Producing the Conjugal Patriarchal Family in Maulana Thanvi’s Heavenly Ornaments
Biopolitics, “Shariatic Modernity” and Managing Women
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/cis.v5i1.93Keywords:
Women and Islam, Maulana Thanvi, South Asia, Deoband School, Tabligh Movement, Islam in South AsiaAbstract
Written in the 1930s for Muslim women in north India by Maulana Ashraf Thanvi (1864-1943), Bahishti Zewar or Heavenly Ornaments, has been influential in defining proper feminine etiquette and household management. The household type that is produced is nuclear and with a clearly defined male patriarch. The most mundane of tasks are outlined and related to religious duty. What is central to my analysis is how the meticulous details of household management, bodily comportment and etiquette articulate a regime not of repressive power but rather a (modern) productive modality of power that produce trained docile bodies (Foucault, 1975) and complementary gendered Muslim subjectivities. Thus the tropes Thanvi uses to produce a manual for the self-management of women cannot be divorced from certain logics of modernity and modernist reform; but instead of medico-scientific discourses producing women’s subjectivity, Thanvi uses shariatic principles as the vector through which a modern vision of a managed patriarchal conjugal family infiltrates the household. I am thus depending on Foucault’s notion of biopower that characterizes a modern modality of power. In order to justify my use of this concept, I will outline how Thanvi’s reformist ideas are not inherently oppositional to the logics of Bourgeois modernist production of the conjugal family and the scientific management of the private sphere (Abu-Lughod, 1998). Though I am not claiming that a European Victorian mode of modernity was synonymous with Thanvi’s reformist sentiments, I will reveal that the Bahishti Zewar can be thought of as a modern text, though one articulating an alternative modernity (Göle, 2002; Zaidi, 2006; Gaonkar, 2001) organized around Thanvi’s selective interpretation of shariatic principles. This will reveal the ability to rethink modernity’s relationship with reformist Islamic sentiment and challenge the denial of coavelesence (Fabian, 1983) between modernity’s temporality and Islam, as well as challenging the idea that Thanvi refuted modernity (Naeem, 2003: 2).References
Abu-Lughod, Lila. “The Marriage of Feminism and Islamism in Egypt: Selective Repudiation as a Dynamic of Postcolonial Cultural Politics.” In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, edited by Lila Abu-Lughod, 243–269. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Ahmad, Aijaz. Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia. New York: Verso, 2000.
Al-Hibri, Azizah. “An Introduction to Muslim Women’s Rights.” In Windows of Faith: Muslim Women Scholar-Activists in North America, edited by Gisela Webb, 51–71. New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000.
Ali, Kecia. “Progressive Muslims and Islamic Jurisprudence: The Necessity for Critical Engagement with Marriage and Divorce Law.” In Progressive Muslims on Justice, Gender and Pluralism, edited by Omid Safi, 163–189. Oxford: Oneworld Press, 2005.
Anshuman, Mondal. “The Emblematics of Gender and Sexuality in Indian Nationalist Discourse.” Modern Asian Studies 36(4), (2002): 913–936.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Aslam, Maleeha. “The Process and Impact of Ideologization of Islam in Pakistan.” M.Phil Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003.
Atasoy, Yildiz. “Cosmopolitan Islamists in Turkey: Rethinking the Local in a global Era.” Studies in Political Economy 71/72 (2003): 133–161.
Brass, Paul. The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.
Chandra, Bipan. Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India. Delhi: Orient Longman, 1979.
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Daechsel, Markus. The Politics of Self-Expression: The Urdu Middle-Class Milieu in Mid-Twentieth Century India and Pakistan. London: Routledge, 2006.
Dalmia, Vasudha. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Branatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banares. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Davis, Charles. “Pluralism, Privacy, and the Interior Self.” In Habermas, Modernity and Public Theology, edited by Don Browning and Francis Fiorenza, 152–172. New York: Cross Roads, 1992.
Deshapande, Satish. “Hegemonic Spatial Strategies: The Nation-Space and Hindu Communalism in Twentieth-Century India.” In Subaltern Studies Conference: Community, Gender and Violence, edited by Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan, 167–211. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1975.
———. “The Dangerous Individual.” In Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, edited by L. Kritzman, 125-151. New York: Routledge, 1988.
