Religious weeping is intentional devotion, not involuntary personal suffering.

Evidence

As the booklet and discussions among the mosque attendees make clear, weeping during the course of prayer is not tantamount to crying provoked by the pain of personal suffering. Nor must it be undertaken for the sake of impressing fellow Muslims, an act that some Muslim theologians explicitly iden.. tify as idolatrous (shirk) . This weeping must instead issue forth out of a sense of being overwhelmed by God’s greatness, and must be enacted with the in.. tention of pleasing Him. Thus, the mosque participants do not consider fear and weeping, within the context of ritual action, to be generic expressions or acts devoid of intentionality; they are specifi to the economy of motivation and action of which they are a constitutive part and, in an important sense, impart to the ritual action its distinctive quality. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 913

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in small acts of decorum carrying more weight than their practical logic suggests - here, weeping in prayer as a deliberate devotional act rather than authentic emotion.