Jamil 2019

‘This is a gathering of lovers’:
Islamic self-help and affective

pedagogies in contemporary
Singapore
Nurhaizatul Jamil Pratt Institute
In Singapore, the proliferation of Islamic classes drawing from self-help rhetoric, popular culture, the
Qur’an, and Hadith allude to the increased appeal of affective pedagogies to Muslim youth. Taught by
Singaporean Al-Azhar University graduates, the classes predominantly attracted university-educated,
minoritized Malay Muslim women. Through the use of affective pedagogies, the teachers reframed
Islamic piety to foreground three forms of love: self, divine, and romantic. Extending scholarship on
racialized affect, this article interrogates the ways in which the teachers’ affective pedagogies mediated
young women’s anxieties within a neoliberalizing context, and the latter’s negotiations of their newly
acquired religious knowledge as they contended with quotidian precarities. While anthropology’s
foregrounding of lived materialities complicates some of the theoretical presuppositions of affect
theory, the latter expands our understanding of piety projects as not merely concerned with ethical
self-discipline, but entangled with broader racialization processes – especially for minoritized subjects
whose capacity to transform becomes constitutive of a will to improve. By placing anthropological
theory on Islamic piety in a dialogical tension with affect theory, I highlight the forms of affective
religious sentiments that circulate through difference and negation, and are integral to particular sites
of minoritized Muslim subject formation.
After leading the students in a recitation of Surah Al-Fateha (1:1-7) from the Qur’an,
Ustaz Ali welcomed us to the class.1 Fiddling with his laptop, he proceeded to screen a
short clip that he had extracted from the Hollywood blockbuster Eat, pray, love (2010),
prefacing that we were about to ‘witness someone preparing for the endless waves of
transformation’.2 On the projector screen, Julia Roberts’s character was penning a letter
to her former lover, her voiceover articulating quotes such as ‘ruin is a gift; ruin is the
road to transformation’. Ustaz asked the students whether they recognized the film,
and many nodded in response. Perhaps to allay the students’ concerns that a religious
class with a teacher in a songkok and a baju kurung (Malay cultural attire) had begun
with a Hollywood popular cultural reference, Ustaz clarified that the short clip was
‘useful’ in ‘sending a message’.3 The video should compel us to think about the ‘forms
of romantic attachment’ embodied by the protagonist, who ‘desired to break free from
her partner in order to find herself’. Ustaz further reminded us that the concept of
attachment in Islam had to be framed in terms of a ‘deep spiritual relationship with
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2019
468 Nurhaizatul Jamil
God’. Pointing to the Qur’anic verses on a projected PowerPoint slide, he suggested

that faith in, and attachment to, God enabled Muslims to achieve security (7:197),
certainty (2:250), and divine mercy (26:104).4 Conversely, being ‘overly attached’ to our
relationships would cause us to have ‘dependency problems’; thus he suggested that we
perceive romantic bonds as a ‘religious responsibility’ that would facilitate our ultimate
spiritual connection with God. To further illustrate this, he set up contrasts between
love and desire. Romantic love derived from desire could drive a person to addictive
impulses; selfless love would encourage Muslims to embody ideal taqwa (piety/God
consciousness) and attain success in the present and the hereafter. Ustaz’s remarks
framed romantic love as an affective sentiment that structured a subject’s capacity for
autonomy while securing their submission to God. His fluid citational actions – drawing
from Islamic texts and popular culture – extended and reconfigured the boundaries
of conventional Islamic education. Conscious that some students might perceive his
eclectic pedagogy to be incommensurable with the discursive conventions of an Islamic
class, he turned to the Qur’an to reframe the clip’s message and reinforce the primacy
of faith in God.
Ustaz Ali’s pedagogical strategies symbolized one of the ways that affective sentiments
permeated the spatialities of the classes I attended. Gaining popularity since the
mid-2000s, these lessons offered students insights into the ideal habits of effective
Muslims – encouraging young, upwardly mobile, minoritized ethnic and religious
subjects to foreground Islam in their daily lives by recasting it through the frame
of self-help. Fashionable, social media-savvy, young women mostly attended these
classes, battling rush-hour traffic on weekday nights from university classrooms and
workplaces. Taught by Singaporean graduates of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, the classes
addressed a range of topics from ritualized practice and marriage to Islamic marketing.
To distinguish themselves from the earlier generations of mosque preachers, the Al-
Azhar returnees actively utilized social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram
as pedagogical tools and to proselytize and market their lessons. In contrast to the free
mosque lessons, these classes were held at convention centres and industrialized office
spaces, costing US$40-120 per module. The teachers sustained their religious authority
by code-switching across Classical Arabic, vernacular Malay (their native language),
and English; their ability to reference self-help and popular cultural rhetoric while
foregrounding the Qur’an and Hadith (prophetic traditions) extended their relevance
to interactions beyond the religious classroom.5
While I entered into the field intending to examine Muslim women’s embrace
of eclectic Islamic pedagogies, I was struck by my interlocutors’ association of the
disciplining of affective sentiments with the consolidation of religious virtue. While
endorsing heteronormative conceptions of romance, the teachers also circulated
notions of idealized affects – emphasizing the importance of loving one’s self (self-love)
while believing in a compassionate God in contending with quotidian precarity. Within
this frame, the ability to discipline and transform one’s self to embody the appropriate
affects (e.g. cultivating optimism in the face of adversity) was indexical of an individual’s
ability to exist as an ideal Malay Muslim, and, by extension, a minoritized citizen-subject
of the nation-state. The teachers and students thus regularly set up contrasts between
‘ideal’ Muslims and ‘typical’ ethnic Malays within the classroom and in informal
conversations – constructing the former as having successfully attained socioeconomic
mobility and spiritual enlightenment, while criticizing the latter for lacking the
aspirational will suited to a future-orientated imaginary. Such rhetoric corresponded

‘This is a gathering of lovers’ 469
to hegemonic discourses constructing ethnic Malays as burdened with negative affects

such as hypersexuality, addiction, and over-reliance on state welfare (see Heng &
Devan 1997; Li 1989; Rahim 2001; Tan 2001). Navigating Islamic education alongside
my interlocutors, I thus came to realize the impossibility of understanding forms of
self-transformation centred on pious cultivation as distinct from the broader context
of ethnic and class stratification.
While my broader research addresses a point of contention that has occupied
anthropologists of Islamic piety regarding the coherence of Islamic discursive traditions
versus secularizing imperatives that foreground everyday negotiations and flexible
moralities, this is not an analytic that I foreground in this article.6 Anthropologists
of Islamic piety have theorized Muslim-majority contexts, yet the condition of
minoritization presents distinct stakes that necessitate an analysis of the disciplining of
the self in relation to the state governmentality in conceptualizing Muslims’ habituation
and negotiation of normative ethics. By foregrounding the ways that racializing practices
mediated embodied sentiments, my analysis grapples with minoritized Muslim subject
formation at the interstices of the techniques of power that regulate bodies and affective
sentiments, and the techniques of the self that configure personal discipline as a vital
means of ethical cultivation. Extending such scholarship, this article interrogates the
ways in which the teachers utilized affective pedagogies through the use of multiple
media modalities (e.g. sound and video) and writing and movement exercises to incite
the students’ emotional transformation as they navigated the increased privatization
of healthcare and social services, the rising costs of living, and stagnating wages tied to
neoliberal economic restructuring.7 Thus, I ask: how did the teachers reframe structural
inequalities as ethical challenges from a loving, merciful God necessitating Muslims’
affective self-transformation? How did the students negotiate their newly acquired
religious knowledge as they contended with quotidian realities? In interrogating these
questions, I argue that we cannot understand the currency that affective self-discipline
wields for Muslims without first attending to the state’s disciplinary project. Next, I
intervene in ongoing debates on Islamic piety by placing anthropological scholarship
in a dialogical tension with affect theory to grapple with the complexities of pious
agency. While anthropology’s foregrounding of lived materialities complicates some of
the theoretical presuppositions of affect theory, the latter expands our understanding
of piety projects as transcending ethical self-discipline, to include entanglements with
broader racialization processes – especially for minoritized subjects whose capacity
to transform becomes constitutive of a will to improve. Following that, I draw from
sixteen months of ethnographic research (2012-15) to examine the teachers’ and students’
attempts at cultivating desirable affects such as perseverance and patience in dealing
with the contingencies of everyday life. By examining my interlocutors’ discourses on
self-love, love for God, and romantic love, I highlight the forms of affective religious
sentiments that circulate through difference and negation, and are integral to particular
sites of minoritized Muslim subject formation.
Being Malay and Muslim in Singapore

