In the last two decades one of the key questions that has occupied many feminist theorists is how should issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and politics of any feminist project. Although this questioning has resulted in serious attempts at integrating issues of sexual, racial, class, and national difference within feminist theory, questions of religious difference have remained relatively unexplored in this scholarship. The vexed relationship between feminism and religious traditions is perhaps most manifest in discussions on Islam. This is due in part to the historically contentious relationship that Islamic societies have had with what has come to be called "the West," but in part to the challenges contemporary Islamic movements pose to secular-liberal politics of which feminism has been an integral (if critical) part. In particular, women's active support for a movement that seems to be inimical to their own interests and agendas, at a historical moment when more emancipatory possibilities would appear to be available to women, raises fresh dilemmas for feminists. 1 In this essay, I will probe some of the conceptual challenges that women's participation in the Islamic movement poses to feminist theorists and gender analysts through an ethnographic account of an urban women's mosque movement that is part of the larger Islamic revival in Cairo, Egypt. In this movement women from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds provide lessons to each other that focus on the teaching and studying of Islamic scriptures, social practices, and forms of bodily comportment considered germane to the cultivation of the ideal virtuous self. 2 Even though Egyptian Muslim women have always had some measure of informal training in piety, the mosque movement represents an unprecedented engagement with scholarly materials and theological reasoning that had to date .been the purview of learned men. Movements such as this one, if they do not provoke a yawning boredom among secular intellectuals, certainly conjure up a whole host of uneasy associations such as fundamentalism, the subjugation of women, social conservatism, reactionary atavism, Cultural Anthropology 16(2):2O2-236. » 204 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY public roles from which they were previously excluded. A paradoxical effect of these developments is the proliferation of forms of piety that seem incongruous with the trajectory of the transformations that enabled them in the first place. 5 Notably, even though this movement has empowered women to enter the field of Islamic pedagogy in the institutional setting of mosques, their participation is critically structured by, and seeks to uphold, the limits of a discursive tradition that holds subordination to a transcendent will (and thus, in many instances, to male authority) as its coveted goal. 6 According to the organizers, the women's mosque movement emerged in response to the perception that religious knowledge, as a means to organizing daily life, has become increasingly marginalized under mo...

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A trial was conducted to determine the effect of low-protein diets with constant ME:CP ratio on performance and carcass characteristics of broilers from 1 to 35 d of age. Four experimental diets were formulated to have 4 levels of CP and ME, respectively, in each phase: 23, 22, 21, and 20% CP with 3,036, 2,904, 2,772, and 2,640 kcal/kg in the starter phase (1 to 10 d); 22, 21, 20, and 19% CP with 3,146, 3,003, 2,860, and 2,717 kcal/kg in the grower phase (11 to 26 d); and 20, 19, 18, and 17% CP with 3,100, 2,945, 2,790, and 2,635 kcal/kg in the finisher phase (27 to 35 d). Digestible Lys was maintained at 1.10, 1.02, and 0.90% of the diet in the starter, grower, and finisher periods, respectively. A total of 1,760 one-day-old Hubbard broiler chickens were randomly divided into 16 experimental pens, 110 chickens in each pen, and each diet was offered to 4 replicates at random. Weight gain was linearly decreased (P < 0.001), whereas feed intake and feed conversion ratio were increased (P < 0.001) linearly as dietary protein and energy decreased during grower, finisher, and overall experimental periods. Protein efficiency ratio and energy efficiency ratio were decreased (P < 0.05) with low-CP and low-ME diets during the grower, finisher, and overall experimental period. However, carcass yield, breast meat yield, thigh yield, abdominal fat, and relative liver and heart weights were not affected by the treatments. Feeding broiler chickens low-CP diets with constant ME:CP ratio has adversely affected the growth performance, but carcass parameters were unaffected without any increase in abdominal fat content.

Any academic discussion of religion in the present moment must countenance the shrill polemics that have followed from the events of the past decade-including 9/11, the subsequent war on terror, and the rise of religious politics globally. What was once a latent schism between religious and secular worldviews has now become an incommensurable divide, and protagonists from both sides posit an ominous standoff between strong religious beliefs and secular values. Indeed, a series of international events, particularly around Islam, are often seen as further evidence of this incommensurability. Despite this polarization, more reflective voices in the current debate have tried to show how the religious and the secular are not so much immutable essences or opposed ideologies as they are concepts that gain a particular salience with the emergence of the modern state and attendant politics-concepts that are, furthermore, interdependent and necessarily linked in their mutual transformation and historical emergence. Viewed from this perspective, as a secular rationality has come to define law, statecraft, knowledge production, and economic relations in the modern world, it has also simultaneously transformed the conceptions, ideals, practices, and institutions of religious life. Secularism here is understood I would like to thank Charles Hirschkind, Hussein Agrama, Talal Asad, and Michael Allan for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. I am particularly indebted to Amy Russel for guiding me through Greek sources on schesis and relationality. I am grateful to Mark McGrath for providing research assistance. I have presented this essay to audiences at the

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In the anthropology of ritual, one productive area of debate has focused on how the formal and conventional character of ritualized behavior is linked to, or distinct from, informal, routine, and pragmatic activity. In this article, I engage and extend this debate by analyzing various understandings of the Muslim act of prayer (salat) among a women's piety movement in contemporary Cairo, Egypt. Rather than assume a priori that conventional gestures and behaviors necessarily accomplish the same goals, I inquire into the variable relationships assigned to rule-governed behavior within different conceptions of the self under particular regimes of truth, power, and authority. In the second half of the article, I link my analysis of ritual to issues of embodiment, emotions, and individual autonomy, examining parallel conceptions of salat that coexist in some tension in contemporary Egypt, [ritual, embodiment, emotions, discipline, subject formation, Islam]

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