———. The History of Sexuality: Vol 1. An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Fox, Richard. “Communalism and Modernity.” In Making India Hindu: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, Second Edition, edited by David Ludden, 235–249. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. “On Alternative Modernities.” In Alternative Modernities, edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 1–23. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Göle, Nilüfer. The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996.
———. “Islam in Public: New Visibilities and New Imaginaries.” Public Culture 14(1), (2002): 172–190.
Gupta, Charu. Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Imran, Rahat. “Legal Injustices: The Zina Hudood Ordinance of Pakistan and Its Implications for Women.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 7(2), (2005): 78–97.
Kurzman, Charles. “Sayyid Ahmad Khan.” In Modernist Islam: 1840–1940, edited by Charles Kurzman, 291–303. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Landes, Joan. “The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration.” In Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, edited by Johanna Meehan, 91–116. London: Routledge, 1995.
Masud, Muhammad Khalid. “Introduction.” In Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jama’at as a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal, edited by Muhammad Khalid Masud, xiii–lx. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2002a.
———. “Ideology and Legitimacy.” In Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablighi Jama’at as a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal, edited by Muhammad Khalid Masud, 79–118. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2002b.
Metcalf, Barbara. Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1990. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
———. Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi’s Bihishti Zewar: A Partial Translation With Commentary. Berkley: University of California Press, 1990.
Naeem, Fuad. The Ulama of the Indian Subcontinent at the Rise of the Modern Age: Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi and His Response to Modernism. PhD Thesis, George Washington University, 2003.
Najmabadi, Afsaneh. “Crafting and Educated Housewife in Iran.” In Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, edited by Lila Abu-Lughod, 243–269. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Ong, Aihwa. “State vs. Families, Women’s Vodies and the Body Politic in Malaysia.” American Ethnologist 17(2), (1990): 258–276. doi:10.1525/ae.1990.17.2.02a00040
Outhwaite, William. Habermas: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.
Patel, Sujata. “The Construction and Reconstruction of Women in Gandhi.” In Ideals, Images and Real Lives: Women in Literature and History, edited by Alice Thorner and Maitreyi Krishnaraj, 288–321. Mumbai: Orient Longman, 1998.
Salvatore, Armando. “After the State: Islamic Reform and the ‘Implosion’ of Shari’a.” In Muslim Traditions and Modern Techniques of Power, edited by Armando Salvatore, 125–142. London: Transaction Publishers, 2001.
Sarkar, Tanika. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Sayyid, S. (Salman). A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. London: Zed Books, 1997.
Sikand, Yoginder. The Origins and Development of the Tablighi Jama’at (1920–2000): A Cross-Country Comparative Study. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002.
———. “The Tablighi Jama’at and Politics: A Critical Re-Appraisal.” The Muslim World 96(1), (2006): 175–195. doi:10.1111/j.1478-1913.2006.00122.x
Sinha, Mrinalini. “Refashioning Mother India: Feminism and Nationalism in Late Colonial India.” Feminist Studies 26(3), (2000): 645–660. doi:10.2307/3178643
Smart, Barry. “On the Subjects of Sexuality, Ethics and Politics in the Work of Foucault.” Boundary 2 18(1), (1991): 201–225. doi:10.2307/303388
Srinisavan, Amrit. “Women and Reform of Indian Tradition: Gandhian Alternative to Liberalism.” In Women and Indian Nationalism, edited by Leela Kasturi and Vina Mazamudar, 1–15. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1994.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.
Taylor, Charles. “Two Theories of Modernity.” In Alternative Modernities, edited by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 172–196. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.
Thanvi, Maulana Ashraf Ali. Bahishti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments). Translated by Moulana Muhammad Mohamedy. Azadville, South Africa: Zam Zam Publishers, 1999.
———. Bahishti Zewar (Heavenly Ornaments). Translated by Muhammed Masroor Khan Saroha. Delhi: Saeed International Press, 1992.
Vahdat, Farzin. “Critical Theory and The Islamic Encounter with Modernity.” In Islam and the West: critical Perspectives on Modernity, edited by Michael Thompson, 123–138. New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003.
Van der Veer, Peter. Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India. Berkely: University of California Press, 1994.
Wallis, Roy and Steve Bruce. “Secularization: The Orthodox Model.” In Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis, edited by Steve Bruce, 8–30. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Zaidi, Ali Hassan. “Muslim Reconstructions of Knowledge and the Re-enchantment of Modernity.” Theory, Culture and Society 23(5), (2006): 65–91. doi:10.1177/0263276406067099.
