I sit, engrossed in my book. I am taking a course on jihad and the modern state. My professor is preoccupied by Foucault. He describes him as a thoroughgoing Ghazalian and relates Foucault’s technologies of the self to Al-Ghazali’s. Foucault’s technologies are those of the state: the mechanisms of culture and law that shape the citizen. The believer without ritual exposes herself to this machinery, for ritual embodies Al-Ghazali’s technologies. It supplements the jihad of the soul, the struggle to improve the self. In the previous seminar, my professor asked us where struggle begins. “Does it begin with the lesser jihad, the struggle against the material enemy—the social, the legal, the political? Or does it begin with the greater jihad, the struggle against the enemy within oneself?” I ra
