سياسة التقوى

by Saba Mahmood, عبير العبيداء (مترجم)

على الرغم من أن هذا الكتاب يتمحور حول الســياسة الإسـلامية في مصر، فإن جذوره تـعود إلى مجموعة من الألغاز، ورثتها من مشـاركتي في صياغة سـياسـة اليسـار التقدميـة في باكستان - مسقط رأسي. خلال السبعينيّات والثمانينيّات حينما اكتسب جيلي من الباكستانيين درجة متقدمة من الوعي السياسي، كانت القومية ما بعد الاستعمارية قد ولَّى أوجُها، وكانت هناك خيبة أمل كبيرة مما يمكن للأمة - غير الحديثة بمقاييسنا الآن - أن توفره لمواطنيها. رغم ذلك كان لا يزال هناك شعور في أوساط اليسار النسوي في باكستان أن الماركسية النقدية والتروي تجاه قضايا عدم المساواة بين الجنسين، يمكن أن يوفرا وسيلة للخروج من المأزق، ولتنظيم جهودنا البراغماتية في تغيير الواقع المعيش. في هذا المجال ربما لم نكن نختلف عن نظرائنا في دول مثل الجزائر ومصر وتونس؛ حيث إن ظروف ما بعد الاستعمار قد ولَّدت شعورًا مماثلًا من خيبة الأمل، ولكنه كان أيضًا شعورًا مستمرًا بالاغتذاء، نقلته الوعود التي قطعتها لنا الأيديولوجيتان المتلازمتان؛ الماركسية النقدية والنسوية.

Genres: Islam, Feminism, Anthropology, Religion, Nonfiction, Gender, Politics

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Saba Mahmood is an associate professor of social cultural anthropology at UC Berkeley.

Reviews

[Preethi Krishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saba Mahmood's ethnographic account of the Women's Mosque movement in Egypt is quite an enlightening read. She poses some very interesting questions. She hopes “This attempt at comprehension offers the slim hope that in this embattled and imperious climate…analysis as a mode of conversation, rather than mastery, can yield a vision of coexistence that does not require making other lifeworlds extinct or provisional.”

Her project is situated in a particular point in history (after September 11)where Western intrusion in other parts of the world is justified also as a means to save the Muslim woman from the Muslim man. However, Mahmood wonders why so many women choose to align themselves to a movement which supposedly oppresses them. Especially at a point where Muslim women have other options.

Mahmood concludes that the trouble lies in the way agency and freedom is often defined by liberal feminism. While some see certain Islamic practices as oppressive, others recognize these preferences (of modesty and veiling) as women's choices. She questions the simplistic differentiation of resistance and repression. As mentioned before, veiling has either been criticized as oppressive. Or as choice. The choice is often explained as one of convenience(in a space where sexual harassment is widespread) or as resistance to western hegemony. Mahmood argues that there could be other reasons as well. Mahmood brings in piety as an important aspect of these women's lives. According to Mahmood, bringing in piety into analysis renders the other analytical frames put forward by liberal feminism as inadequate. For these women, achieving their potential as pious individuals is more critical than gender equality. Through examples, Mahmood demonstrates how women stand up against their husbands when they discourage their religious activities. While feminists may recognize this as resistance to gender inequality, Mahmood argues that for these women, it was more about achieving their potential as pious individuals. Moreover, by providing the wide range of interpretations among women teachers, Mahmood also demolishes any notion of a uniform Muslim woman even within the mosque movement.

While her intention to enable a discussion rather than allow for a "savior" perspective is commendable, some aspects continued to trouble me. This review articulates my dilemma quite well. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/... As Selim says in this review, neither liberal feminism nor Islamic religiosity is a natural instinct. Both are results of a political movement which seeks to achieve an outcome. Selim says, "Mahmood’s argument for scholarly neutrality in the name of a postmodern cultural relativism becomes quite problematic, for it obscures an ongoing political struggle and forecloses the possibility of active commitments and solidarities; of “taking sides,” so to speak." The book and this review has not put my dilemma to rest. And I guess, with that Mahmood has achieved her goal of beginning the conversation. In that respect, this book does achieve its objective :)

[Jennie · Rating 4 out of 5]

a phenomenal book that disentangles human agency from liberation politics. individuals don't just exercise agency when they rebel against hegemonic, existing norms, but they also do so when they inhabit the hegemonic norms. through a study of the feminist mosque movement in egypt, mahmood shows us that women are rebelling against *some* traditional norms-- specifically, the norm of only males being able to interpret the koran-- in that they are reading and interpreting the koran for themselves. at the same time, their interpretations are often patriarchal, upholding existing systems of domination. far from "liberating" women from patriarchal systems of domination, the women exercise their agency in inhabiting these patriarchal systems through their own interpretations of the koran.

totally fascinating, and mahmood is an amazing writer.

[Hafsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A part ethnographic, part theoretical book that leverages a fundamental critique to the secular-liberal assumptions of Western feminism through a study of the motivations of the women in the mosque movement in Cairo, Egypt. Although I have a few problems with the methods/methodology of the book, it is a must read for anyone interested in feminist theory, Islamic feminism, and anthropology.

[Maarya Abbasi · Rating 3 out of 5]

TLDR: overrating this w/ three stars b/c of my sheer appreciation n awe that a work like this exists, but found a lot of problems with it overall

My overly long + verbose book review below:

Saba Mahmood, in her book, Politics of Piety, proposes that despite their inclusionary intentions, existing feminist accounts of the agency of Muslim women from “other” parts of the world obfuscate rather than clarify our understanding of these individuals; more problematically, they tend to erase the religious subjectivity of these Muslim women by continuing to rely in secular discursive frameworks built upon reductive western notions of agency and resistance. Mahmood’s project is concerned with how Muslim women’s agency is understood within secular and liberal feminist analysis: she deigns to “question the overwhelming tendency within post-structuralist scholarship to conceptualize agency in terms of subversion or resignification of social norms” (Mahmood 2004: 14). Through an anthropological study of the women’s piety movement that is part of the larger Islamist movement in Egypt, Mahmood takes secular liberalism to task for failing to “problematize the universality of the desire...to be free from relations of subordination and, for women, from structures of male domination” (Mahmood 2004: 10). Mahmood reframes this quandary by questioning the pervasive assumptions inherent within liberal conceptions of “agency” that are confined within a “binary model of enacting and subverting norms” (Mahmood 2004: 29) and instead advocates for an articulation of agency as an embodied ethical practice that “defines and makes possible particular ways of relating to people, things, and oneself” (Mahmood 2004: 34).

Mahmood’s ethnographic research weaves in fieldwork conducted over two years, from 1995 to 1997, in three mosques in Cairo, as she follows a select group of Salafi Muslim women in their ritual lives within the women’s mosque movement. But because Mahmood’s ethnographic research follows only a select group of women, and rarely does so outside of this ritual sphere, this means that her conception of agency within and between different social worlds has its limitations. We get very little sense of the extent to which the moral and ethical dispositions cultivated by these women in the ritual sphere and context are congruous with their behavior in other contexts, as well as the extent to which these moral selves endure over time.

In addition, while Mahmood’s argument about the agentic quality of women of the mosque movement is worthwhile, her analysis of da’wa and the mosque movement is quite static and ahistorical. Mahmood theorizes da’wa as a “pedagogy of persuasion,” but it can also be understood as a form of conversion, particularly in the larger context of the movement’s strategic goals. It is the absence of this critical reading of the ways in which the piety movement is intertwined within larger institutional frameworks that allows Mahmood to define the women’s piety movement as a purely ethical project of personal cultivation while ignoring its politically prescriptivist elements. How would her analysis change if we conceptualize da’wa as a mode of politics that is not only an ethical act directed inward as a physical embodiment of spirituality (as she argues) but also outwards, towards a network of other bodies?

Lastly, Mahmood’s portrayals of the women she interviews read more as portraits of “radical alterity” that counterpose their praxis to that of the Western liberal subject. This ideologizing of the “pious Salafi woman” lends itself to a counterposing of western liberal feminism to an Islamic piety movement that, according to Mahmood herself, is uninterested in challenging patriarchal forms of oppression. But this is a false binary, particularly in a country with a flourishing leftist feminist community that has actively struggled against imperialism, fundamentalism, gender-based violence, and more. Despite, in many ways, aiming to challenge this binary, Mahmood’s Politics of Piety in many ways fails to leave us with the tools to truly do so.

[Mitt.ayd · Rating 2 out of 5]

good theory, awful ethnography. S. Mahmood wants to have a chat with Judith Butler, Jennifer Nedelsky and Joan Wallace Scott and tell them how wrong they are. Cool, there is nothing wrong with that. However, portraying your informants as nothing but morally overdetermined, timeless, faceless Muslim subjects who help you to score against some others is a pretty boring thing. Meaning: textual and political priorities should be reviewed here, maybe change their places. And there is a lack of context here: these women's momentous conversion to Islam, and Islam as a discourse of moral selves, have to be contextualized. Meaning: politics, post-colonial developmentalism, rise and fall of Nasserism, capitalism...you name it.

