Producing the Conjugal Patriarchal Family in Maulana Thanvi's Heavenly Ornaments

Biopolotics, 'Shariatic Modernity'

Abstract

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).