Abstract
This chapter explores how Muslim female volunteers are informed by secular and liberal discourses, and how they take these discourses as a reference point while advancing their religiosity in the public sphere. This focus delves into the question of public piety. The volunteers’ first concern is that their embracing of the Islamic religion be compatible with liberal secular norms and an endeavor to merge these traditions in their everyday living. Volunteering gives them an opportunity to creatively negotiate these spaces. What is most notable is how they locate their spiritual growth in the everyday by embedding such tasks within a discourse of intentionality. Thus, even the most secular act becomes a sartorial commitment. What are regarded as “pious” markers are intentionally detached from formalisms both in content and form, opening the doors of a public life the women make sense of with these spiritual but, at the same time, disenchanted trajectories.
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Notes
- 1.
Mahmood lengthily describes the meaning of faith— taqwa —for her Muslim interlocutors. Taqwa is the perfection of faith ( iman ), and the trajectory of perfection is the process of ethical self-making. Thus, the Muslim subjects are always in a very conscious state of perfecting their bodily performances and inner affects to reach the highest level of faith (see Mahmood 2001). She traces this practice of ethics to Aristotelian virtue ethics, which locates ethics in practice and action (Mahmood 2001; Lambek 2010).
- 2.
Other Turkish-Muslim communities in Belgium, such as the Suleymanci or Millî Görüş , are embedded in explicit religious narratives. They organize mavlud sessions, Ashura days, and charities for war-torn or impoverished Muslim countries. My volunteers stay away from such events. If they do organize Ashura days, it is usually framed as an “interfaith” event, and the objective is still to incorporate larger segments of society.
- 3.
When Sumeyye told me this, she added that it was important to reach as many politicians as possible, so as to indicate that as Muslim they are also proactive citizens; this echoes the previous section’s analysis of how a good Muslim is also a good citizen.
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Kayikci, M.R. (2020). In Between Two Traditions: Female Muslim Volunteers in Belgium. In: Peucker, M., Kayikci, M. (eds) Muslim Volunteering in the West. New Directions in Islam. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_6
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