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.

中文翻译：

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为虔诚而努力

在西班牙，皈依的穆斯林妇女努力脱身世俗并培养虔诚，在那里“西班牙人”（阅读、天主教和世俗）和“穆斯林”（阅读、虔诚和外国）被概念化为相互排斥的身份和行动的道德制度。为了管理她们跨越这一边界的过渡，皈依女性灵活地结合她们认为“世俗”和“虔诚”行动领域的元素，重新诠释婚前性行为、不戴面纱和“世俗女权主义”婚姻角色作为培养伊斯兰虔诚的核心. 我认为，这种策略表明，欧洲普遍存在的世俗性和虔诚之间的绝对区分在人们的生活经验中在符号上比表面上表现的更具有流动性，即使对于深深致力于这种对立的人来说也是如此。这个论点以三种方式干预了使世俗去自然化的人类学计划：通过追踪皈依者如何努力去体现世俗来照亮世俗；强调欧洲关于世俗主义和伊斯兰教的话语同时具有符号学的流动性和僵化的、霸权的二元论；并关注当地天主教如何在欧洲南部边缘引发关于世俗主义和伊斯兰教的辩论。