Disinheriting and Recuperating Tradition

POLITICS OF PIETY: THE ISLAMIC REVIVAL AND THE FEMINIST SUBJECT. By Saba Mahmood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. In Chapter Two of Politics of Piety, Mahmood (2005) details how the women’s mosque movement emerged in response to “the perception that religious knowledge as a means for organizing daily life becomes increasingly marginalized under modern structures of secular governance” (44). Across the mosques where Mahmood spent time, which varied both socioeconomically and in their doctrinal or sharʿī (legal) sensibilities, a common lament rang clear: the secularization of Egyptian society has had “corrosive” effects on pious practice. The folklorization of ʿibādāt (worship) renders the performance of ritual obligation—prayer or fasting—mere convention, risking a fall into rote identitarianism, instead of a deliberate mode of self-cultivation. This seems to indicate the realization of a thesis stipulated by theorists of modern Islam, namely that of the “objectification” of religion writ large. As Mahmood reminds us, widespread literacy, urban mobility, and mass media have acquainted lay Muslims with religious modes of reasoning formerly the provenance of the scholarly class. Cairene women debate how to “render even the most intimate details of their lives in accord with standards of Islamic piety” (55). A palpable shift has occurred from an unconscious enactment of tradition toward a reflective one. Insofar as we can speak of multiple mosques throughout Cairo at this time comprising a mosque movement at all, this shift is both their point of convergence and the larger telos of the movement. But Mahmood notes her disagreement with the objectification thesis on several counts: that self-reflection is integral to the performance of any skilled practice; that self-reflective practices are contingent upon historically changing ideas of self and forms of subjectivity that make possible or demand particular kinds of reflection (55). In fact, she reminds us that the distinction her interlocutors “draw between customs/habits and religious obligations has been made by theologians at least as far back as the thirteenth century, and is not merely a modern invention,” and that particular reflections can be oriented toward different kinds of ends (56). In sum, to get at contemporary forms of reflection as they pertain to Muslim practices, we first need to have a sense of the conditions that naturalized them and the practical ends to which they are geared. The mosque movement, as part of a larger Islamic reform project with global reach, finds parallels in concurrent developments across geographical locations, not least of which is Muslim North America. My dissertation traces how contemporary Muslim parenthood in Canada is enacted by a “second generation,” a Canadian-born or at least locally raised cohort of Muslims across the country. I explore how they approach parenthood in part through their own self-construal (and self-reflection) as the “children of immigrants.” I trace how this self-understanding preoccupies my interlocutors in disparate and informal registers of curating Islam for their children, for example, in interpersonal dynamics with their children, departing from their immigrant parents, whom they now cast as inhabiting an improper sentimentality. But this ostensible immigrant/second-generation division is only legible through the language of the post-1967 multicultural Canadian state—one that opened up mass pathways of entry while simultaneously fixing the terms of national identity by stabilizing, or “exalting” (as Sunera Thobani 2007 writes) proper national subjects in relation to the nations’ new global south “others.” (This is to say nothing of the Indigenous populations by this time sequestered to reserves, their children apprehended en masse into the residential school system.) In one case study, I show how my interlocutors forego, or disinherit, the supplication (duʿāʾ) practices central to the affective and asymmetrical dynamic of parents offering spontaneous prayers for their children (but not vice versa) as a conversational fixture. For purposes of contrast, I detail duʿāʾs displacement with the reciprocal idiom “I love you.” Take Ayesha, a 37-year-old mother of three, a woman of Pakistani heritage, who lives in a suburb near Toronto, Canada. She speaks in English to her children and is more interested in transmitting what she distinguishes as “dīn” (religion) rather than “culture.” For her, this means, among other things, playing English-language and Arabic-language religious songs (“nashīds”) at home. Somehow, what is neither relevant nor neutral to her parenting is the Urdu-language qavvālī or g͟hazal she grew up hearing in the background. Ayesha tells me that had she “felt closer” to her parents as an adolescent, she might have also felt “stronger about being Muslim.” At various times, she describes how she tries to forge “closeness” with her own children, for example, by saying “I love you” to them frequently throughout the day. I ask her if she grew up hearing this from her own parents. “Not at all,” she laughs, “my parents were typical immigrant parents, they never said that.” But Ayesha’s parents “constantly made duʿāʾ” for her, all the time. “You do the smallest task for them, like bring them some tea, and they’ll say, like, ‘mā shā’ allāh, merī pyārī beṭī, allāh nek taufīq de” [glory be to God for my lovely daughter, may God give you virtuous success]. But Ayesha does not “ever really” utter spontaneous prayers for her own children. “Why not?” I ask. “I’m not sure, I haven’t really thought about it before. That’s so weird that we don’t … because I … appreciate that my parents pray for me … obviously I really need my parents’ prayers!” Her insistence—“Obviously, I really need my parents’ prayers!”