ABSTRACT
Pious-modern subjectivities are Muslim women’s beliefs about themselves as pious but modern. Based on the ethnographic investigation of Islamic women’s activism in the (urban) Palestinian West Bank, the chapter finds that the contours of pious-modern subjectivities were pious women’s advancement of a non-political, bottom-up social reform approach to social change; a non-traditional, non-masculine, definition of women’s piety that is in tension with the gender stance of the traditional Muslim Brotherhood but consistent with that of The New Islamism of the Middle (al-Islam al-Wasati); a definition of pious women’s subjectivities in terms of neoliberal Islamic ethics that incorporates economic and business neoliberal values and skills such as entrepreneurship, time management, self-development and personal progress into religiosity (Atia 2012); and a framing of pious women’s moral claims against the status quo in the the Palestinian West Bank in Islamic human rights terms (e.g., public ignorance of Islamic rights as duties and obligations (ḥuqūq wa- wājibāt).
The chapter places the formation of women’s pious-modern subjectivities and their contours in the Palestinian West Bank in the interaction among pious women’s individual socio-cultural repertoire of piety and their tension with the gender discourse of the local traditional Brotherhood; the decline, from the late 1980s, of Middle East political Islam and the rise of ‘The New Islamism of the Middle’; the emergence of Market Islam; and the rise of a global human rights discourse in the 1990s.
