¹ One example of such a text, popular among devout Muslims in the Arab world and increasingly among diasporic Muslims, is the seminal work of the medieval Salafi theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, On Disciplining the Soul and on Breaking the Two Desires. An example of an authoritative Islamic text popular among literate pious Muslim communities in South Asia, particularly Muslim women, is the reformist prescriptive treatise or advice manual Heavenly Ornaments, written in northern India in the early 1900s by Ashraf Ali Thanawi (1864–1943), a scholar trained in the Deobandi tradition of orthodox Islamic education in South Asia.

² Eickelman, Dale F., ‘Islamic religious commentary and lesson circles: Is there a Copernican revolution?’ Aporemata, 4 (2004), 121–146Google Scholar.

³ See, for example, Kepel, Gilles, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh, translated by Rothschild, Jon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993 [1985])Google Scholar; Moussalli, Ahmad S., Radical Islamic Fundamentalism: The Ideological and Political Discourse of Sayyid Qutb (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1992)Google Scholar; Carré, Olivier, Mysticism and Politics: A Critical Reading of Fi Zilal al-Qur'an by Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), translated from the French by Artigues, Carol and revised by Shepard, W. (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2003)Google Scholar; Khatab, Sayed, The Power of Sovereignty: The Political and Ideological Philosophy of Sayyid Qutb (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁴ For an unusual and rich description of specific texts read by participants in a particular Islamic movement, in this case the transnational Islamic revivalist group Tabligh Jamaat, see Metcalf, Barbara D., ‘Living Hadith in the Tablighi Jama'at,’ The Journal of Asian Studies, 52, 3 (1993), 584–608CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ This has been noted for Islamic activism from South Asia to Southeast Asia to the Middle East and North Africa. For example, see El-Guindi, Fadwa, ‘Veiling infitah with Muslim ethic: Egypt's contemporary Islamic movement,’ Social Problems, 28 (1981), 465–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eickelman, Dale F., ‘Mass higher education and the religious imagination in contemporary Arab societies,’ American Ethnologist, 19, 4 (November 1992), 643–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Banu, Razia Akhter, Islam in Bangladesh (Leiden, New York, Koln: E. J. Brill, 1992)Google Scholar; Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Brenner, Suzanne, ‘Reconstructing self and society: Javanese Muslim women and “the veil”,’ American Ethnologist 23, 4 (1996), 673–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Göle, Nilufer, The Forbidden Modern (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

⁶ It is important to note, however, that some lesson circles, particularly those conducted by and for women, are not formally connected to any Islamic organization but by individual persons as acts of piety. Such circles centre more on Qur'anic commentary delivered by the group leader than on group discussion. The goal of such grassroots circles is less to train participants in authoritative Islamic knowledge than to re-moralize individuals and families in a particular neighbourhood (and often in specific socio-economic groups) by imparting a basic knowledge of Qur'anic prescriptions, and to do so by ‘returning to the source’—i.e., the Qur'an, as opposed to popular manual-style works such as Heavenly Ornaments (see note 1 supra).

⁷ For example, see the collection of essays edited by Salvatore, Armando and LeVine, Mark, Religion, Social Practice, and Contested Hegemonies: Reconstructing the Public Sphere in Muslim majority Societies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see the volume edited by Salvatore, Armando and Eickelman, Dale F., Public Islam and the Common Good (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2004)Google Scholar.

⁸ For example, see Robinson, Francis, ‘Technology and religious change: Islam and the impact of print,’ Modern Asian Studies, 27, 1 (February 1993), 229–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eickelman, ‘Mass higher education and the religious imagination in contemporary Arab societies’; Patricia Horvatich, ‘Ways of knowing Islam,’ American Ethnologist, 21, 4 (1994), 811–26; Zaman, Muhammad Qasim, ‘Commentaries, print and patronage: “Hadith” and the Madrasas in modern South Asia,’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 62, 1 (1999): 60–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yavuz, ‘Nur Study Circles (Dershanes) and the Formation of New Religious Consciousness in Turkey’; Jon W. Anderson and Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, ‘Technological Mediation and the Emergence of Transnational Muslim Publics’ in Salvatore and Eickelman (eds), Public Islam and the Common Good, 53–74. Also see the volume edited by Eickelman, Dale F. and Anderson, Jon W., New Media in the Muslim World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press)Google Scholar.

