Religious Rituals as Civil hexis

Abstract

In their attempt to question the assumption that rituals are merely symbolic, Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood tried to show that rituals have functioned as instruments. In Asad’s study of medieval Christianity and Mahmood’s work on mosque women, rituals function to make selves. These instrumentalist readings stand outside the usual modernist representational readings. For these anthropologists, the distinction between representational and instrumental understandings of rituals seems to be very clear. Nationalist modernist readings of Islamic rituals seem to confirm the representational logic, which apparently falls entirely outside the instrumental framework. In this paper, I intend to disturb this clear-cut distinction, and demonstrate that in many occasions the instrumental understanding is preceded by a representational interpretation, while the representational may, in turn, help create a civil subject. My evidences come from the Iranian Islamic literature in 1960s and 70s, viz. Mortaza Motahhari, Ali Shariʾati, Mehdi Barzargan, and the authors of Maktab-e Islam monthly. Although some of these intellectuals emphasized the instrumental nature of rituals in making the pious subject, others proposed different rationalizations—medical benefit, collective solidarity and order, and existential meaning. For these thinkers or their audience, there was no clear distinction between these justifications. It is true that many of them had a representational logic; but they contributed to making a proper civil subject. Hence, the instrumental-representational binary cannot always be maintained. Asad’s and Mahmood’s critiques of anthropological readings of rituals have yet to be qualified to take into account the prior interpretations and theological context of religious rituals, to highlight the conflation of the representational and instrumental frameworks in many modern rituals, and to note that deciding on the instrumentality of a particular ritual is not only significant when it is about constructing the interior of the private self, but may be involved in building larger communities.