Abstract
This paper is about the diverse ways in which piety is conceptualized and cultivated by highly-educated Muslim women in Turkey. These women hold active professional roles within the secular-public sphere while trying to keep their aim of becoming pious in their own way, in relation to their subjective understandings of piety. The paper examines the various paths of virtue formation taken by Turkish Muslim women by analyzing the data collected through the methods of participant observation and in-depth interviews. By questioning how they negotiate between the dynamics of the body and the mind, along with the different conceptions of agency, freedom, and submission informed by the secular-liberal and Islamic economies of ethical behavior, the paper claims that the boundaries between them is usually unclear in their everyday manifestation of piety and the course of its realization.
Utilizing the Foucauldian “care of the self” as the main analytical tool, the paper traces the milestones of cultivating piety within the Islamic tradition, particularly through Mohamed Al-Ghazzali’s The Alchemy of Happiness, and On Disciplining the Self. In this way, the paper puts these classical Islamic thinkers in a dialogue with contemporary anthropologists of Islam, such as Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad, in relation to their conceptions of virtue-making and agency, and portrays how the women in this particular case negotiate with their theories unknowingly while they are on their way towards building a pious modern self.
In order to create this dialogue, the paper examines the practices of headscarf and ritual prayer, as well as the particular contexts and happenings that are paving the way for a particular type of piety: including easier access to Islamic pedagogical sources, the ease of travel, and the availability of new religious communities that appeal to some of the interlocutors for various reasons. In this way, the paper concludes that all these technologies of self-cultivation, including the headscarf, create multiple subjectivities in relation to piety depending on the familial, educational, economic, and cultural backgrounds of Muslim women in Turkey, defying any monolithic categorization of veiled women, conservative women, religious women, etc. against a secular-liberal normative group.
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