From Breathing to Writing: Meditation in the Colonial Public Sphere

As one of the last bastions of the universal, breathing appears to have withstood the assault of relativism over the past century. With the cultures of its variously modified forms regarded as separable from, and even irrelevant to, the universal essence of breath, respiration has been widely accepted as an ideologically neutral sphere of human activity. In the course of the twentieth century this assumed universality enabled distinctive Asian cultures of breathing (Yoga, Tai Chi) to be translated into European and American environments that proved otherwise less hospitable to the moral and political structures that had sustained these practices in their original contexts (ascetic renunciation, Chinese warfare). In short, breathing has seemed neither to require nor reflect a context. Yet like any other human activity, breathing always has a context and is indeed in its various forms (fast, shallow, hard, weak) perhaps the most subtly contingent of all human activities. This contingency is still more the case with regard to the deliberate modifications of breathing found in systems of meditation, for breath control and meditation are no less shaped by history than any other form of physical culture.

Over the first 15 years, foreign resident and migrant women have developed a multitude of Islamic study circles or halaqa throughout the Arabian Peninsula (Gulf). While some scholars attribute the development of these study circles to the overall spread of Islamic organizations in the region, I present a contrasting explanation in this essay. Based on several years of fieldwork conducted in the mid- to late-2000s, my discussion points to how conventional analyses are not so much incorrect as they are limited in their scope of analysis. Islamic reformist organizations influence women's halaqa; however, the development of these study circles are part and parcel of a broader set of processes shaping foreign resident and migrant women's religious experiences in the Gulf. Notable here are two factors: women's everyday diasporic uncertainties, and their development of cosmopolitan forms of Islamic practice.

A fieldwork moment prompting me to consider the importance of these processes occurred shortly after one of Auntie Noor's halaqa, gatherings that were attended primarily, if not exclusively by middle and upper-middle class South Asian women residing in Kuwait. The official part of the halaqa had ended. Those of us without pressing engagements or errands to run had moved to the kitchen, where Auntie Noor, our host and organizer of the weekly halaqa, had prepared a lavish meal. Carefully balancing a plate heaped full of pulao and sahlin, I was wending my way through the room when a conversation caught my attention.

The authors in this volume discuss contemporary Islamic reformism in South Asia in some of its diverse historical orientations and geographical expressions, bringing us contemporary ethnographic perspectives against which to assess claims about processes of reform and about trends such as ‘Islamism’ and ‘global Islam’.

The very use of terminology and categories is itself fraught with the dangers of bringing together what is actually substantially different under the same banner. While our authors have often found it necessary, perhaps for the sake of comparison or to help orient readers, to take on terms such as ‘reformist’ or ‘Islamist’, they are not using these as terms which imply identity—or even connection—between the groups so named, nor are they reifying such categories. In using such terms as shorthand to help identify specific projects, we are following broad definitions here in which ‘Islamic modernism’ refers to projects of change aiming to re-order Muslims' lifeworlds and institutional structures in dialogue with those produced under colonial and post-colonial modernity; ‘reformism’ refers to projects whose specific focus is the bringing into line of religious beliefs and practices with what are held to be the core foundations of Islam, by avoiding and purging out innovation, accretion and the intrusion of ‘local custom’; and where ‘Islamism’ is a stronger position, which insists upon Islam as the heart of all institutions, practice and subjectivity—a privileging of Islam as the frame of reference by which to negotiate every issue of life; ‘orthodoxy’ is an interesting term,[…]

Introduction

From the beginning of the Islamic era, Muslim societies have experienced periods of renewal (tajdid). Since the eighteenth century, Muslim societies across the world have been subject to a prolonged and increasingly deeply felt process of renewal. This has been expressed in different ways in different contexts. Amongst political elites with immediate concerns to answer the challenges of the West, it has meant attempts to reshape Islamic knowledge and institutions in the light of Western models, a process described as Islamic modernism. Amongst ‘ulama and sufis, whose social base might lie in urban, commercial or tribal communities, it has meant ‘the reorganisation of communities… [or] the reform of individual behavior in terms of fundamental religious principles’, a development known as reformism (Lapidus 2002: 457). These processes have been expressed in movements as different as the Iranian constitutional revolution, the jihads of West Africa, and the great drives to spread reformed Islamic knowledge in India and Indonesia. In the second half of the twentieth century, the process of renewal mutated to develop a new strand, which claimed that revelation had the right to control all human experiences and that state power must be sought to achieve this end. This is known to many as Islamic fundamentalism, but is usually better understood as Islamism. For the majority of Muslims today, Islamic renewal in some shape or other has helped to mould the inner and outer realities of their lives.

Introduction

In recent years, growing numbers of Muslim women in India have been publicly calling for reform of Muslim Personal Law (MPL), justifying their demands for gender equity with religious arguments, referring to the authority of the Qur'an rather than to the Indian Constitution or to the universalistic principles of human rights that have long guided Indian secular feminists in their campaigns for a gender-neutral uniform civil code (UCC) of personal law. These women are part of a trend observable all over the Muslim world, in which ‘a new breed of Muslim women scholaractivists’ (Sikand 2005a) is seriously and critically studying the foundational texts of their religion. They are

Scholars of the Middle East began to use the term ‘Islamic feminism’ in the 1990s for movements then gaining prominence in Egypt, Iran and elsewhere, in which women were attempting, ‘through a rereading of the Qur'an and early Islamic history’ to ‘reclaim their religion… [and] undermine both Islamist patriarchal distortions and Western stereotypes of Islam as backward and terroristic’ (Moghadam 2004: 53).

