In December 1999, towards the beginning of an extended period of field research in the pious Shi'i Muslim community in the southern suburb of Beirut, Widad, 1 the president of an Islamic women's organization where I had recently begun volunteering, asked Aziza, my closest friend in the community, about me. As a researcher from the United States, I was accustomed to understandable encounters with suspicion; however, as Aziza related their conversation to me, it became clear that this was different. Rather than trying to assess whether or not I had any ties to espionage or the US government, Widad was instead trying to assess whether I was talking to the 'right' people in her community in Lebanon. She wanted to know to which other organizations I had gone and what sort of information I had been receiving about Islam and Muslim women. Widad then concluded the conversation by emphasizing that she 'welcomed the opportunity to show Lara the way that Islam is civilized and how modern our women are' .j rai_1545 107..120 This sense that it was crucial to demonstrate the modernity and civilized status of Islam and especially Muslim women is one of the dominant themes that has emerged again and again in my conversations with pious Shi'i Muslims -men and women -in Lebanon over the past ten years. 2 Also ten years ago, in her introduction to the key volume Remaking women, Lila Abu-Lughod wrote that the volume would address the way that in the postcolonial world women have become potent symbols of identity and visions of society and the nation ... the way that women themselves actively participate in these debates and social struggles ... [and] the complex ways that the West and things associated with the West, embraced, repudiated, and translated, are implicated in contemporary gender politics (1998b: 3).
It is my contention that both the questions and the political implications that Abu-Lughod raised in her introduction remain relevant today. In fact, a resurgence of tropes equating certain forms of Islam with absolute 'otherness' and calling upon women's bodies and practices to mark those boundaries has amplified the echoes of the Islam,