An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements

3. Women’s Islamic Movements in the Making

| 51 3 Women’s Islamic Movements in the Making We also have to start from a deep-rooted conviction that Islam calls for modernization, development, and keeping up with the spirit of the times. It is a religion that is built on tolerance, fraternity, compassion, and not causing harm to others except in the case of self-defense. —President Hosni Mubarak Whether by acknowledging religion or denying it, various interlocutors author religious movements, drawing on historical and discursive processes that reinforce power structures in society. These processes of discursive production take place locally and globally, forming a discourse that is always in constant dialogue and is always responding to shifts in power relations. In the previous chapter, I traced a number of epistemological themes in the analysis of religion and the normative concept of religious subjectivity in order to highlight their limitations in studies of religion. I now turn to analyzing the relationship between the projects of secularization instituted by colonial and nationalist politics in Egypt and the production of secular liberal citizens of the state. Women are positioned at the intersection of these relationships. Simultaneously bearing the symbols of tradition and modernity, they continue to be the target of ideological projects that shape Egyptian social values.1 Islamic women’s activism embodies these trajectories, yet it also reconstitutes them in ways that reflect the inconsistencies, temporalities, and discontinuities in the mutual embeddedness of religion and secularism. An understanding of Egypt’s particular historicity will shed some light on the processes shaping the desires of the women who engage in Islamic movements. 52 | Women’s Islamic Movements in the Making Islamic Movements in Egypt The rise of Islamic movements as part of the religious resurgence around the world has sparked intense controversy and interest, particularly in Western discourse, in which Islamic revival is often represented as a monolith acquiring the proportions of a global tidal wave threatening to engulf the tenants of liberal democratic life, indeed of modernity itself.2 Although the complexity of Islamic revival means that it cannot be described as a monolith, interpretations of Islam, Islamic movements, and resurgence have led to views that essentialize the multiethnic, politically diverse, and historically, culturally, and socially heterogeneous Muslim world. Dubbed by the media as the world’s fastest-growing religion, Islam’s 1.4 billion followers come from such geographically diverse areas as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Macedonia , and the United States. Muslim cities such as Cairo, Tehran, and Jakarta team with diverse, contradictory, and ubiquitous discourses, all of which proclaim to be Islamic. But it is often one “Islam” that persists in the Western imagination today, one linked to the underpinnings of stagnation, tradition, and even terrorism. Seen as a global discursive shift after the collapse of the Soviet regime, “Islam” is posited in these views as the paramount opposing force to the current neoliberal global capital. Egypt’s shift toward the Islamization of public life in the twenty-first century is clearly visible. Often shunned and repressed by the government, the Muslim Brotherhood is Egypt’s most popular Islamic group. Although its members generally uphold a philosophy of nonviolence and focus on social services to the poor, the Brotherhood has occasionally engaged in exchanges with the state that have often turned violent.3 In Egypt’s 2005 elections, the Brotherhood formed a political alliance with the secular left-wing party al-Tagamou’. Both groups rallied for the liberation of Palestine and called for common goals for the Arab region. In an unprecedented success, the Brotherhood, with its long history of providing social services for the masses, secured 20 percent of the seats in parliament. These successes for Islamist groups have forced subtle shifts in the Egyptian government, which has remained a persistently secularizing state in character, if not in practice. Indeed, the Egyptian state regards Women’s Islamic Movements in the Making | 53 Islamization as a threat to national security and often propagates the idea that it is protecting the public space from incursions of blind faith and the “backward” “irrational” tradition of Islamist fundamentalism. This fact should not be taken at face value, however, as the Egyptian state continues to demonstrate an inordinate ability to negotiate and manipulate issues related to Islamist groups that has allowed the ruling regime to retain power. But the state has consistently conceded to the demands of Islamic groups in issues relating to women or the private domain of the...