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FIVE Alasira, the Path to God “WE WILL ALL die one day, my daughter. What will you tell your Creator once you stand before Him? How will you justify your wrongdoings in life? How will you justify your disregard for God’s truth, for Him who found so many ways to show you the right path?” With these words, Hadja Bintou, the leader of a Muslim women’s group in Badialan, a lower-class neighborhood in Bamako, opened our first conversation in 1998 after the initial introductions had been made. With a gesture of impatience, if not indignation, she brushed away my mumbled effort to respond, and continued, “To live means to search for the path to God, and to return to the original teachings of Islam, that’s the truth, plain and simple.” Alasira, the path to God, demarcates the horizon that, according to Hadja Bintou, frames all human doings, desires, and destinations. To choose the path to God means to return to the authentic teachings of Islam. Alasira thus signals a turning point in the truest sense of the word. Similar views of alasira are reflected in the teachings of other women leaders and male teachers. Here, alasira serves as an umbrella term for the various activities, concerns, and sensibilities that inform and animate their project of personal moral transformation. This chapter looks at the areas in which Muslim women intervene in order to realize their quest for ethical improvement and at the same time contribute to their collective well-being.1 Only by paying close attention to the pious practices through which women hope to “embark on the path to God” and become virtuous Muslims can we comprehend the modernizing project that these women pursue, one that articulates specific ideas about female religious subjectivity. These ideas are not entirely novel, but they gain new significance under contemporary political conditions that at once facilitate and create a greater need for women to articulate their moral and social aspirations in a public arena. In investigating the ethical sensibilities that motivate Muslim women’s search for closeness to God, we must navigate several difficulties that restrict scholarly understanding of these women’s participation in reform movements throughout the Muslim world. It is important to recognize that, rather than conceptualizing piety as the exclusive result of individual practice (Mahmood 2005), ALASIRA, THE PATH TO GOD n 137 female Muslim religiosity is constituted at the interface between, on one side, individual women’s attempts to cultivate certain virtues and, on the other, the meanings that others attribute to the women’s activities, claims, and attire. Here I want to emphasize that the current socio-political context, especially reconfigurations of the conditions for articulating an Islamic normativity in the national political arena, has important effects on women’s religiously inspired actions. As a consequence, Muslim women’s religiosity cannot be conceived independently of its public manifestation or of the need believers have to enact their faith before a broader, more normatively diverse constituency (see Deeb 2006). The approach proposed here differs from studies that investigate how women who join various social and religious movements address and challenge the political institutions and ideological foundations of nation-state politics. The literature on the emblematic role of Muslim women in Islamic revivalist movements (Saktanber 1994; Göle 1996), identity politics (e.g., Moghadam 1994; Hale 1997) and nationalist projects (e.g., Kandiyoti 1991b; Chatterjee 1993) posits that the policing of women, their rights in the family, their scope of public maneuver, and their religious orientation gains a symbolic function in the politics of cultural authenticity; women’s apparel, in particular, takes on unprecedented political and symbolic salience. Although I agree with this interpretation , I suggest that the focus on identity politics is too narrow. Deserving of closer scrutiny is how women’s personal motivations and efforts to cultivate a pious disposition intersect with broader social transformations that emerge at the interface of the institutions and rationalities of state power, on the one hand, and transnational intellectual trends, institutional configurations, and communication flows, on the other. In contemporary Mali the interaction between Muslim women, and between Muslim women and male supporters of the moral reform movement, is an important field in which inter-subjective meanings of Muslim piety are created. What interests me are the distinctive characteristics of the conditions and forms of Muslims’ public interventions in Mali. This inquiry comes close to studies that, from divergent analytical standpoints, examine forms of Muslim public reasoning in the...

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