Islamic law holds women answerable only for their own piety, not their husbands’.

Evidence

Given that Islamic j urisprudence regards men to be the moral and physical guardians of women,Z6 participants in the mosque movement often complained that liv.. ing with male kin who were not as religiously devout compromised their own standards of piety. The problem seemed to be particularly acute for a woman who was married to what the mosque participants called “al..zauj al..ea�i” (a dis.. obedient husband)-this concern was widely discussed not only in the mosque circles but also in religious advice columns in newspapers. In the eyes of the shar·ta, even though a woman is not responsible for her husband’s moral con.. duct but only her own and her children’s, her husband’s behavior nonetheless profoundly affects her own pursuit of a virtuous life, given the moral authority he commands over her and his offspring as their custodian. Faced with such a situation, it is not easy for a woman to challenge her husband’s conduct or to seek divorce, given the stigma of being a divorcee in Egyptian society and the restrictions Islamic law places on a woman’s right to divorce. It was, therefore, very common during the mosque lessons to hear the audiences ask the daeiyat what a woman should do if she was married to a husband who lived a sinful ex.. istence by the standards of virtuous Muslim conduct. … There is no simple doctrinal resolution to this problem. The responses of the daeiyat varied and the women were urged to pursue a variety of means to come to terms with the contradictions posed by the confl cting demands of loyalty to God versus fi lity to one’s (sinful) husband. Most daeiyat, whether at the upper..middle.., middle.., or lower..income mosques, argued that since men are the custodians (auliya”’ singular: wali ) of female kin in Islam, and not the other way around, women are not accountable in the eyes of God for the actions of their adult male kin. They advised women to try persuading their “disobedient to reform their behavior, and in the event they failed, to continue living with them -with the understanding that they would have to be extra vigilant in monitoring their own conduct. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1235

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the strategic-essentialism/postcolonial cluster (Spivak/Ahmad): piety subjects are constituted within—not against—the very structures liberal feminism reads as pure oppression. Also complicates liberal-feminist assumptions about the husband’s moral guardianship being the primary constraint.
• QUESTION: How does the moral division of accountability here map differently onto the question of female agency than Western accounts that frame coverture purely as subordination?