The Singapore state’s management of race and religion undergirds its multicultural
project – structuring Muslims’ contentious social location, and underscoring the ways
that affect is racialized within public spheres. Within the nation-state, the disciplining
of negative affects scaffolds discourses on Malay Muslim self-transformation, bolstered
by the historical conflation of racial and religious identity markers. For instance,

the 2015 and 2017 census reports suggest that the Malays, comprising approximately
13.4 percent of Singapore’s population of 5.61 million, compared to the dominant 74.3 per
cent Chinese majority, account for 99.2 per cent of Singaporean Muslims (Department
of Statistics 2015; 2017). With the exception of a brief merger with Malaysia (1962-
5) as part of the process of decolonization from the British, the post-independence
government led by the People’s Action Party (PAP) has sought to secure political
dominance by ensuring economic growth through foreign and state-owned capital,
while managing religious expression, political dissent, and press freedoms (Chua &
Kwok 2001). Scarred by the neighbouring Malaysian elites’ rhetoric of Malay bumiputera
(sons of the soil) rights during the merger, the PAP set about legitimizing the logic
of multiculturalism by categorizing Singaporeans into four ethnic groups – radically
simplifying cultural differences into a monolithic CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian,
Others) model (Chua 2005). Within this frame, Singaporean Malays heralding from
different parts of the Archipelago with hybridized ethnic identities such as Javanese and
Baweanese were automatically indexed Malay and Muslim at birth. Thus, while I utilize
descriptive terms such as ‘Malay’, ‘Muslim’, and ‘the Malay community’ to represent
my interlocutors’ articulations of their subject positions, I remain cautious that the
categories they index allude to the state’s normative disciplining of race and religion for
the purposes of governance – an illusion of homogeneity that elides the complex ways
that identities configure in the praxis.
As Ahmed (2004b) elucidates, discourses of multicultural harmony require the
negation of unwilful aspects that challenge the perceived progress of the nation.
The pursuit of multiculturalism mirrors the ethos of conditional love, whereby
ideas of tolerance and respectful difference function so long as they fulfil certain
criteria endorsed by authoritative structures. In the process, the state disciplines
into erasure other subjectivities that might threaten the semblance of upper-middle-
class respectability. For instance, although the British colonial governance initially
consolidated racial governmentality in Singapore, race and class continue to reverberate
as haunting spectres – with the post-independence PAP government evoking the racial
riots of the 1960s to emphasize the need for socially engineered multiculturalism,
national harmony, and political stability. To avoid the stigma of a welfare state,
the government promoted the creation of race-specific civic associations supposedly
best positioned to understand the ‘problems’ plaguing each ethnic community.
Labelled ‘self-help groups’, they facilitate the state’s framing of perceived behavioural
dysfunctionalities such as addiction, low educational achievement, and poverty,
as distinctly Malay problems that the community should resolve through self-
transformation (see Chua 1995). Such rhetoric further points to the neoliberal-
developmental state’s strategic appeal to particular political-economic modalities in
sustaining economic growth at the expense of state welfarism.8
Although Singapore’s secular identity is contentious, the state’s obsession with
defining religious signs and the spaces they inhabit is part of its attempt at securing the
nation’s boundaries (also see Agrama 2010). Concerned with the spread of racial and
religion tensions from Malaysia and Indonesia within a ‘double minority setting’ (Mauzy
& Milne 2002),9 the state intricately manages Islam in Singapore through particular
provisions, while preventing religious claims from assuming political overtones within
various public spheres (Fischer 2016: 49; Nasir, Pereira & Turner 2010: 3). These
affordances belie a sense of anxiety in acknowledging the Malays’ indigenous ontology
within the region that must be disciplined into limited recognition. For example,

through the Administration of Muslims Act (1966), the PAP government has constructed
a specific power structure to lead the Malay Muslim community comprising a state-
appointed Minister of Muslim Affairs endorsed by the Islamic Religious Council of
Singapore (MUIS), a state-linked statutory board. The government also continues
to provide the Muslim community with incentives such as mosque-building funds,
subsidized tertiary education fees, as well as an institutionalized syariah (shari‘a) court
system to mitigate matters pertaining to marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Despite
these allowances, Islam assumes limited electoral visibility in Singapore compared to
Malaysia and Indonesia. With the implementation of the Maintenance of Religious
Harmony Act in 1990, religious leaders who engage in political discourse – vaguely
defined – could face detention without trial and be charged with sedition (Tan 2010).
Wary of dissenting voices that would disrupt the meticulously crafted religious and
racial harmony, the government mandated the registration of all Muslim preachers,
and standardized the Friday khutbah (sermons) across local mosques (Nasir et al. 2010).
Despite the state’s precise management of national harmony, however, the Muslim
community has tussled with numerous incidents from the late 1990s onward involving
the wearing of hijab in public schools, an attempted terrorist attack by Singaporean
members of the regional Jemaah Islamiyah organization, and conservative preachers’
crusades against homosexuality.10 Within this climate of intensified Islamophobia and
state surveillance, religious preachers like my Singaporean interlocutors were conscious
of the need to refrain from political commentary in the classroom, explicitly framing
their lessons as mere ‘gathering[s] of lovers’ that focus on seemingly apolitical topics,
while fostering empowerment through affective personal transformation.11
From emotions to affect

