Pious Muslims distinguish virtue-forming practice from mere identity signaling

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. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 370

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the book’s central distinction between practice-as-ethical-training and practice-as-identity-marker.
• XREF: connects to: Pious Muslim self-cultivation functions as a rigorous attentional discipline. — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 57