Religion and Culture

The tension surrounding the veil as a custom/habit or as a religious object points towards a deeper/more fundamental tension: that is, between religion and culture, their intertwinement and co-constituting positions. Mahmood writes: "[Mosque] movement participants argue that ritual acts of worship in the popular imagination have increasingly acquired the status of customs or conventions, a kind of "Muslim culture" undertaken as a form of entertainment or as a means to display a religio-cultural identity." (Politics of Piety, p.48) Here, Mahmood points towards (implicitly) an issue of production; that is, does custom/habit produce or become taken and inflected through religious structure, or does religion propagate culture and inform cultural practices? How discrete of an entity is religion from culture, how distant? Or can we not separate the two so definitively, but rather the demarcation between them (religion and cultural practice) continually made porous and shifting? Essentially, where do religion and culture lie in relation to each other (Is this even a productive question, or is it a moot point?)?