Muslim World Journal of Human
Rights
Volume 4, Issue 1 2007 Article 3
THE TRANSNATIONAL MUSLIM WORLD, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND
THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN AND SEXUAL MINORITIES
Islamism, Re-Islamization and the Fashioning
of Muslim Selves: Refiguring the Public
Sphere
Salwa Ismail
∗
∗
School of Oriental and African Studies, si1@soas.ac.uk
Copyright
c
2007 The Berkeley Electronic Press. All rights reserved.
Islamism, Re-Islamization and the Fashioning
of Muslim Selves: Refiguring the Public
Sphere
∗
Salwa Ismail
Abstract
This article explores the political implications of Muslim public self-presentation and forms of
self-fashioning associated with the ongoing processes of re-Islamisation in both Muslim-majority
and Muslim-minority societies. It sketches how projects of the Muslim public self contribute
to a refiguring of the public sphere. The argument put forward is that public practices of self-
reform grounded in religion and presented in pietistic terms are political by virtue of being tied
to projects of societal reform and because they have a bearing on the public sphere and public
space. Proceeding from the premise that the public sphere is not neutral and that the subjectivities
inhabiting it are shaped by power relations, the article examines the ways in which projects of
Muslim public selves are imbricated in the material conditions of the settings in which they develop
and as such are underpinned by dynamics of power and contestation.
KEYWORDS: Islam, public sphere
∗
Salwa Ismail is Reader in Comparative Politics of the Middle East, at the School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London. Her research and writing focuses on Islamist politics,
and urban politics and state-society relations in the Middle East. She has published widely on
modern Islamic political thought, Islamist movements and questions of urban governance. Her
publications include Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism, I.B. Tauris,
2003&2006, and Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State, Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Over the past three decades, the rise of Islamist movements has turned on
the political and social visions these movements have advocated. In scholarly
analyses and media writings, explanations for this rise have tended to focus on the
ideologies of Islamist groups, on the socio-economic backgrounds of Islamist
actors, and on the political contexts for their emergence. More recently, research
has turned to the wider processes of re-Islamization entailing social practices and
disciplines that constitute individuals as Muslim selves active in the public sphere.
These selves do not necessarily endorse the Islamist project of the Islamic state,
nor do they perforce advocate militant or violent action to actualize a program of
reforming the self and the social body of which they are members. However, the
engagement of individual and collective projects of self-transformation in matters
of ethics and morality has a bearing on the public sphere and on public space. As
such, these projects engage others who may have varying, competing and
conflicting projects. In the context of secular and western societies, they disrupt
and destabilize modes of thinking and ways of being long thought to be the
subject of consensus and closure. In Muslim-majority countries, the construction
of Muslim public selves interrogates the project of modernity modelled after the
western experience, while proposing alternative visions of the public sphere.
In this essay I begin by reflecting on the varying constructions of Muslim
subjects in the public sphere and, in particular, on how different projects of self
are guided by varying understandings of religion and personal faith. My purpose
is to draw out some of the political implications of individual projects of self
grounded in religion, underscoring that we cannot isolate moral selves from
political selves. In exploring the political implications of Muslim projects of self,
I will engage with current debates on the nature of the public sphere and, in
particular, the claim made about its neutrality. In this respect, I want to address
the implications of adopting a critical questioning on the neutrality of the public
sphere in terms of the subjectivities inhabiting it, and in terms of the signs and
symbols that populate it. In questioning this presumed neutrality, I highlight the
historical situatedness of the visibility or invisibility of Islamic markers in the
public sphere. Following from that, I sketch elements of the refiguring of the
public sphere and the reshaping of Islamic traditions under conditions of
globalization. Finally, I turn to an examination of the local dynamics of power
and contestation underpinning projects of self-presentation in the public sphere.
My overriding argument is that projects of the Muslim self, like all such projects,
take shape in context and in relation to material conditions, and are, further,
enmeshed in power relations. They are never apolitical even when framed or
explained in strictly moral or pietistic terms. Thus, projects of Muslim self-
production should not be seen as divorced from the settings and contexts in which
they take place, but as imbricated in and emergent from those settings.
1
Ismail: Islamism, Re-Islamization and the Fashioning of Muslim Selves
Published by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2007
Islamism, Re-Islamization and the Construction of Muslim Selves
The various projects of self that are pursued by contemporary Muslims are tied up
with Islamist politics and the ongoing processes of re-Islamization. Before
proceeding further, I will briefly define what I mean by Islamist politics and re-
Islamization. I use Islamist politics to refer to activities of organizations and
movements that mobilise and agitate in the political sphere while deploying signs
and symbols from Islamic traditions. I use re-Islamization to designate the
processes whereby various domains of social life are invested with signs and
symbols associated with Islamic cultural traditions (Ismail 2003, 2). I have argued
elsewhere that Islamist politics and re-Islamization are not mutually exclusive
(Ismail 2003). Rather, they have points of both convergence and divergence. I
also think that the forms of activism that both entail fall under the wider rubric of
Islamism.