Another thing: since she interviewed with her informants in mosques (except some chat in a bus), it is pretty clear that her informants will talk about nothing but Islam there (see the whole literature on space in Anthropology). And the conclusion: their agency cannot be limited to or understood with I. Berlin's notions of positive and negative liberties, but whose can be? And secondly, can we hear some more about Muslim subjects (the way authoritative texts are compiled, the politics within these texts, the politics of historical reception and interpretations etc.) beyond this mediocre conclusion?

[M]

fascinating interrogation of subjectivity. particularly interesting treatment of the relationship that western anthropologists have with the concept of personal agency as it relates to the feminist subject and the trend of ostensibly renouncing agency among Islamic women in Egypt and the Middle East. also some fun bits on embodiment through ritual practice.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

while i’ve read parts of it before, this was my first time reading this all the way through and i loved it so much. the insistence on situating an analysis of agency, resistance, and subversion in a geographical and historical context still feels so prescient in todays liberal political projects.

[hajrah ♡]

i'm learning how to read for grad school!! more on this book later (maybe, someday)

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

It promises to be an ethnography and it's quite dissapointing as that, spending very little time on pure anthropological ethnographic content (which is nevertheless the most interesting part of the book) instead opting to spend copious amounts of time on analyzing various theories about feminism and piety movements in Egypt, which is both unnecessarily verbose javascript:{}(to the point of pretentiousness) and uninteresting. In the end the main argument here seems to be, "it's more complicated than some people think, so you should know it's more complicated," which doesn't really amount to much

[Melodie Roschman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Smug, pretentious, and so impressed with its own jargon that reading it was insufferable. There’s very little field work here; cut away all the self-satisfied masturbatory theorizing and the book could he summed up in a few paragraphs.

[Winn · Rating 3 out of 5]

fascinating topic, wonderful research. drug on a bit.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

read for class - very interesting, but don't agree with the dismissal of Judith Butler's concept of gender as a performance even within the context Mahmood outlines.

[Sara Hosseini · Rating 2 out of 5]

نمی‌دونم واقعاً زن ایرانی زخم‌خورده از مذهب چطوری باید با استدلال‌های چنین متونی کنار بیاد (به‌ویژه صبا محمود و طلال اسد). نتونست قانعم کنه این کتاب.

[Narges Anzali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never encountered a book that I so wish I had been able to read earlier in life, though I probably would not have understood it even if I had. Saba Mahmood's thoughtful analysis of the Egyptian Islamic Revival Movement is a class act in anthropology, and one of the few anthropological reports which give me hope for the future of the field. In reading the book, I found her eloquently explaining to me what I had so often missed about my own parents or about Islam in general---the sources of the arguments that I just couldn't quite understand.

Hijab & modesty, especially as an Iranian woman, is a subject that quite often disturbs. It causes a reflexive reaction similar to the knee being tapped at a doctors appointment. Saba Mahmood's analysis might have saved me some words in all those arguments with my parents about the nature of a feminist politic that purposefully views the formation of the self as an individual act towards autonomy, something that is patently untrue in most Islamic countries. Indeed, she points out a key distinction: "Liberalism's unique contribution is to link the notion of self-realization with individual autonomy, wherein the process of realizing oneself is equated with the ability to realize the desires of one's 'true will.'" I am American enough to recognize this thought in myself---that I have participated mainly in a feminism which equates the true will of women as a challenge to a dominant social order, and therefore centers resistance.

What, then, seems to be the mode through which Muslim women make decisions? Through a series of complicated philosophical pivots that are worth following, Mahmood suggests that 'tradition' in this world is not something which justifies current practices but a complicated ground through which the self is understood. This 'discursive formation' is not separate from the conditions that formed the self---rather, it demands that the conditions be fully realized as a set of actions which then are capable of changing the self. In this mindset, then, hijab is a realization of haya which actually internalizes modesty, rather than manifesting as a result of it. I am, it seems, Middle Eastern enough here to recognize parts of my personal philosophy which I have struggled to verbalize, and perhaps was not even aware were different from those around me---as Mahmood states: "What we have here is a notion of human agency, defined in terms of individual responsibility...this account privileges...a conception of individual ethics whereby each person is responsible for their own actions."

But wouldn't that be the ultimate manifestation of individualism? Not necessarily, because as she elegantly puts it, individualism presumes a struggle of the internal 'authentic' individual against their formative condition, rather than an imperative towards the formation of the self through action---rather, the self is something which exists and is immutable. And it is clear that this alternative view of the self does bring these women into conflict with established norms---not necessarily because of a desire to not wear the hijab, but rather struggle with their less pious husbands and with the religious establishment in order to become more involved with Islam.