While this essay engages primarily with affect theory, it is critical to note that the
‘affective turn’ (Clough & Halley 2007) in the humanities has occluded much of
the preceding scholarship by anthropologists of emotion. Writing against culture-
and-personality scholars who framed emotions as embodied transcultural feelings
that contained an evolutionary or cognitive basis extricable from corporeality,
anthropologists of emotion emphasized the interpersonal, communicative, and
culturally specific aspects of sentiments (see Lutz & Abu-Lughod 1990; Lutz &
White 1986).12 Within this scholarship, Southeast Asia emerged as a focal point,
with anthropologists such as Geertz (1973) and Rosaldo (1984) presenting emotions
as interior sensibilities that indexed cultural processes, as well as the role of nation-
states in transforming subjectivities through an incitement to emotive practices.13 In
particular, Brenner (1998), Jones (2004), and Lindquist (2004) highlighted Javanese
women’s engagement in emotional labour in order to appropriate ideal femininity
through bodily discipline, whereby controlling one’s desires enabled the acquisition of
both material wealth and spiritual merit.
While illuminating in deconstructing essentialized images of ‘primitive’ or ‘peasant’
populations, these analyses collapsed ‘emotion’ with ‘affect’, obscuring their generative
force (see Berg & Ramos-Zayas 2015: 660).14 Critiquing the framing of emotions as
interiorized cultural landscapes, anthropologists of affect have consequently analysed
intersubjective emotive dispositions as imbricated with material and discursive
power formations (Berg & Ramos-Zayas 2015; Martin 2013; Richard & Rudnyckyj
2009; Rudnyckyj 2011). While affect constructs the sensing individual and their
communicative partners, emotion might or might not be externalized. Thus,

anthropologists of affect distinguish their analytical approach by analysing subject

formation through affect, rather than the circulation of emotions between subjects.
Yet, with the exception of Berg and Ramos-Zayas’s (2015) critique, anthropologists have
largely elided the theoretical quandary presented by affect theorists who foreground
subliminal sensibilities (Massumi 2007; Sedgwick 2003) in relation to ethnographic
scholarship foregrounding the economies of affect (Richard & Rudynyckyj 2009).
Conceiving affect as proprioception, Sedgwick (2003) and Massumi (2007) frame
affective responses as autonomous embodied ones: the pre-subjective subliminal
intensities that exist prior to the incursions by ideology and are thus automatically
expressed before cognition sets in.15 Here, affect becomes the social effect of biology
separated from broader forces, with intentionality reproducing these effects (see Martin
2013: S156). Framing affect as proprioception thus reinstates the dichotomy between the
mind and body; an ontologizing quest for a subliminal intensity that eludes structure,
cognition, and signification, and thus elides ideology – even as it becomes a receptacle
through which power is manifested. While such a definition of affect enables us to
attend to spontaneous acts, Leys (2011: 471) argues that it is a form of materiality
without historicity; an anti-intentional interpretation that is only sustainable when it
does not have to reconcile with everyday complexities.
Ahmed’s scholarship is instructive in acknowledging not only the corporeal
sensibilities that foreground affect, but also capital flows – insisting that ‘affect
does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced only as an
effect of its circulation’ (2004a: 119). Extending Rose’s scholarship on ‘governing
through affect’ (1999: 84) – the ways that advanced liberalism is governed through
the incitement to freedom – Rudnyckyj (2011) further examines the ways that affect is
mobilized for the creation of new subjectivities suited to a spiritual economy. In his
ethnography of an Indonesian steel factory, he highlights the corporate owners’ attempts
at instilling workers’ productivity by hiring motivational speakers like Ary Ginanjar
who espoused Emotional and Spiritual Quotient (ESQ) leadership training within
an explicitly Islamic framework – establishing the connections among organizational
management theory, American self-help, and Islamic discursive traditions. At these
seminars, ESQ trainers relied on performative acts such as dimming the lights
and diffusing inspirational music over the speakers to incite affective responses
such as spontaneous crying as material manifestations of the factory workers’ inner
transformation and commitment to God and, by extension, their corporate employers.
Rudnyckyj’s ethnography thus extends anthropological scholarship on piety and subject
formation that has compelled us to consider the ways that the capacity to experience
spontaneous emotional intensities often serves as a material index of authenticated
commitment to piety for faithful believers (see Asad 1993; Deeb 2006; Hirschkind
2006; Mahmood 2005). At the same time, complicating this scholarship and Massumi’s
framing, Rudnyckyj suggests that while the workers’ emotive displays resembled
spontaneous affects, they simultaneously equipped them with the moral and mental
certitude to contend with detrimental labour conditions arising from eliminated state
subsidies and tariffs. Indeed, beyond the seminar, the factory workers had to train
themselves to embody the proper affects conducive to both corporate mobility and
divine salvation, consolidating the relation between labour productivity and devotional
life. In this manner, transcending its interiorized modalities, affect is both expansive and
transitive – eliciting novel subjectivities and ethical behaviour suited to neoliberal
landscapes. Rudnyckyj therefore argues that while ESQ training emphasized bodily

discipline, it symbolized a regime of self-improvement tied to affective economies and

was thus markedly different from the conventional forms of pious docility. So, while at
first blush the battle over the definition of affect appears extraneous to an interrogation
of Islamic piety, attending to the former’s analytical framing and its manifestations
within diverse ethnographic contexts facilitates our understanding of the modes of
relationality between spontaneous emotive intensities and neoliberalizing structures,
in the process reconfiguring theorizing on affect and ethical cultivation.
Racialized and religious affects

Drawing from, and extending the preceding scholarship on the economies of affect,
anthropologists Ulla Berg and Ana Ramos-Zayas (2015) interrogate the racializing
processes through which affective sensibilities acquire quotidian resonance. Rejecting
Massumi and Sedgwick’s emphasis on proprioception, they bridge the structural
and the individual by locating racializing practices within the intentional, reflexive,
and embodied instantiations of affect. Within this frame, ‘liable affect’ refers to
the ‘simplified, undermined subjectivity of populations racialized as Other’, and
‘empowering affect’ refers to ‘the privileged and nuanced affective subjectivity frequently
reserved for whites in the United States and for self-styled “whitened” elites in Latin
America’ (Berg & Ramos-Zayas 2015: 654). Citing the example of Latin American
migrants and their progeny who embody an ‘always-already criminalized US-born
minority’, Berg and Ramos-Zayas (2015: 655) point to the constructed sense of
alterity that underscores minoritarian subject formation. Indeed, for immigrants
and other minoritized subjects, affect exists not as an ‘asocial’ response (Massumi
2007: 91), but as a performative labour that one has to master and manage in
order to survive as an effective, ideal citizen. Drawing from Berlant’s (2011: 116)
theorizing on modalities of ‘lateral agency’ and ‘interpassivity’ that evade binaries
such as conformity versus resistance, Berg and Ramos-Zayas argue that liable and
empowering affects often operate concurrently to sustain neoliberal projects of self-
transformation. Further, their conception of ‘racialized affect’ accounts for the ways in
which subjects turn to ‘emotional self-invention’ and ‘embodied self-packaging’ as they
contend with disciplinary regimes that demand neoliberal flexibility (Berg & Ramos-
Zayas 2015: 665). Minoritized subjects like my interlocutors who desire to embody
empowering affects thus demonstrate their consciousness of historical discernment –
an awareness of their displacement through liable affects.
While the theoretical scaffolding in this article is indebted to Richard and Rudnyckyj’s
and Berg and Ramos-Zayas’s conceptual frames, I further complicate their conclusion
by querying the ways that affective religious sensibilities intersect with minoritized
ethnic subjectivities. Thus, while foregrounding the political economies of racialized
affect, this article also critically considers the Singaporean self-help teachers’ reliance on
sensorial intensities and extra-discursive materialities such as sight, touch, and sound
to elicit the desired spontaneous affects from their students that would indicate the
latter’s capacity to self-transform and attain authentic piety. In this manner, despite
their perceived contradistinction, ‘affect as proprioception’, ‘economies of affect’, and
‘racialized affects’ uneasily collided in the classes as the teachers equipped the students
with the Islamic ways of overcoming hardships and failures. A tension thus exists
between the workings of liable affects as a consequence of state governmentality
and the liberatory and empowering affects of a neoliberal self working towards an
optimistic future. As Yang (2013) and Ngai (2005) demonstrate, however, it is possible

