How to Achieve Piety in the Immanence ?
The ethnographic fieldwork I have conducted in France and in Quebec among women who embraced Islam has shown that the work on the self (djihad an-nafs) is central in the process of conversion. While this hermeneutic of the self is concurrent with a theological reading of the Muslim being and her formation, those endeavors to produce the subject also combine two cultural and social systems that are in tension, the one of origin and the on chosen. How do the women I have met appropriate those two universes of meanings and norms ? Which social and political possibilities do these processes of subejctivation open as they are negotiated ? In this paper, I describe the charity activities, the mutual aid behaviours and the social commitments that the new Muslim women enter into, as a form of praxis related to their understanding of Islam. It is through action, demonstration or ostentation of religious practices aimed at achieving piety in the immanence that the converts make up alternative normative frames. As the will to improve the self serves the community, Islam appears here as a political language to express the identity and to convey an alternative project for society.