This is where I take a couple of issues with the rest of her analysis. The main proposition of her book is to critique the West's critiques of Islam. There's no doubt that she achieves this quite fantastically. But there are several unanswered questions about feminism that seem to linger even in the conclusion. They're the same questions that any total subjectivity poses---can any movement be truly global? Are the positive changes of liberal efforts to be dismissed? Her ability to answer these questions are obviously limited by the narrow scope of her research. Islam is very different in Egypt than in Jordan than in Afghanistan than in Indonesia. Probably, the answer to these questions is to be found within these communities. Because of that, this book becomes a successful one; Mahmood aims to critique the critiquer, not the subject. Therefore, the critique of the subject must come, presumably, from the subject itself, with a full-bodied knowledge of their history and their aims. We cannot claim other people's freedom, no matter how often both conservatism and liberalism compel us to try.

[Raheleh Abbasinejad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Desire to resist freedom?!

In Politics of Piety, Saba Mahmood seeks to confront the liberal preoccupations about and around the representation and understanding of Muslim women as passive victims in the patriarchal Muslim societies, by discussing the “female pious subjects” who participate in the piety movements in Cairo in late 20s. According to Mahmood, these subjects “occupy an uncomfortable space in the Feminist Scholarship” and bring the liberal-secular feminist prescriptive projects about gender inequality in Muslim societies into question (4). She analyzes the taken-for-granted conceptions of self, the universality of desire, aspirations, and motivations in relation to politics, ethics, the notions of individual autonomy, and freedom as a natural ideal, trying to propose an alternative understanding of agency that goes beyond the binary of subordination/resistance. She does that by uncoupling the notion of agency from the goals of progressive politics (14). Like Butler, she does challenge and question “the subject” and “the category of women” in Feminist scholarship, however, unlike Butler she argues that “agential capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabit norms” (14-15). Butler maintains that “the iterability of performativity is a theory of agency,” and that “agency is grounded in the essential openness of each iteration and the possibility that it may fail or be appropriated or re-signified for purposes other than the consolidation of the norms.” Thus, for her, in “each re-enactment/restatement of social formation that can fail, there is also a possibility of its undoing” (19). Mahmood, on the other hand, argues that Butler’s concept of agency is developed primarily in contexts where norms are thrown into question or are subject to resignification,” while Mahmood suggests what if there are different modalities of agency in which norms are not only consolidated and/or subverted but also performed, inhabited, aspired to, reached for, and experienced in variety ways” (22). Mahmood responds to and engage with the debate about moral agency, and she wants to distance from glorifying the instances of female resistance, but also want to understand why women join these movements, and she maintains that if one wants to understand this form of ethical life (i.e. being a good Muslim woman) and the form of agency they entail, they must explain their life choices within their own terms and within the historically and culturally specifics that form the subject (i.e. cultural and religious traditions).
Supporting her arguments, Mahmood uses a number of philosophical approaches to and theories about ethical self-formation and ethical conduct, especially from Aristotle, Foucault, and Kant, to highlight the process that makes one’s virtues, and the relationship between habits, the specificity of bodily and corporeal practices, outward practices, and the impacts and influences they have on each other and the type of ethical agent and the embodied subject they form and choices they led to (27). In this regard, she defines ethics as “practices, techniques, and discourses, through which a subject transforms herself into the willing subject of a particular moral discourse” (28). Mahmood challenges the Kantian understanding of ethics that emphasizes the role of reason and residing the responsibility in an individual rather than the culture, which is fundamental to the view of liberal thought, and emphasizes on the outward behavior rather than reason, ethical self-formation and cultivating the virtuous self. Consequently, she shows how this piety movement underscores “the outward markers” of religiosity, rituals, dress, and so forth, to become pious person, and how they do not see them as constraints of their individual freedom, but “as the potentialities through which the self is realized, to develop individual actions, capacities, and skills for living a pious life, and this is the ethical formation. For instance, veiling, for them, is a bodily act, and a way of both expressing and acquiring modesty or disciplining the body of the right attitude.

[Roger Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent feminist account of piety among women in the mosque movement in Cairo. A harmonious balance of rigorous theory and ethnographic research. I loved it, and its arguments remain crucial for understanding liberalism's intimate relationship with empire.

[Lilith · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.68 stars, to be exact!

[aliyah overturf · Rating 3 out of 5]

this reading feels very relevant and i’m excited to get into even more feminist theory work!