—indexes the primacy of parental prayers accorded in my interlocutors’ view of the Islamic tradition. The prayers coming from a parent are widely considered a special case, their efficacy less contingent on the righteousness of the supplicant and instead emanating from their presumed sincerity—an interior state resultant from the purity of parental love. Here, notions of parental prayer intersect with the cultural thematic of child sentimentality. My interlocutors draw their connections from various textual precepts about parental affect or descriptions of parental authority, such as the hadiths “God loves you more than your mother” and “Obey God and be good to your parents.” Parental love and parental rights merge to form an imaginary about the power of parental prayer: that it can perforate the usual uncertainty of God’s response to a human request. It is through this sensibility that Ayesha prays for her children. Even so, these supplications take place through adjusted terms: she says she does so “after namaz [ritual prayer],” “just on my own,” or “with them at nighttime.” It is a given both to pray for one’s children and to do so in one’s private moments with God. Or, parents pray with instead of for their children, to ensure they instill in their children the proper duʿāʾ habits and practices. The impetus toward didactic modes of guiding one’s child toward moral development, by a parent who is tutored rather than “untutored” (Asad 1986) in the tradition, is in keeping with the turn toward the nuclear family as a site of pedagogy and the expectation of parents to engage with their children as educators in an especially technical sense (the increasing use of the term “parenting” is itself a mark of this orientation). It is also in keeping with contemporary parenting culture’s liberal impulse to cultivate subjects equipped to depart from the nuclear household with an already inhabited autonomy. Muslim parents in Canada are, of course, also shaped by the early twentieth-century turn toward scientific parenthood, where bestowing affection becomes a parental skill, and the rise of the nuclear family, including the concomitant set of postindustrial intimacies it brought with it (James and Prout 2015; Lee, 2014; Zelizer 1985). They are also situated in the social terrain of public language, one that maps onto some of the very speech dynamics they enact in the parent–child encounter. Not only is vocal prayer not part of current public language mores, but it is tethered in this case to the figure of the hypervisible immigrant parent. What is sayable and unsayable in the public domain is mirrored in these private dynamics, blurring any meaningful divide between the two in the first place. In these ways, I read contemporary Muslim parenthood as a site where the “ethnic” immigrant is brought into being as an intimate category, a reality first felt in the home, ostensibly away from national discourses. Out-loud prayer fades as a grammar of intimacy in the diasporic context and refers that mode to the category of the well-intentioned but ultimately inappropriate immigrant parent. Counterintuitively, prayer loses its capacity to contour a religious subjectivity and is displaced instead by a particular attention to inhabiting one’s relations, forged through modern modes of intimacy and mutual disclosure. One could easily account for this shift as a heightened mode of objectified religion characteristic of the present. The highly reflexive terms of today’s parenting as an enterprise of selecting what to keep, efface, or incorporate from varied “evidence-based” techniques only compound in a context of diasporic dislocation, where the generational transmission of life-forms is irrecuperable, alongside Islam’s fraught placement in a secular-liberal Canada. This confluence results in Muslim parents engaging in a continuous labor to (reflexively) separate the wheat from the chaff of Islamic tradition as a mode of child-rearing. Curating a relevant Islam seems to demand ongoing deliberative judgments about dissociating from tradition’s cumbersome inheritances. What Mahmood’s critique of the objectification thesis underlines for me, however, is that even this verge toward objectification is still not quite the rupture it appears to be (namely, a ham-fisted postimmigrant Islam attempting to purify itself from the “cultural baggage” attached to the immigrant parent, reifying the modern twin dynamic between religion and culture). Rather, instead of distinguishing between reflection and tradition, she instructs us to observe their less obvious imbrications: recall that Ayesha’s “reasons” for abandoning the practice of audibly praying for her child are just as inarticulable as actually praying aloud for her children. As she gestured toward, parental prayers remain widely understood as a direct line to God, sought and performed even when shot through with new vectors of power. As much as the departure from immigrant parenthood requires reflexive and stark leaps toward something ostensibly new and improved, the grammars of parenthood displaced along the way are not necessarily rejected or refuted. Instead, they seem to quietly fade in salience. The imbrication between reflection and tradition Mahmood allows us to see in the postimmigrant formation of Muslim Canada is that disinheritance’s modes are disavowing, indifferent, and unwitting all the same.

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