to acknowledge the centrality of sensorial intensities while accounting for the power
structures that interpellate these affective registers. Within the context of this article,
it becomes pertinent to critically consider the senses of empowerment that upwardly
mobile Muslim subjects acquired from appropriating the state’s discourses on racialized
Malay affects. Always already framed as embodying alterity, the class participants’
positioning of educational and financial mobility as metrics of individual and collective
successes reproduced a problematic ‘model minority’ rhetoric that elided the structural
inequities faced by their predominantly working-class ethnic community.16 In this
manner, racialized affects exist as both an index of vulnerability and an extension of
power. Seriously contending with the aspirations of pious interlocutors thus requires us
to transcend Marxist teleological notions of false consciousness in theorizing neoliberal
self-transformation, examining not only minoritized affects, but also the political-
economic structures that undergird the reproduction of dominant registers.
Unwavering trust in God

Within the Islamic classes, self-governance and state governmentalities circulate,
manifesting in the form of racialized affects. During informal conversations, young
women often attributed their ‘return’ to Islam – through these religious classes –
to their attempts at contending with everyday grievances such as unemployment
instabilities, heartache, and debilitating health and financial issues. As part of their
self-help pedagogy, the teachers constantly reminded students to reconfigure their
minds to perceive individual struggles as minor challenges in comparison to God’s
infinite mercy. In order to do so, the students had to train themselves to be conscious
of the ephemerality of life itself, and to cultivate a complex ethic of self-reliance
and detachment – applying free-market values to daily interactions, while remaining
steadfast in the face of quotidian uncertainties. Instead of relying on the state to pursue
tangible policy change, my interlocutors were to derive agency from turning inwards and
transforming themselves. By cultivating hope and the ability to respond appropriately
to obstacles, the students demonstrated an ‘unwavering trust in the Al-Raheem’ (the
most compassionate God) that would enable them to overcome ‘all the hardships that
bring [them] down’. With this rhetoric, Ustaz Ali and the other self-help teachers re-
signified dunya (world) hardships as part of God’s divine plan, in which a return to
piety provided the empowering affects to cope with disenfranchising neoliberal shifts.
Likewise, the teachers reminded students to discipline their negative affects, such as
anger towards, or envy of, the Chinese majority, reconfiguring racialized discontent as
semiotic markers of individualized inability to grapple with the changing economy.
Yet these markers cannot be dislodged from the broader authoritative discourses
that structure their possibility. For instance, the disciplining of envy intersects with
the state discourses on communitarianism. While embracing capital from the Global
North, the post-independence Singapore government has simultaneously disciplined
the body politic against potential ‘Western pollutants’ such as democracy and a
free press by evoking communitarian frameworks such as ‘Asian values’ and ‘shared
values’ – emphasizing the importance of prioritizing the needs of the nation and the
collective beyond the individual. These constructs facilitated the state’s reframing of
citizens’ racially charged discourses on rising economic inequality since 1999 as un-civic
signifiers of envy towards fellow citizens that must be disciplined. At the same time,
the complex imbrications between state governmentalities and liberatory techniques
of the self surface when minoritized subjects like my pious-aspiring interlocutors

appropriate the state’s liable affective discourses as part of their project of neoliberal
self-transformation (see Svendsen 2011; Yang 2013).
It is critical to note at this juncture that although neoliberalism conventionally
references the retreat of the state in favour of a free market, its practical instantiation
involves extensive state involvement in the interests of corporations and economic
elites (Brown 2003; Harvey 2005). Beyond economic shifts, neoliberal transformation
entails the restructuring of labour, reproductive life, welfare, and the ‘habits of the
heart’ (Harvey 2005: 3). Reducing neoliberalism to a mere collection of economic
policies therefore ignores the political rationality that transcends market spaces (Brown
2003: 38). In Neoliberalism as exception, anthropologist Aihwa Ong thus proposes a
conception of neoliberalism as a ‘technology of government’ (2006: 1), whereby state
apparatuses rely on calculative techniques to rationalize social issues as non-political
ones that require technical solutions and self-governance. Neoliberalism, in Ong’s (2006:
4-6) framing, serves as a ‘biopolitical mode of governing’ (vis-à-vis Foucault [1983])
comprising assemblages of market-driven techniques that manage conduct according
to principles of efficiency, flexibility, and competitiveness. The idea of neoliberalism as a
form of governmentality aptly captures the ‘baroque ecology’ (Ong 2006: 180) of nation-
states like Singapore where state-sanctioned technocrats assert political authority and
craft material and social values while leveraging on liberal market ideology to attract
investments from global entities. At the same time, neoliberal rationality does not
merely extend from the state apparatuses, it also emanates from individuals such as
the teachers who practise self-discipline and offer Islamic classes inciting Muslims to
manage themselves. As Rose (1999: xxiii) argues, governmentality must be apprehended
in relation to the process of assembling subjects: the ways that particular techniques,
gazes, and devices within spaces such as classrooms create subjects who embody
neoliberal rationality through ethical self-practices. When self-help ideologues such
as Muslim preachers frame labour productivity in terms of personal satisfaction at the
expense of justified remuneration, and conceptualize poverty as a form of behavioural
deficit, they ‘enter the soul of the citizen directly into political discourse and the practices
of government’ (Rose 1999: 2).17
Self-love and divine compassion

Further complicating the emphasis on discipling negative affects, Ustaz Ali’s lessons on
the power of God’s mercy were inextricable from his ideas on self-love, as he suggested
that we become ambassadors of Islam by treating ourselves with compassion. In casual
conversations, my fellow classmates revealed that one of their most memorable learning
moments centred not on a particular Qur’anic verse or Hadith, but on a letter-writing
activity. One night, Ustaz decided to break the monotony of his lectures by asking us
record the things that we loved most, and would like to forgive, about ourselves. As he
handed out bounded mini-journals emblazoned with the logo of his state-registered
business, he reminded us to take the activity seriously, get in touch with our feelings, and
be honest with ourselves. Attempting to induce the right affects, he projected relaxing
instrumentals from his Apple laptop. Ten minutes into the assignment, I began noticing
muffled sniffles. Many women had become so emotionally invested in the activity that
they were moved to tears. Although he had explicitly instructed us to refrain from
interacting with one another as we completed the activity, a few women seated at
the back started giggling and rolling their eyes, seemingly mocking the sentimentality
of the exercise, and prompting Ustaz Ali to sternly remind them to ‘take the activity