⁹ Charles Hirschkind, ‘Civic virtue and religious reason: An Islamic counter public,’ Cultural Anthropology, 16/1 (2001).

¹⁰ Hirschkind, ‘Civic virtue and religious reason,’ Mahmood, Politics of Piety, especially 79–107.

¹¹ For a brief description of the emergent women's Islamic public sphere in Bangladesh and the larger region of South Asia, see M. Huq, ‘Religious Practices: Preaching and Women Preachers,’ forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Women in Islamic Cultures, vol. 5.

¹² BICSa's ideological–moral imperatives, organizational structure and style of operation derive largely from that of Jamaate Islami. For insights into the historical relationship of Jamaate Islami (specifically of its founder Maula Abul Ala Mawdudi) to other Islamic reformist figures and organizations in South Asia, such as the transnational da'wah or pietistic movement Tablighi Jamaat, see Nasr, Seyyed Vali Reza's The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama'at-I Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 3–27Google Scholar, and Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9–68. Also see Ahmed, Mumtaz's ‘Islamic Fundamentalism in South Asia’ in Marty, Martin E. and Appleby, R. Scott (eds.), Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 457–530Google Scholar. For useful discussions of Islamic reformist currents and movements in Bengal (of which Eastern Bengal, home to the majority of Bangali Muslims and which now comprises Bangladesh), namely the Faraizi movement initiated by Haji Shariatullah (1781–1840) of Faridpur in Eastern Bengal and Tariqah-i-Muhammadiya, an extension of the jihad movement launched in 1826 by the sufi-warrior Shah Sayyid Ahmad (1786–1858) of Rai Barelwi in Northern India, see Ahmed, Rafiuddin's The Bengal Muslims 1871–1906 (Oxford University Press, 1981), 39–105Google Scholar; Metcalf, Barbara Daly's Islamic Revival in British India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 68–71Google Scholar; and Banu, U. A. B. Razia Akter's Islam in Bangladesh (Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill), 33–53Google Scholar.

¹³ A view of the Bangla language as an ‘un-Islamic language’, which was widespread until the early twentieth century among traditional Muslims in South Asia, including Bengal, likely impeded translation of Islamic texts into and the composition of Islamic texts in the Bangla language. For discussion of this particular historical contingency as well as its wider social, religious and political context, in which a ‘Muslim identity’ came to be pitted against a ‘Bengali identity’ perceived as tainted by Hindu socio-cultural and religious elements, see Rafiuddin Ahmed's The Bengal Muslims 1871–1906, 1–132. The issue of ‘identity crisis’ continues to surface in scholarly discourses on Islam, culture and politics in Bangladesh.

¹⁴ College/university students have historically played a central role in social and political movements in South Asia. This is particularly true for Bangladesh, where students played a leading role in the 1952 Bangla language movement and then in the 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. Also, the privileged status of education in a poor country such as Bangladesh enhances the standing of students as the source future leadership in many areas. Thus, every major political party in Bangladesh has an affiliated student organization that recruits on college and university campuses and struggles to sustain or extend the parent party's hegemony on campus—struggles that often spill over onto the streets in violent conflict.

¹⁵ Eickelman, ‘Islamic Religious Commentary and Lesson Circles: Is There a Copernican Revolution?’, 121.

¹⁶ In Bangladesh, even though traditional religious schools have continued to receive some state aid, partly in order not to alienate the ulamas and partly to limit educational expenses, state support has been increasingly confined to public schools, with funds and key privileges (such as access to government jobs) shifting increasingly to graduates of nonreligious state schools. The majority of students, especially from the urban middle and upper classes, therefore attend modern, non-religious public schools.

¹⁷ Fieldnotes, Qur'anic lesson circle at a training program for members of the ‘worker’ cadre from all over the country, Dhaka, 15 July 2000.

¹⁸ Hirschkind, ‘Civic virtue and religious reason.’

