Pious Practices and Secular Constraints

Pious Practices and Secular Constraints is premised on the image of a secular state under siege by Muslims who persist in religious practices that challenge Europe’s identity, including the highly public wearing of headscarves. Jeanette Jouili integrates relevant poststructuralist accounts of the anthropology of ethics with her original ethnographic work to illustrate the porous yet regulated boundary between the secular and religious worlds as well as a range of ways in which Muslim women in Germany and France deal differently with the opportunities, demands, and restrictions associated with secular modes of life. How do “pious” Muslim women cope with the everyday difficulties of living an ethical life, as defined by the Islamic tradition, in societies that are increasingly hostile to visible forms of Islamic piety? Based on fieldwork done in the early-to-middle 2000s in and around Cologne and Paris, this book illustrates how certain Muslim women--namely, those associated with “revival circles”--inhabit restrictive secular spaces in two different national contexts and engage in moral struggles in the public sphere.

Aesthetics · Ethnography · Everyday life · Identity (music) · Islam · Piety · Political science · Politics · Public life · Public sphere · Secular education · Secular state · Secularism · Secularity · Sociology · State (computer science) · Theology · Anthropology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Gender Studies · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Law · Philosophy