seriously’. With the exception of these few students, my interlocutors constantly referred
to this particular pedagogical moment as crucial to their sense of self-awareness and
transformation. Many informed me that they could not stop themselves from tearing
up as it was the first time that they had considered the importance of practising
compassion towards themselves in evaluating their ‘romantic and professional failures’.
Ustaz’s attempts at creating a conducive environment to elicit the desired response from
the students point to the connection between sonic landscapes and the production of
spatialized affects. Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld (2012) has written extensively on
the ways that acoustic soundscapes generate shared experiential knowledge by inciting
emotions. Sound not only evokes individualized responses, it also constructs a collective
public sentiment with others embedded within the similar experience, prompting social
practice. Despite my initial scepticism, I was interpellated into the classroom collective
when I became highly conscious of the affective intensities circulating within the room
as I completed my own list. Although not immediately moved to tears myself, the
intimacy of the exercise compelled me to engage in intense self-reflection, inspired by
the women around me who were deeply invested in the exercise.
At other instances, the teachers encouraged students to be cognizant of their emotions
while performing the daily ritualized prayers or when making dua (supplication) in
order to experience the requisite affective intensities. Here, the cathartic ability to
manifest tears during the performances of religious rituals signals one’s ability to
transcend routinized banality and attain a form of pietized emotional authenticity
necessary for God-consciousness. As demonstrated by Asad’s discussion of medieval
monastic Christians’ deliberate cultivation of weeping, affect could be deliberately
organized to index the ‘apt performance of conventional behavior’ (1993: 64). Others,
such as Mahmood (2005), have drawn from Asad’s frame to discuss Egyptian Muslim
women’s participation in piety movements that emphasize the capacity to weep as
signifying a pious self with the ability to emote. However, a tension exists between the
cultivation of the desire to weep and the ability to do so spontaneously – what Mahmood
(2005: 129) refers to as rehearsed spontaneity. Yet we cannot divorce the emphasis on
rehearsed spontaneity – as an embodiment of authenticated piety – from the broader
social context that necessitates such affective transformations in the first place. Instead
of a form of materiality without historicity, the cultivation of pious affective intensities
drawing from Islamic discursive traditions is implicated by particular structures of
governmentality. For instance, the ‘forgiveness list’ that Ustaz Ali encouraged us to create
re-interpellated the self as the locus of neoliberal transformation, whereby professional
failures were reconstituted as negative individualized attributes, thereby occluding the
broader political-economic structures contributing to precarity.
Islam is more than just romance . . . What it means to be a slave

Beyond cultivating compassion towards one’s self, discussions of idealized affects
encompassed the pursuit of romantic love as a means towards fostering pious
subjectivity. For a lesson coinciding with Valentine’s Day, Ustaz Ali decided to structure
the discussion on the festivities’ compatibility with Islam. Although he did not directly
reprimand those who confessed to celebrating the day with their partners, he asked
us to ‘reflect’ on whether we were ‘celebrating love’, or the ‘idea of love’. Instead
of advising the students against romantic relationships, he called upon the women
to ‘set the boundaries’ in their interactions with their romantic partners, presenting
women as bearers of community disciplining responsible for safeguarding their bodies

and affective sentiments against potential sins. Women could transgress pious norms,
yet they also possessed the willpower to transform themselves and their community
towards ideal subjectivity. In his analysis of Egyptian Muslims’ negotiations of discursive
traditions, Schielke (2009) similarly suggests that male youth possessed greater ability
to navigate moral registers related to gender, sexuality, and religion than their female
counterparts, who constantly felt the pressure to safeguard their chastity for marriage.
Young Egyptian men experimented with non-marital romance despite the Salafi
preachers’ insistence on its incommensurability with Islam; nevertheless these young
males upheld conventions such as prohibitions against adultery, and the importance of
finding the right marital partner corresponding to their family’s social status. Within
both contexts, the preachers’ authority was incumbent upon their ability to mitigate
Muslim youth’s anxieties as they navigated religious and cultural norms tied to romance
and marriage.
As he concluded the Valentine’s Day class, Ustaz Ali emphasized the significance of
romantic love as a way to attain a greater, more totalizing affect, one that enslaves a
subject to their creator in a state of submission:
If you go to other religious classes, they will tell you that everything is haram [forbidden]. In this
class, I will not tell you that. The great thing about being in love is that it makes you think about
others than yourself. It makes you a better person. Most importantly, it makes you understand what
it means to be a slave.
Ustaz’s proclamation positioned love as central to the Islamic faith, although Islam itself
was ‘more than just romance’. Being in love is important as it makes us conscious of the
needs of others, thus enabling us to submit fully to God. Like other Muslim religious
authorities globally, Ustaz’s demonstration of moral flexibility, and his ability to extend
the symbolic connection between romantic and spiritual love, enhanced his appeal to
Muslim youth wary of the older preachers’ hardline stances towards romance (see Deeb
& Harb 2013). The students I attended classes with appreciated his willingness to discuss
romance and regularly shared their relationship troubles with him, inviting him to their
engagement and wedding ceremonies. In turn, he often alluded to his insider status by
referencing his students’ romantic partnerships in class: for instance, telling jokes about
one of the male students’ attempts at impressing his girlfriend.
Ustaz’s rhetoric was not particular to the male teachers. Ustazah Fatimah, a fellow
Al-Azhar graduate, often articulated the following statement in her classes: ‘We must
want the Creator, who wants love’. Ustazah encouraged the single female students in
her classes to get married as a way to ‘get access to jannah [heaven]’. Thus, all the
classes that she offered – on work, marriage, consumption of organic food, child-
rearing – advocated the cultivation of ideal gendered affects as epistemological and
ontological frames (see Jamil 2016). It is crucial to note that unlike the subjects of
feminist emancipatory analyses, my interlocutors consistently framed themselves (and
other Muslims) as being in a state of wilful submission to God – in spite of the
agentive choices that they might enact in other spheres of their lives. In this regard, I
concur with Mahmood’s (2005) call to dismantle the presumed universal relevance of
Western secular liberal models of emancipation. Yet, as I pursued social activities such
as yoga, dining, and shopping with my interlocutors, I realized that even as the students
presented romantic affects as religious requisites, they did not always conceive of their
desires as means of becoming wilful subjects to God. Instead, their commitment to

fulfilling the Islamic sunnah (prophetic tradition) to marry were also deeply entangled
with quotidian concerns that affected their habituation of Islamic discursive traditions.
Finding romance amidst precarity

While the classes facilitated my understanding of Islamic educational socialization
pertaining to romantic affects, my interactions with my interlocutors beyond the
classroom provided me with intimate insights into the extent to which cultural norms
and state policies contributed to young women’s anxieties as they sought their ideal
partners. The religio-communal sanctions against cohabitation before marriage, and the
national home-ownership policies, meant that marriage was one of the ways for Muslim
women to explore their sexuality, obtain social freedom, move out with their husbands,
and begin new lives for themselves.18 Upwardly mobile Malay women graduates desiring
partners of equal status also faced a limited pool of eligible men, given that more Malay
women than men were enrolled at the local universities. Disappointed with the lack of
suitable men within their immediate social circle, and faced with the immense pressure
from family members to settle down and bear children, many women turned to social
media to find love. This met with varying levels of success, however. Often, young
women decided that their on-line friends were incompatible with them in terms of
displaying idealized affects marked by their degree of commitment to religion and the
pursuit of social mobility. If they ended up meeting their on-line friends, they made
sure to safeguard their modesty by gathering at home with their parents serving as
chaperones, or at public cafés and shopping malls. Zahara, one of my key interlocutors,
met many single Muslim men through Facebook and Twitter, engaging in conversations
about life and religion before finally meeting them in person. Although she enjoyed
these ‘modest dates’, she soon realized that none of the men she encountered were
‘serious about marriage’ and thus became wary of the ‘advantages of on-line dating’
for Muslim women like her who were committed to ‘settling down’. Zahara’s anxieties
about finding her ideal spouse while maintaining her commitment to modesty were
apparent during the time that I got to know her. She regularly posted Facebook images
of herself displaying desirable affects such as attending Islamic seminars and reading
books on cultivating ideal domesticity.
The lack of eligible Singaporean Muslim bachelors was so disconcerting that one of
the teachers was inspired to post a public Facebook status calling upon ‘single men above
the age of 25’ to contact him. While many of his social media followers welcomed his
call, others questioned him, prompting him to clarify that he was merely responding
to the ‘perceived imbalance between demand and supply’, while conceding that ‘we
might have been looking at the wrong places’. Although the teacher did not clarify his
statement or the audience he signalled (‘we’), his interactions with his followers via his
Facebook comment thread suggest his desire to investigate and perhaps even resolve
the perceived imbalance between the limited supply of eligible Muslim bachelors and
women’s increased demand for them. Responding to their female students’ calls, other
teachers regularly organized halal (permissible), chaperoned, blind dating events for
single Muslims in public spaces, intending to foster romance within morally permissible
frames.
The challenges young women faced in finding suitable spouses motivated their
decision to turn to religious classes to learn about love from an Islamic perspective,
and to find peace from within. Alia, a 27-year-old media executive, confessed that she
often had to handle intrusive questions about marriage from her relatives. A university