¹⁹ Eickelman, ‘Qur'anic Commentary, Public Space, and Religious Intellectuals in the Writings of Said Nursi,’ 54.

²⁰ This is not to say that BICSa does not consider the other parts of the Qur'an to be less important; as BICSa activists advance in levels of piety and knowledge, the syllabus broadens accordingly, and one is expected to study an increasing number of Qur'anic verses and chapters. For the most advanced BICSa activists, who are usually a small group and comprise the core organizational leadership, the ideal is to study each and every chapter of the Qur'an. What is at stake here, therefore, is BICSa's ability to familiarize low- and mid-level activists working under significant time constraints with a selection of materials. BICSa sees itself as racing against time—the duration of each member's academic career—to produce authentic Muslims who will counter what it sees as the growing secularization of Muslim Bangali (Bengali) society and culture specifically and the global Muslim community of the ummah generally. For mid-level activists such as lesson-circle participants, BICSa's syllabus therefore features verses and chapters that equally emphasize both the cultivation of virtuous dispositions and the integral necessity of striving in the path of God both personally (in private, within oneself) and socio-politically (in relations with others, especially Muslims, and in the public sphere).

²¹ Some study-circle leaders employ another method, which is to group two or more verses thematically for discussion. They feel that this forces an activist, trained to follow Mawdudi's Tafheem closely, to develop her own approach to the study of the Qur'an by beginning to think about the verses for herself instead of simply paraphrasing Mawdudi. Nabila felt that paraphrasing Mawdudi's exegesis for each verse and then supplementing that exegesis with knowledge derived from other sources was a more thorough approach; this way, the material ‘becomes truly imprinted on the heart’ (mone genthe jai). However, sometimes even Nabila would resort to a discussion organized around thematically grouped verses when there was too little time for the quantity of verses being considered.

²² Asad, Muhammad, The Message of the Qur'an (Dar al-Andalus: Gibraltar), 861–2Google Scholar.

²³ Suzanne Brenner notes the ‘panoptical’ nature of the disciplinary practice of veiling among Islamic reformist women in Java, Malaysia. She demonstrates the ways in which the embodiment of discipline through clothing helps sustain a constant sense of anxiety regarding the religious appropriateness of one's actions (1996: 688–689).

²⁴ There are clear similarities between these rhetorical techniques and those employed by conservative evangelical Christian preachers.

²⁵ For a detailed description of BICSa's administrative structure and cadre system, see Maimuna Huq, ‘The Politics of Belief: Women in Islamic Activism in Bangladesh,’ PhD dissertation in socio-cultural anthropology, Columbia University in New York City, 2006, 73–125.

²⁶ Asad, The Message of the Qur'an, 860.

²⁷ One such technique is disciplining oneself by maintaining a detailed and precise log of daily activities. A pedagogical technique is the practice of ‘worker meetings’ where an initiate learns to (1) study and articulate Qur'anic teachings; (2) obey strategic instructions issued by city-level and/or central BICSa authorities who might advise local units that it is time, for example, to organize public events in celebration of the life of the Prophet Muhammad or that it is time to engage in some intensive preaching (dawat) in celebration of the ‘general preaching week’ (sadharan dawati saptaha); (3) plan and execute organizational or movement projects; and (4) perform bureaucratic and administrative tasks.

²⁸ Asad, The Message of the Qur'an, 860.

²⁹ Fieldnotes from a Qur'anic lesson on the last (40th) section of Surah Baqarah at a ‘worker meeting,’ September 10, 1999.

³⁰ Fieldnotes from a lesson circle at a ‘training session’ (TS) held on June 23, 2000.

³¹ Huq, ‘The Politics of Belief,’ 126–87.

³² Notes from field research conducted between 1998 and 2003 among BICSa women in Dhaka.

³³ The totalistic nature of this particular Islamic worldview is enshrined in one of BICSa's central and Mawdudi-derived tenets that Islam is a ‘complete code of life’. The unambiguousness of this ideology or ‘way of life’ is idealized in the frequent assertion that Islam constitutes a ‘straight’ path and renders life ‘easy’ (sahaj) and ‘simple’ (saral).