Piety distinguishes ethical formation from mere identity signaling in practice

Evidence

Undergirding Fatma’s and Hajja Nur’s critique is a conception of religiosity that discriminates between a religious practice that is part of the larger project of realizing Islamic virtues in the entirety of one’s life, and a practice that is Islamic in form and style but does not necessarily serve as a means to the training and realization of a pious self. Fatma and Hajja Nur are critical of the process by which practices that are supposed to be part of a larger program for shaping ethical capacities lose this function and become little more than markers of identity: such as when people fast because they have learned that this is simply what Muslims do. In summary, Fatma and Hajja Nur’s remarks imply a critique of those forms of Islamic practice whose raison d’etre is to signal an identity or tradition and which are , therefore, shorn of their ability to contribute to the formation of an ethical disposition. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 370

Categorization

• XREF: This distinction between ethical self-formation and identity markers directly parallels Spivak’s critique of strategic essentialism flattening heterogeneous practice into a unified identity for the West’s consumption.