graduate, she had travelled independently across Asia and Australia, and was one
of the women with whom I ended up forging a close bond over endless cups of
espresso at cafés around the city. Although she considered the ‘obsession with marriage’
an ‘older way of thinking’, she confided her apprehensions about finding a suitable
partner. Her ideal spouse had to display the requisite emotive sentiments such as
spiritual commitment to Islam, and express support of her career goals while holding
a promising job of his own. Like Alia, many young women did not hesitate to end
their romantic relationships when their male partners failed to display the appropriate
affects suited to a middle-class Muslim morality such as labouring towards upward
mobility, and enhancing their ethical commitment to Islam. Often these break-ups
devastated young women, and part of their recuperative efforts included spending time
with other female friends, and delving further into their spiritual growth. Hana, a 26-
year-old mid-rank civil servant, ended her five-year relationship with her boyfriend
midway through my research because he was ‘directionless’ and ‘consistently failed his
university exams’. Hana dealt with the demise of her relationship by attending Islamic
classes, and providing her ex-boyfriend with lists of ‘things to work on’, such as ‘excelling
in school’ and ‘getting a good job’. He eventually regained her affections by ‘proving’ that
he had ‘mended his ways’ and was ‘serious about improving himself’. He subsequently
proposed to her and they recently tied the knot. Even though pious women like Hana
desired the barakah (blessings) of marriage, they also insisted that romance had to be
accompanied with the possession of desirable affects necessary to excel in Singapore’s
neoliberalized economy.19
In casual conversations, young women who felt the need to settle down early despite
nagging uncertainties about their partners cited social pressures from relatives, the fear
of waiting too long and being too old, and the knowledge they had gained from the
religious classes espousing the ‘beautiful benefits of marriage’. In these classes, women
teachers like Ustazah Fatimah constantly reminded women that ‘Allah has promised
rezeki [sustenance] for those who choose marriage and avoid zina [unlawful sexual
relations]’. Amira, a 22-year-old teacher-in-training, casually shared the following with
me over afternoon tea:
Well, I hope to get married soon . . . I still pray daily for that. Hopefully in two years’ time because
I have a partner. But he said that I had to finish my studies first. For me, that is not important, you
know . . . He is working, but he is not where he wants to be. He is still trying to find his career. He
doesn’t attend these classes with me. I think he should, then maybe he will change his mind [about
marriage]. [I then asked why she did not encourage him to attend the classes with her] . . . He works
different shifts. It is hard for him to be free for classes. But he goes with his friends to the mosque
sometimes, but never to paid classes. He’s a practising Muslim; he’s just not ready to get married.
Throughout my research, women like Amira rationalized their partners’ indifference to

early marriage by referencing the latter’s commitment to Islam through the performance
of daily rituals, and their desire to become responsible husbands through career
advancement. Such forms of reasoning enabled women to reframe their partners’
practices as utilitarian actions necessary towards the fulfilment of economically viable
lives in Singapore rather than wilful defiance of Islamic precepts on preventing zina
through marriage. Although they were aware of ‘the need to have their own place of
living’ and a ‘stable income’ to ‘survive in Singapore’, the women also believed that ‘God
would ultimately provide for faithful believers’.
In her ethnography on Caribbean women’s entrepreneurial self-making, Freeman
(2014) similarly demonstrates that their adoption of neoliberal practices facilitated

their middle-class expressions, enabling them to utilize the language of malleability

and flexibility in navigating romance and marital life. Like young Singaporean Muslim
women, Freeman’s Barbadian interlocutors had achieved the requisite upward mobility
to restructure their domestic responsibilities, fostering their expectations of equality
and economic promise within romantic partnerships. Freeman’s ethnography thus not
only demonstrates the currents of the global within the local, but also returns us to
neoliberalism’s exceptionalism (see Ong 2006). The intersections of piety, marriage, and
motherhood further reverberate in distinct ways within the broader Malay Archipelago.
Writing on shifting courtship and marriage patterns among Javanese Muslim youth,
Smith-Hefner (2005) points out that the ideal marriage comprised individuals of similar
social standing. The expansion of higher education enhanced the array of choices
available to Indonesian women, who perceived their agency in selecting their own
spouses as symbolic of their acquisition of modernity. Similar to the Singapore context,
populist preachers responded to the rising individualism by urging tertiary-educated
youth to refrain from delaying marriage. In both instances, authoritative structures
circulated essentialized conceptions of civic motherhood in which a woman’s labour
towards her husband and children indexed her service to the nation (see Brenner
1998; Jones 2004; Stivens 2006). Despite the emphasis on pious gendered docility within
heteronormative households, Muslim women seldom passively endured transgressions.
As demonstrated by Hoesterey’s (2015) analysis of the rise and fall of Indonesian
businessmen and self-help preacher Aa Gym demonstrates, women who were especially
enamoured with the latter’s discourses of aspirational self-transformation became
disenchanted with his appeal when details of his secret polygamous marriage became
public. Hoesterey argues that women’s refusal to consume Aa Gym’s image in the
aftermath of the polygamy scandal reveals the tenuous nature of populist religious
authority figures – especially those who emphasize the cultivation of an ideal Muslim
subject as a way to enhance the moral fabric of the nation.
Ideal marital affects

