency
• Freedom
• Self-realization
• Autonomous will
• Resistance-subordination
• Subject and power (Foucault)
• Positive ethics
• Substance of ethics
• Mode of subjectivation
• Techniques of the self
• Telos
Religion and daily life

• Secular perspective
• Separation between religion and the state.
• Differentiation of society in discrete spheres.
• Reduction of Islamic Knowledge to costume
and Folklore.
• Examples: Ramadan and the use of the veil.
Da‛wa

• God’s called to believe in the “true

religion”, Islam.
• Dā‛iya: one who practices da‛wa. (same
word for the teachers in woman’s
mosque movement)
• Vocation – doesn't involve the use of
force.
Women and Da‛wa

• Certain verses of the

Quran exhort both men
and women to undertake
Da‛wa.
• Certain limits
• Khatīb
• Iman
• High literacy and
sociability.
Positive ethics and the Mosque Movement

• Distance with Kantian approach to ethics as

an abstract system of regulatory norms.
• The way in which people live this norms.
• The desire of praying as an object of
pedagogy.
• No distinction between ritual and pragmatic
activities. Example: Salāt
• Interiority-exteriority
• Key Aristotelian concept of Habitus (practice,
repetition)
Positive ethics and the Mosque Movement

• Fear and love of God  God’s

greatness.
• Emotion not simply as a motivational
device, but as an aspect of pious action
itself.
• Emotion as something acquired and
cultivated.
• Styles of preaching (tarhīb, targhīb)
• Taqwa
• Another understanding of the subject –
cultivation of the self not inculcation.
Final considerations

• Women of the Mosque movement as different

kind of subjects.
• Subjects produce by certain power relations.
• Subjects that do a certain work upon
themselves with certain techniques.
• This work is done through the pedagogy of the
Mosque movement.