Resumen de Striving toward Piety: Gendered conversion to islam in catholic-secular Spain
Convert Muslim women strive to disembody secularity and cultivate piety in Spain, where “Spanish” (read, Catholic and secular) and “Muslim” (read, pious and foreign) are conceptualized as mutually exclusive identities and ethical regimes of action. To manage their transition across this boundary, convert women flexibly combine elements of what they deem “secular” and “pious” realms of action, reinterpreting sex before marriage, nonveiling, and “secular feminist” marriage roles as central to the cultivation of Islamic piety. This strategy, I argue, shows that the pervasive European categorical distinction between secularity and piety is more semiotically fluid in people’s lived experience than it may appear on the surface, even for people deeply committed to this opposition. This argument intervenes in the anthropological project of denaturalizing the secular in three ways: illuminating the secular by tracing how converts strive to disembody it; highlighting the simultaneous semiotic fluidity and rigid, hegemonic binaries of European discourse about secularism and Islam; and attending to the way local Catholicism infuses debates about secularism and Islam at Europe’s southern periphery.
