From standing inside “secular” or “religious” spheres, the other seems distinct with clear boundaries and you can easily become blind to the ways in which it blends into your sphere. Drawing on Bruce Lincoln’s arguments, religion is not so much internal as focused on discourse, practice, and community. In other words, religion is what we say and do, not a mood or motivation. We cannot know exactly what others feel or think, only what they say and do (and this is of course very relevant to the embodied practice of Jouili’s interlocuters). This is not to say that our interiority doesn’t matter, just that it is inaccessible, personal belief is not the entire point of religion. One important factor which Clifford Geertz fails to acknowledge in his study of religion as a cultural system are the dynamics of power created when religion becomes embedded in politics (as seen in Saudi Arabia, which I will return to later). Geertz’s structuralist account of symbolic religious systems does not entirely grasp how religion can be fused into mundane things so as to transform them to become powerfully meaningful. Religion is powerful precisely because it answers certain questions.
Jouili conceptualizes phronesis as self-formation or development of agency through the virtuous capacity of “‘do[ing] the right thing at the right time in the right way’ (MacIntyre [1981] 2007: 150).” (Jouili, 18) “Right” being doing what is right for human flourishing (as opposed to what is right for the individual alone) within a given community (in this case, the umma). Therefore, phronesis, for Jouili’s interlocutors, is knowledge linked to being and becoming an independent subject and agent through a dialectical relationship with Islam. For these women, Islam serves as an embodied practice of assimilation, or rather formation through finding ways to exist as pious in a secular space, to learn by living in. Faith is a constant in Islam (as Jouili’s interlocuters conceptualize it) and does not have the teleological view of much Western thought that the logical progression should be from religious to secular. In fact, “Islamic epistemological traditions have not incorporated modern positivist assumptions which oppose (rational) knowledge and (irrational religious) belief to each other.” (Jouili, 39)
An important nuance of Jouili’s ethnographic work is that it is not located in a place. It is a decentered ethnography, not interested in the the Islamic schools these women attend except insofar as they impact the women themselves. There is more reference to “Germany” and “France” in Jouili’s writings rather than “Cologne” or “Paris”. This is not because Jouili is incorrectly attempting to cast broad strokes on entire countries based on case studies in singular cities, but it is because Jouili’s work is not located in any one country, but in a sort of Wittgensteinian “form of life”. More specifically, “religious” life in a “secular” environment, and how these women’s conceptualizations of “religion” and “secularity” are revealed by their social interactions. By this I mean that Jouili’s work is about what these women say and do in their day-to-day lives, what they take for granted, what enables their communication with people, and what this could say about Islamic and secular culture.
The situation of women in Saudi Arabia and their recently granted right to drive is interesting because it sort of turns the situation of the women in Jouili’s book upside down, albeit not exactly in a one to one reversal. In an Atlantic article, Hala Al-Dosari (being interviewed about the decree) says, “They [the government] want all the credit to go to the king for making this wonderful decision; it shows how the kingdom is being moved toward modernization.” Here an interesting contrast can be seen between the situation in Saudi Arabia and the situation in France and Germany as presented by Jouili. It exemplifies that this “pious practice” vs. “secular constraints” or “secular modern” vs. “religious traditionalism” divide is not a clear binary by any means and is shaped by various historical discursive contexts. In 1990, “the Ministry of Interior instructed the mufti … to issue a religious fatwa justifying why women driving is bad” and now “… the government is taking more steps toward modernization, there’s more political utility in [ending the ban].” This can lead to multiple confusions from an outside, Western perspective, the ending of the ban could be seen as a “modernization” of Islam whereas there may be plenty of Muslims in Saudi Arabia whose notions of “modernization” differ greatly from those of the Western project.
An important section of Jouili’s book which draws out this idea of varying notions of modernity is her discussion of Max Weber’s description of the Protestant ethic as “focusing on God as a vector for individualization … the historical foundation for modern individualism (Weber [1930] 1996).” Jouili goes on to say that
“If one follows Webb Keane’s claim that Protestantism has given rise to a new ‘world-historical configuration that exceeds particular doctrinal identifications,’ a configuration that is associated with the overarching narrative of modernity and a novel conception of personhood, one can certainly argue that the discourses encountered during my fieldwork reflect the sedimentation of this ‘world-historical configuration’ within contemporary understandings of Islamic practice.” (Jouili, 67)

This challenges notions of the “secular modern” inasmuch as these women are religious, yet can be seen to ideologically overlap with conventional notions of “modern.” Jouili’s work is important because she uses real-life examples to refute the notion that minimalist religion and secular society must necessarily go hand in hand.
Minimalist notions of the place of religion fit neatly with notions of “spirituality” and personal belief delineated from “religion” proper, in the secular immanent age. The women in Jouili’s book refer several times to a “spiritual essence of Islam,” but this is a pious Islam they are committed to. This pious Islam is not minimalist, but maximalist, it does push into the secular public sphere. This is where the tension lies and where these women come into conflict between what they think is right, and what society thinks they should think. To the secular public these women’s lifestyle is “unintelligible”. From a minimalist, secular sphere, one often automatically sees the necessity of embodied practice in one’s beliefs are superfluous. As religion has often become so deeply embedded into our ideals (such as in the protestant work ethic of capitalism) we often envision religious belief as merely a personal, private mental affair. Of course automatically many Westerners may label the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia as “backwards traditional Islam” when really, as this Atlantic article posits, it is more of a political issue. Likewise, many of those opposed to hijab wearing in France or Germany may confuse the actual embodiment of religious belief being displayed with a political message enforcing the kinds of restrictions seen in Saudi Arabia.