The Argument

Despite critiques, much of the scholarship on Islamism and the ‘woman question’ continues to be driven by a modernization paradigm. A classic example is the assumption that not only Islamist movements but Islam itself stand against women's equality. Articulated variously under the flags of Islamic ‘religion’, ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’, it is held that Islam is the signature cause of women's plight. From an atheistic framework, Winter (2001b) argues that Islam and Islamist movements (she conflates them) have irredeemably chained women. She asks: is Islam not ‘a primary cultural means of ensuring men's political domination of women'? (Winter 2001a: 33). Furthermore, she dismisses the idea that Islamist movements (she describes them as right-wing) have become moderate. Thus, she rejects any progressive reading of Islam claiming that the Qur'an (like other holy texts) is inherently ‘oppressive to women’ (ibid.: 12; see also Sahgal and Yuval-Davis 1992). Critical of ‘Islamic feminists’ project of evolving non-patriarchal readings of sources of Islamic authority (see, e.g., Badran 2002; Mirza 2005; and Moghadam 2002), Moghissi (1999) too contends that gender equality is ‘diametrically opposed to the basic principles of Islam’ and that ‘ … no amount of twisting… can reconcile the Qur'anic injunctions… with… gender equality' (ibid.: 140; also, see Karmi 1996: 79). Likewise, Mojab (2005: 325) avers that Islamic feminism ‘is a compromise with patriarchy’.

By the middle of the nineteenth century many of India's thinkers were occupied with a single task: to understand and assimilate the modernity they thought had made British rule possible. Until late in the century these efforts were made in the name of religion, with Hindu and Muslim groups founded to reform their respective faiths, and this meant that the idea of modernity had no secular history in India. In this essay I want to look at the way in which Muslim intellectuals who were part of the influential Aligarh Movement came to think about their society as something that had to be reformed and made modern (Lelyveld 1978). Named after the town in northern India that housed its most prominent institution, the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, later Aligarh Muslim University, the Aligarh Movement was also primarily a North Indian phenomenon, but one whose intellectual influence extended much beyond the borders of India. This movement was founded by a group of men who belonged to a class of professional or salaried gentry, known as the shurafa, which had furnished administrators to pre-colonial states and now attempted to do the same for colonial India. Sayyid Ahmad Khan, a minor aristocrat, was the founder and acknowledged leader of the Aligarh group, which called itself a party or school in English, and a movement or tahrik in Urdu, and whose important activities, the college apart, comprised the Muhammadan Educational Conference and voluminous writings, including a journal, the Tahzib-ul-Akhlaq or Refinement of Morals.

Introduction

In Muslim communities in contemporary South Asia and other Muslim-majority areas, informal religious lesson circles are proliferating rapidly as mass higher education brings more Muslims under the umbrella of standardized, nationalized education systems. These study circles often revolve around the study of compendia of Qur'anic commentary or exegesis, hadith (written records of sayings and acts attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) such as the thirteenth-century Riyad al-Salihin, as well as Qur'anic commentaries and theological texts produced by authoritative traditional religious scholars, contemporary or recent.

While some scholars have discussed contemporary commentaries on the Qur'an and their authors, fewer have focused on the users of these commentaries and of other Islamic literature, or on the specifics of audience engagement with these texts (Eickelman 2004). Thus, for instance, while the works of Sayyid Qutb (which are central to the Muslim Brotherhood, the leading Islamic movement in the Middle East and North Africa) have been analysed by several scholars (see, for example, Carré 2003; Kepel 1993 [1985]; Khatab 2006; and Moussalli 1992), some important questions are left unanswered: How are Qutb's ideas explained to adherents on the ground? What styles of discourse are employed in lesson circles? Which ideas are emphasized and which marginalized, and what kinds of techniques are used to do so? Do lesson circles actually shape how individual members feel, think, express themselves, and act? If so, how, and to what extent? Which groups are reading which texts or selections from texts?

In his waaz mahfils (public lectures) attended by thousands of women and men throughout Bangladesh, prominent Jamaat-i-Islami (Society of Islam) leader and former parliamentarian Delawar Hussain Saidi routinely discussed the above hadith as part of his effort to highlight the importance attached by the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, and Islam itself to the role of the mother in Muslim society, and the privileged status of women generally in Islam. Interestingly, he used the verb ‘to serve,’ transforming the man's question into ‘Whom shall I serve?’ He repeatedly punctuated his lectures on women with the question, ‘Have women come out as winners or losers under Islam?’ And, invariably, the audience responded loudly and enthusiastically, ‘Winners!’

In this essay, I argue that, around the turn of the century, leaders of the Jamaat-i-Islami in Bangladesh regularly invoked women's privileged status as mothers—as in the hadith cited above—to counter the claims of the largely secularist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) operating in the country that Islam has been harmful to women and the only route to progress is to discard the shackles of religion and tradition.