At the ideological level, there is a wide range of articulations constituting
the discursive field of Islamism. These articulations are neither coherent nor
homogeneous. For example, they do not all necessarily buttress the idea of an
Islamic state. Further, this field does not have fixed boundaries but rather overlaps
with popular articulations of religion, more generally, and with differing
productions of Muslim identities. Popular preachers, sheikhs associated with
official Islam, religious figures of moderate Islam, lay religious intellectuals,
Islamist activists, and ordinary Muslims all engage in the production of Muslim
and Islamist identities. They are all party to the processes of re-Islamization. We
do not have a straightforward equation for organising the manner in which this
discursive field shapes Islamist movements. While it is safe to argue that re-
Islamization does not equate with Islamist politics, it is simplistic to see in re-
Islamization a negation of Islamism. There are stakes in the competing
interpretative frames. Simply put, diverse actors, from secularists to militant
Islamists, aim to claim ownership of “true Islam”. At this stage, we do not have a
comprehensive view of the various discourses and their interaction (Ismail 2004a,
398-99).
For the purposes of this discussion, I want to focus on the individual level
of engagement in the production of Muslim and Islamist identities, paying
particular attention to projects of self and the kind of politics that they represent.
Some projects of self make clearly-stated political claims, while others renounce
and reject an explicit political stance. While I accept this distinction, inasmuch as
the agents themselves make it, I argue that there may be different kinds of politics
at play and therefore projects of self are almost always, in some sense, political.
As will be elaborated below, in most cases, projects of self-reform are tied up
with projects of societal reform and transformation. For example, proceeding
from the individual level, they may aim to alter gender relations, family norms
2
Muslim World Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 4 [2007], Iss. 1, Art. 3
http://www.bepress.com/mwjhr/vol4/iss1/art3
and modes of conduct in public. The drive for re-Islamization in these areas does
not necessarily operate in the narrow political sphere nor does it address questions
of government and state. In light of this, we should be attuned to the different
politics expressed in individual and collective projects of self and society.
To illustrate, let us look at the examples of two Muslim women activists
and their constructions of Islam and of their Muslim identity. I begin by
considering the views of a well-known activist, writer and professor of Political
Science at Cairo University, Heba Raouf. Raouf’s political vision is captured in
her approach to the shari’a as a political ideology and her view that religion has
an emancipatory role to play in society (see Qureshi and Raouf 2004). This
premise appears to guide Raouf’s approach to social, cultural and religious
practices of self-presentation in the public space. In her discourse, Raouf is
critical of what she calls al-muhajjaba al-mutaharira (the liberal, veiled woman).
Under this rubric, Raouf has in mind a muhajjaba (veiled woman) who wears a
pure silk veil and speaks to her children in English (Haenni & Füger 1996, 121).
The critique of certain forms of Muslim public self-presentation made by Raouf
cannot be said to issue from any religious strictures in Islamic traditions.
1
Rather,
it is an improvisation necessary for the evaluation of proper adherence to a
political project that, in the terms enunciated, has nationalist and cultural
overtones, expressing the desire to draw distinctions from “the Other” through
styles of dress, language and overall cultural self-construction and positioning.
2
I pose, in contrast to Raouf, Mrs. H., an activist who volunteers for an
Islamic charitable association in Cairo, namely al-Jam‘iyya al-Shar‘iyya. Mrs. H.
holds a doctorate in the natural sciences and is engaged in fundraising for poverty
relief, sponsorship of orphans, religious preaching and Quranic teaching. In
discussing her activism, Mrs. H. rejected any reading of her engagement in
political terms (interview with author, Cairo, April 2004). She explained that her
activities in the charitable organization expressed a personal desire to please God:
li-wajh allah (literally, “for God’s face”). She denied that she was guided by a
sense of social responsibility or that she was motivated by a desire to assume an
“alternative moral citizenship” (as one analyst has suggested).
3
To prove the
1
However, it should be noted that it is possible to mine the traditions to find religious justification
for the kind of position taken by Raouf. Indeed, Saudi scholars issued fatwa-s disallowing Muslim
women from wearing jeans on the basis that they make them look like infidels (the reference, here,
being to westerners). See Al-Rasheed 2007, 132. This is not the ground on which Raouf stands.
2
The ‘Other’ from whom it is necessary to draw distinctions is invariably the west. While certain
Islamist discourses construct the relations with this other in predominately cultural terms, a clear
link between cultural, economic and political antagonisms is articulated in the contestatory
discourses of some Islamist preachers and ideologues. An excellent example is the sermons of
Safar al-Hawli and Salman al-Awda discussed in Mamoun Fandy (1999).
3
The idea that engagement in the charity work of organizations like al-Jama‘iyya al-Shar‘iyya
expresses an alternative form of citizenship is put forward by Sarah BenNefissa (2004). The
3
Ismail: Islamism, Re-Islamization and the Fashioning of Muslim Selves
Published by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2007