"The Politics of Belief: Women’s Islamic Activism in Bangladesh" by Maimuna Huq

Maimuna Huq

Deposited 2006

Abstract
I argue that investigation of Islamic movements in South Asia and elsewhere should be informed by anthropological concerns with subject-formation within historically specific cultural regimes. This entails a widening of the conventional emphasis on the public-formal aspects of Islamist discourses and the socioeconomic structures within which these discourses operate to include those micro-level processes whereby the selves of Islamic activists are formed.

I closely examine the successful Bangladeshi women's Islamist student group "Bangladesh Islam Chatri Sangstha" (BICSA) on these terms. I find that its success depends on its ability to produce a specific moral-practical subjecthood through disciplinary technologies grounded in revivalist-orthodox Islam and Western-style pedagogy. The latter is made accessible to BICSA by mass higher education and a mass print culture, both relatively recent developments in Bangladesh. I examine Islamist women's opposition to hegemonic Bangladeshi cultural mores through painstaking submission to religious prescriptions, and trace how forms of agency mobilized by BICSA's top-down process of shaping "pristine" Muslim women return to haunt that process in the form of contestations ranging from explicit protest to ambiguous resistance.

To discern the everyday micro-level processes that guide subject formation among BICSA women, I conducted field research in urban Bangladesh (primarily Dhaka) between September, 1998 and May, 2003. This enables me to explore how Islamic activist women both embrace and subvert Islamic teachings imparted by the BICSA leadership with the intention of producing subjects totally committed to the Islamization of self, society, and state. I posit that in seeking to adapt Qur'anic prescriptions and the jihad-centered ideology of South Asian Islamist Sayyed Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903-79) to present-day realities, BICSA inevitably produces ambivalent subjectivities in the interstices of conflicting and overlapping power structures. I trace some ramifications of these conflicted subjectivities in the quotidian lives of BICSA activist women, highlighting domains of expansiveness as well as constraint.

Because their subjectivity arises amid contradictory, intersecting social domains, BICSA activists attain a more complex and textured agency than perfect commitment to any one ideology, whether conformist or oppositional, would allow.