Islam, Modernity and the Politics of Gender 95their societies’ ‘backwardness’. Afsaneh Najmabadi (2005) takes this argument
even further by suggesting that, from the nineteenth century onwards, in the
case of Iran, there was a radical transformation of gender and sexuality through
a process of repressive ‘heteronormalisation’, whose sexual anxieties linger on.
Thus, when modernity – defi ned as a political project rather than an imma-
nent process of social transformation – is recast as authoritarian and monolithic,
resistance articulated in an Islamic idiom may be interpreted as an instance of
subaltern expression or the emergence of counter-publics. For those who, like
Göle, posit a Muslim habitus that is diametrically opposed to Western notions
of corporeality and public presence, women’s bodies and sexuality become a
privileged political site for the expression of difference and resistance to Western
modernity. However, the contemporary veiling movement, far from represent-
ing a retreat into tradition, is reinterpreted as part and parcel of an indigenously
defi ned modernity that is refl exive in character to the extent that the codes and
symbols associated with religion are critically appropriated and distanced from
traditional culture (Göle 1996, 2002). Others, like Mahmood, reject the reduc-
tion of the resurgence of Islamic forms of modesty and sociability to an expres-
sion of resistance to the West, since this simplifi es the nature of the subjectivities
that are crafted through pietist movements involving Muslim women. Pietist
discourse engages in a critique of identity politics (namely, forms of Islamic
practice whose raison d’être is to signal an identity or tradition) to the extent that
it does not have the ability to contribute to the formation of an ethical disposi-
tion. The cultivation of virtue, through various forms of embodied practice
(such as veiling, praying and fasting), is at the very centre of the forms of agency
deployed by pious women and must, therefore, be understood on its own terms
(Mahmood 2004).
The detailed ethnographic work by Jenny White (2002) on grass-roots
Islamist mobilisation in Turkey, on the other hand, suggests that Muslim social
imaginaries and presentations of the self may themselves be fractured by class
and gender and that the boundaries between secular and religious identities and
sensibilities may, in fact, be far more fl uid (see Navaro-Yashin 2002). Indeed,
positing the radical alterity of pious subjectivities or, for that matter, of an
assumed Muslim habitus may inadvertently freeze and reify what are continually
evolving manifestations of identity. Ismail (2006), for instance, demonstrates
that, in Cairo’s deprived new urban quarters, the boundaries between pietis-
tic and militant oppositional movements are fl uid and porous and that both
inform constructions of marginalised masculinities. This male marginalisation
is set in the context of antagonistic relations with state institutions, involving
violence and changes in women’s roles both as breadwinners and as mediators
of relations with the state.
What should be amply clear from the above is that, abstracted from the
concrete historical and institutional contexts in which they are embedded and