It is critical to point out that the Singapore state’s strategic bureaucratization of
Muslim marriages facilitates its broader project of fostering desirable affects within
Malay subjects. To receive confirmation of their marital union by the Syariah Court,
Singaporean Muslim couples have to attend a compulsory marriage preparatory course
offered by state-licensed service providers. The Registrar of Muslim Marriages rendered
these classes necessary as an attempt at mitigating the high divorce rate within the Malay
community, supposedly attributed to a lack of Islamic values and financial literacy.
Typically spanning one or two days, these classes include social workers or motivational
speakers addressing issues such as pious obligations and money management skills. To
supplement the compulsory marriage course, my interlocutors also regularly enrolled
in seminars discussing Islamic approaches to relationships and weddings. During
these seminars, the teachers encouraged women to get married early even as they
highlighted the importance of financial stability for young Muslim couples. The
teachers also distinguished between ‘Muslim’ and ‘typical Malay’ weddings, expressing
their disfavour towards the latter with their wasteful and gaudy performative affects.
Reminiscent of village weddings in pre-urbanized Singapore, these celebrations are
held at void decks (open spaces on the first floor of public housing compounds),
typically feature entertainment in the form of a karaoke band and a DJ, and are
less stringent with gender segregation. In contrast, upper middle-class Malays often

prefer expensive wedding banquets at hotels with a limited guest list. The teachers,
however, favoured small, ‘tasteful’ receptions at mosques that foreground the proper
affects by excluding audiovisual entertainment and restricting gendered interactions.
The teachers often relied on humour to extend their meta-commentary on the liable
affects of certain cultural practices: for example, associating the luxurious array of
foods at Malay weddings with the lack of self-discipline contributing to rising obesity
and chronic diseases in the community. The teachers’ rhetoric aligned with the
normative discourses on ethnic minorities’ poverty as a by-product of diminished
self-will instead of structural impediments to equity. The teachers’ commentary also
suggested that the affective sensibilities associated with being a particular type of Malay
were incommensurable with Islam. Islam thus became a marker of distinction and the
negation of a problematic Malay identity. At the same time, the teachers’ appropriation
of authoritative discourses on Malayness and alterity reinscribed conceptions of ideal
Muslim subjectivities.
Although the students deeply respected the teachers and took their advice seriously,
many of my interlocutors desired, or were in the process of planning for, day-long
wedding receptions at void decks or community centres to facilitate attendance by
friends, family, and extended kin networks ranging from 500 to 1,500 guests. Many
women desired to retain the hantaran (brideprice) practice, beautiful wedding décor
and Halal patisseries, and resplendent modest outfits at their ceremonies. To keep
themselves updated with the latest wedding trends, they utilized social media platforms
like Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.20 Young women rationalized their choices by
evoking their parents’ authority in shaping the contours of their wedding ceremonies,
and as a means of directly obtaining the community’s barakah. They negotiated their
dissension with the teachers by citing the importance of foregrounding the proper
affects such as the sincerity of niyyah (intention), while verbally distancing themselves
from ideas of riak (arrogance/self-importance). Through these negotiations, women
re-signified the potentially de-authenticating effects of their materialism on their pious
self-presentation – constructing religious virtue through, rather than separate from,
their consumption practices (see Jones 2010; Meneley 2007). In so doing, they disciplined
their liable affects in ways that affirmed their commitment to pious cultivation while
fulfilling their material desires.
Spontaneous intensities, racialization, affective politics

My interlocutors’ attempts at ethical cultivation demonstrate that affective sentiments
within quietist piety projects that withdraw from political Islam remain structured by
economic and cultural forces of production as well as the state governmentality of race
and religion. However, while the governmentalities through which racialized affects are
disciplined into practice could assume universal cadences, I argue that they acquire
distinctive nuances for ethnically minoritized subjects who desire to cultivate piety.
As the ethnographic vignettes demonstrate, my interlocutors were actively engaged
in classes that emphasized the cultivation of particular affects such as persistence,
resilience, and emotional sincerity with God. Through these affective pedagogical
moments, the love for God had to transcend other sensibilities, and romantic love
had to serve as means to a closer, loving relationship with the Creator. At the same time,
affective intensities became the means through which structures of governmentalities
enacted their disciplinary forces.

My interlocutors’ practices of self-making highlight the importance of critically

attending to the forms of ethical striving premised upon the negation of liable
affects within the self. Part of the teachers’ self-help rhetoric thus included gently
critiquing working-class Malays who struggled to embody Islamic piety and self-
transformation, and thus failed to approximate God’s divine love and mercy. Through
affective pedagogies, the Malay self became interpellated as an Object that had to be
disciplined through self-transformation and negation. Here, ideas about the different
forms of love – divine, self, and romantic – were distinct but mutually entailing:
being a good Muslim woman entailed being a conscientious Malay subject, a good
Muslim wife and citizen, and an obedient subject to God. The latter, in particular,
enabled the teachers and students to re-signify discrepancies and dissatisfactions as
evidence of divine tribulations requiring neoliberal self-fashioning and the belief
in God’s mercy. In this regard, racialized affect theory allows us to understand the
sensibilities of those who cast off abject others, and even parts of their selves, for failing
to approximate neoliberal self-transformation. Here, even minoritized subjects end
up reproducing hegemonic governmentalities through their participation in quietist
projects of self-transformation. Indeed, while my interlocutors derived empowerment
from these classes, their circulation of self-help discourses undergirded by model-
minority logics inevitably imbricated them within new modes of relationality whose
broader consequences are still unfolding.
Yet two critical points of contention emerge in relying on affect theory as a lens with
which to analyse pious cultivation. First, the assumption that transformative affective
sensibilities necessitate the subversion of normativities would not fully encapsulate
the realities of my interlocutors, who derived empowerment from attending the self-
help classes that required the simultaneous cultivation of agentive piety and docility.
Second, a return to affect as a modality of critique could serve to reinstate colonial and
essentialist framings of Malays as hyperemotional and lacking in reflexivity (see Alatas
2012). However, if we were to acknowledge that the discourses of self-transformation
that circulate through negation implicate minoritized subject formation, ethnographic
particularity further compels us to consider the possibility that such forms of
affective pedagogies simultaneously offer liberatory and disenfranchising potentialities.
Accounting for the instantiations of racialized affects in practice would complicate the
ontological coherence we attribute to Islamic discursive traditions, thus allowing us
to attend to the varied forms they manifest for minoritized Muslims who habituate
and negotiate normative ethics. Attending to affective pedagogies would enable us to
acknowledge the transformative sentiments that undergird Muslims’ sincere faith in a
merciful God who works to correct all wrongdoings, and the ways that such an ethical
constitution enables them to cope with the anxieties of living as minoritized subjects in
neoliberal Singapore.
NOTES
The author would like express gratitude to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their thorough and
insightful comments that expanded the critical stakes of the essay. Her research was funded by the Wenner-
Gren Foundation and the Spencer Foundation/National Academy of Education.
1 I relied on pseudonyms throughout the article to ensure confidentiality as requested by my interlocutors.
2 Unless otherwise referenced, all quotations in the article are derived from the ethnographic research I
conducted in Singapore
3 The songkok is a brimless cap in the shape of a truncated cone, and is typically made of black embroidered
felt or velvet. The men’s baju kurung comprises a long-sleeved shirt and trousers. Both are types of cultural

