State regulation makes every world-making project necessarily political

Evidence

The fact that the piety movement does not directly engage the state and its juridical discourses, however, should not lead us to think that it has no direct political implications. To the extent that all aspects of human life (whether they pertain to family, education, worship, welfare , commercial transactions, instances of birth and death, and so on) have been brought under the regulatory apparatuses of the nation— tate, the piety movement’s efforts to remake any of these activities will necessarily have political consequences. As Charles Hirschkind has argued persuasively, “Modern politics and the forms of power it deploys have become a [necessary] condition for the practice of many of our more personal activities. As for religion, to the extent that the institutions enabling the cultivation of religious virtue have become subsumed within ( and transformed by) the legal and administrative structures linked to the state, then the (traditional) project of preserving those virtues will necessarily be political if it is to succeed” ( 1997, 13). In other words, it is not that the pietists have “politicized” the spiritual domain of Islam ( as some scholars of Islamism claim) but that conditions of secular— 3 This is a position, as I suggested earlier, that is upheld by a number of scholars of Islamic re. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1284

Categorization

• XREF: Clarifies a mechanism that connects to the vault’s Islamophobia cluster: the state’s regulatory reach forces even ‘private’ religious practice into political engagement.