Pious Practice and Secular Constraints Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe By Jeanette S. Jouili (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 296 pages.)

Abstract

A research study grounded in both anthropology and ethnography, the aim of
Jeanette S. Jouili’s Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic
Revival in Europe is threefold: (1) to explore how women cultivate Islamic
subjectivities in secular European contexts that stigmatize and politicize
such religious practices; (2) reveal the practical and discursive techniques they
have devised to deal with the difficulties that emerge from engaging in pious
practices; and, finally, (3) attempts to show how living as a religious minority
in a secular-majority society can reshape traditional Islamic discourse and provide
an alternative to the dominant language of autonomy, individual rights,
and equality. Since the early 2000s, Jouili has come into contact with a wide
range of practicing Muslimahs attending courses in various Islamic centers
of learning, specifically in Paris and the region around Cologne. These centers
are distinctive for their willingness to explore a multiplicity of doctrinal lineages
and attempt to transcend cultural and ethnic traditions.
In the case of this most recent publication, there is the added value of a
much-needed overview of pious women who have been active in Islamic revival
circles in Europe, together with perceptive insights into their daily lives.
This book, therefore, contributes to a high-profile body of work by Talal Asad
(1993, 2003), Saba Mahmood (2005), and Charles Hirschkind (2006) around
ethics and ethical self-cultivation, which explores contextual power relations
at play in the construction of religious discourses and practices, as well as Armando
Salvatore’s work on the public sphere (2007). Jouili’s findings shed
light on the incompleteness and unlinearity of these Islamic moral codes, as
well as demonstrate how “[t]he individual’s work on herself [is] significantly
and long-lastingly complicated by prior habits and by the availability of other
sets of moral codes” (p. 15).
Drawing on Aristotelian ethics, with its insistence on practice rather than
reason, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Jouili investigates how the
embodied/practical ethical process molds an Islamic modernity within a secular
European context (chapter 1). The subsequent chapters provide an indepth
study of these practices, which are aimed at strengthening through the
internalization of an “authenticated” knowledge of Islam learned within formal
settings (chapter 2) and the specific techniques of self-cultivation, specifically
118 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 33:2
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