attire often worn within the Malay Archipelago to commemorate occasions such as Eid and during prayer
ceremonies and communal gatherings.
4 ‘But those ye call upon besides Him, are unable to help you, and indeed to help themselves’ (7:197).
‘When they advanced to meet Goliath and his forces, they prayed: “Our Lord! Pour out constancy on us and
make our steps firm: Help us against those that reject faith”’ (2:250). ‘And verily thy Lord is He, the Exalted
in Might, Most Merciful’ (26:104).
5 The teachers conducted the classes in English – using Malay to cite colloquial examples, and Arabic when
referencing the Qur’an or Hadith. For purposes of clarity, I present my interlocutors’ speech as articulated.
I translated the Malay and Arabic terminologies according to my interlocutors’ interpretation of these
lexicons.
6 For a review of this debate, see Deeb (2015); Fadil & Fernando (2015a; 2015b); Schielke (2015).
7 For ethnographic case studies depicting rising inequalities in Singapore, see Teo (2018).
8 Scholars have examined Singapore’s embrace of neoliberal political-economic modalities as evidenced by
its endorsement of the Washington Consensus, the privatization of healthcare and transportation industries,
the rise of government-linked companies, and the transfer of S$62 billion from the compulsory national
superannuation scheme (the Central Provident Fund or CPF) to private sector fund managers (see Liow 2011;
Robison, Rodan & Hewison 2005; Tan 2012).
9 Mauzy and Milne (2002: 109) utilized the term ‘double minority’ to describe Singapore’s geospatial
particularity, whereby the Chinese comprise a dominant majority in the nation-state while constituting a
minority in Southeast Asia, and the Malays exist as minorities within Singapore, while comprising a majority
in the region.
10 The tudung (hijab) issue involved a Muslim parent who insisted on sending his 9-year-old daughters to
their public school in a hijab instead of their school uniforms, sparking debates on the compatibility of Islam
with secularism (see Nasir et al. 2010). The attempted terrorist attack stunned the nation as the government
revealed that a regional Muslim terrorist group had planned attacks on state infrastructures (see Tan 2003).
In 2014, a few preachers began a campaign against a major queer event that also took place on the first night
of Ramadan (Reuters 2014).
11 The phrase ‘This is a gathering of lovers’ is by Jalal ad-Din Rumi, a thirteenth-century Persian poet,
jurist, and Sufi mystic. One of the teachers regularly referenced this quote in their classes.
12 Culture-and-personality scholars relied on culturalist frames in analysing emotional and psychological
states, instead of examining their intersections with the broader political economy. Within this frame, the
interior states of minoritized subjects and the cultural group psyche provided an explanation for structural
processes such as poverty and inequality. Thus, for example, culture-of-poverty explanations located
structural inequalities as corresponding to cultural and individual deficit. In so doing, such frameworks
have focused on the ‘medicalization, psychiatricization, criminalization, and pathologization of structural
conditions’ (Berg & Ramos-Zayas 2015: 658). By the mid-1980s, the anthropology of emotion (Lutz & White
1986) emerged as a more nuanced response to the culture-and-personality paradigm. For an extensive critique,
see di Leonardo (1998).
13 For an extensive review of anthropological analyses of emotion in Southeast Asia, see Boelstorff &
Lindquist (2004).
14 Berg and Ramos-Zayas (2015) argue that by rendering emotion and affect as synonymous and eliding
racialization processes, anthropologists of emotion ended up reinscribing tropes of minoritized populations

as either possessing ‘flat’ or ‘excessive’ emotions for their inability to embody or perform these sentiments in
ways that align with political-economic and historical shifts.
15 In a path-breaking essay, Leys (2011) traces the framing of affect as proprioception to the scholars of the
1960s Basic Emotions paradigm such as Tomkins, Ekman, and Damasio, who propose that affective bodily
sensations occur prior to, and independent of, intentionality. There is thus a gap – 0.5 seconds, according
to Massumi (1995: 90) – between a subject’s affective response and their cognitive appraisal of the situation,
such that affect exists before the mind or reason intervenes.
16 The term ‘model minority’ was initially used to describe Asian American achievements, yet scholars
such as Suzuki (2002) have pointed out the ways in which the concept has pitted immigrant groups against
one another, focusing on individual acquisition of mobility without attending to structural inequities,
and presenting Asian Americans as homogeneous and thus rendering poverty invisible within such
communities.
17 For example, Yang (2013: 293) has written extensively on the Chinese government’s engagements in
‘psycho-politics’ – marked by its attempts at disciplining citizens affectively so as to extract productive labour
amidst its failure to provide public goods.

18 To reduce the citizen strain on welfare and maintain ‘Asian values’ like filial piety, the government
prohibits single adults from purchasing their own public housing unit before the age of 35, and provides
subsidies for married couples buying apartments close to their parents’ residence.
19 See Suriani Suratman’s (2011) research on dual-income Malay households.
20 There is a thriving on-line Instagram community featuring Malay bridal companies, caterers, décor
specialists, and henna artists.
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« Ceci une réunion de ceux qui aiment » : entraide et pédagogies affectives

islamiques contemporaines à Singapour
Résumé
La prolifération de classes islamiques fondées sur la rhétorique de l’entraide, la culture populaire, le
Coran et les hadiths contribue à l’attrait croissant des pédagogies affectives pour la jeunesse musulmane
de Singapour. Dispensé par des Singapouriens diplômés de l’Université Al-Azhar, l’enseignement attire
surtout des femmes de la minorité malaise, musulmanes et éduquées à l’université. À l’aide de pédagogies
affectives, les enseignants recadrent la piété islamique pour mettre au premier plan trois formes d’amour :
amour-propre, amour divin, amour romantique. Dans la lignée des études de l’affect racialisé, le présent
article interroge la manière dont les pédagogies affectives des enseignants médient les inquiétudes
des jeunes femmes dans le contexte néolibéral et analyse leurs négociations avec leur savoir religieux
nouvellement acquis tandis qu’elles se débattent avec leur précarité quotidienne. La mise au premier plan,
par l’anthropologie, des matérialités vécues complique quelque peu les présupposés théoriques de la théorie
des affects. Celle-ci élargit néanmoins notre compréhension des projets de piété en les présentant non pas
simplement comme la recherche d’une autodiscipline éthique mais comme une démarche imbriquée avec
des processus de racialisation plus larges, en particulier pour les membres de minorités donc la capacité de
se transformer devient un élément de la volonté de s’améliorer. En confrontant la théorie anthropologique
de la piété islamique à la théorie des affects, l’autrice met en lumière les formes de sentiments religieux
affectifs qui circulent entre différence et négation et font partie intégrante de lieux particuliers de formation
des sujets musulmans en situation de minorité.
Nurhaizatul Jamil is an Assistant Professor in Global South Studies, and the co-ordinator of the Social Media
Lab at Pratt Institute. Her scholarship foregrounds minoritized Muslims’ engagements in transnational
circuits of Islamic education and consumption.
Pratt Institute, 200 Willoughby Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA. njamil@pratt.edu


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‘This is a gathering of lovers’:

Islamic self-help and affective

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

God’. Pointing to the Qur’anic verses on a projected PowerPoint slide, he suggested

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

to hegemonic discourses constructing ethnic Malays as burdened with negative affects

Being Malay and Muslim in Singapore

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

From emotions to affect

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

anthropologists of affect distinguish their analytical approach by analysing subject

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

discipline, it symbolized a regime of self-improvement tied to affective economies and

Racialized and religious affects

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Unwavering trust in God

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Self-love and divine compassion

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Islam is more than just romance . . . What it means to be a slave

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

Finding romance amidst precarity

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Throughout my research, women like Amira rationalized their partners’ indifference to

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

their middle-class expressions, enabling them to utilize the language of malleability

Ideal marital affects

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

Spontaneous intensities, racialization, affective politics

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

My interlocutors’ practices of self-making highlight the importance of critically

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racialization processes, anthropologists of emotion ended up reinscribing tropes of minoritized populations

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

specialists, and henna artists.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

« Ceci une réunion de ceux qui aiment » : entraide et pédagogies affectives

Pratt Institute, 200 Willoughby Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA. njamil@pratt.edu

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 25, 467-486

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