Devout Muslim women distinguish religious acts from mere custom when justifying the veil

Evidence

Notably, Hajja Nur’s statement above suggests that the attitude of those women who wear the veil out of habit is not dissimilar from those who regard the veil as a local custom (similar to regional styles of clothing, eating habits, and so on). In making this observation, she is referring to a widely known argument put forward by Egyptian intellectuals that veiling is not so much a divine injunction as it is a continuation of regional customs, practiced by women in Arabia at the advent of Islam, that has mistakenly become enshrined as a religious edict. Hajja Nur faults both of these attitudes (the one that regards veiling to be a regional custom, and the other that unthinkingly reproduces the tradition of veiling) for ignoring how the practice of veiling is an integral part of an entire manner of existence through which one learns to cultivate the virtue of modesty in all aspects of one’s life. In making her argument, she uses a key distinction, often invoked by the mosque participants, between customary and religious acts, a distinction that women like Hajja Nur think is elided when religion is understood as yet another kind of cultural practice. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 371

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the liberal/Marxist reduction of religion to culture that Spivak and Ahmad critique — religion’s irreducibility to ‘cultural practice’ parallels postcolonial theory’s refusal of Western epistemic frames.
• DEFINE: Establishes the customary-versus-religious-act distinction central to the mosque movement’s self-understanding.