Outward religious behavior can be a means of producing inner piety
Evidence
When compared with the views of the mosque participants, comments such as these suggest a very different understanding of the relationship between public behavior and interiority, and of the role exemplary models should play in shaping the pious self. Amna’s skepticism about the public display of emo.. tions registers a detachment between the inner life of a self and its outward expressions wherein the experience of the former cannot be adequately cap.. tured in the latter, and where its true force can only be felt within the val.. orized space of personal self..refl Amna questions the mosque partici.. pants’ sincerity precisely because they place undue weight on performative behavior and social conventions as a measure of their religiosity; indeed, if the proper location of religion and emotions is the inner life of the individual, as Amna seems to suggest, then it follows that one’s sincerity in these two domains cannot be measured in one’s outward performances. In contrast, for the women I worked with, outward behavioral forms were not only expressions of their interiorized religiosity but also a necessary means of acquiring it. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1020
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the book’s central contrast between expressive and performative models of piety: interiority as source vs. interiority as product of outward practice.
- DEEPTHINKING: This is the theoretical pivot of the entire book — the claim that exterior practice can produce rather than merely express interior states overturns a deep Western assumption about selfhood and sincerity.
- XREF: connects to: Universal spirit becomes literally present within self-consciousness through worship.