[Vanessa Dib]

“Middle Eastern Feminisms” by Vanessa Dib

[anulka · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful book that became the inspiration behind my masters thesis <3

[Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think Politics of Piety must be read with the constant reminder that it was published in 2004, in the United States, at the height of the Bush administration's War on Terror. It was intended to, and I believe successfully did, make a critical intervention in the liberal and feminist theory of that era, and I think Mahmood's undoubtedly superb theorizing is an achievement that must be read this light. Politics of Piety explicitly engages with and critiques a frankly amazing range of political and social theorists, ranging from Aristotle, to MacIntyre, to Foucault, to Butler, to Kant, to Taylor... the full list of theorists is much too extensive to list at the top of my head. The point I am trying to make here is that if I were to try and imagine myself as a white, liberal, American feminist in 2004, who had supported the War on Terror because I genuinely believed that women who were veiled needed liberation, I can see how this would have been an incredibly powerful and polemical read, because Mahmood unabashedly unveiled all the problems with the fundamental assumptions and theoretical frameworks underlying the white liberal feminist disposition.

But if Mahmood's greatest success is in making a critical theoretical intervention at the moment of 2004, the greatest problem with Politics of Piety is that all this rich theoretical heavy-lifting gets in the way of the ethnography, a problem that many other reviewers and anthropologists have pointed out. Ethnographic vignettes in Politics primarily serve as points to jump off into extensive and rich theoretical discussions, but the consequence of treating ethnography this way is that I never quite got the sense that Mahmood provided enough empiric detail for some of her most fundamental claims about the mosque movement to feel persuasive. For instance, Mahmood keeps telling us that the whole point of the da'wa is for piety practices to bleed into the everyday. I believe she provides us with a couple of interviews or conversations in which her interlocutors tell her how they understand this, but I don't think there is any account in the book of how this lived life actually looks like, beyond these verbal accounts, which, crucially, took place mostly in contexts when her interlocutors were already engaged in practices associate with the da'wa. As someone who was very excited by the prospect that some of these claims which she made in the opening chapters would be substantiated, it was deeply disappointing and frustrating to finish the book and find that missing. Mahmood repeatedly tells us that her experience doing fieldwork forced her to question her own disposition and feelings of repugnance - but what exactly was this "ethnographic moment"? How did it unfold? How did it come about? She mentions in one of the starting chapters that da'wa lessons held in a mosque based in a poorer, working class area of Cairo were these incredibly lively and boisterous sessions where women would ask the daiyat all kinds of questions, including ones about issues like incest: how did these questions come about? Why were they being asked? These questions are important because they demonstrate that actually, Mahmood's own ethnographic record suggests that her interlocutors aren't these fully convinced and fully determined women / robots who single-mindedly pursue their projects of piety. The da'wa movement is fascinating precisely because of the way it challenges people to live out piety projects in the midst of, to quote Das, the "thrown-ness" of everyday life. But Mahmood sadly forsakes the most interesting and fascinating part - how her interlocutors actually navigate this "thrown-ness" - for the kind of theoretical clarity that her book excels at.

I think a lot of my disappointment with the book comes from the sense that it could have easily been a much better ethnography. I keep thinking how great it would be if Politics of Piety were the first half - the theoretical half - of a full ethnography. But sadly all this good theoretical work which could have built up to an absolute wonderful ethnography doesn't build up to anything else other than a magnificent theoretical intervention - which is really fine and important, in and of itself, but really isn't good enough for anthropology / ethnography.

[Edith · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting ethnographic study on the women's piety movement in Egypt, and analysis of how prevalent political notions such as "agency" (which often shows in up discussions of feminist politics) need to be revisited in light of examples where the actors do not seek to subvert a patriarchal norm.

There is also an examination of the process of religious pedagogy that the movement emphasized (the practise of actions to cultivate personal piety - ie. prayer, veiling, cultivation of virtues, participation in da'wa), and the meaning of the acts to the women themselves - to look at the process of subject formation.

Finally Mahmood's work also question whether the prescriptive needs of secular-liberal academic fields such as feminist politics (ie. needs to advance a specific agenda) sometimes affect their ability to correctly assess cases. At worst, these fields unwittingly aid in the agendas of imperialist projects. "Consider how the Feminist Majority's international campaign against the Taliban regime was an essential element in the Bush administration's attempt to establish legitimacy for the bombing of Afghanistan - aptly called 'Operation Enduring Freedom'. It was the burka-clad body of the Afghan woman - and *not* the destruction wrought by twenty years of war funded by the United States through one of the largest covert operations in American history - that served as the primary referent in the Feminist Majority's vast mobilization against the Taliban regime (and later the Bush administration's war)."

[Ashlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mahmood kept my brain moving and alive through out the book. I have to confess that I did not read the book in its entirety, but delved into the parts more interesting to me. She did a good job giving the reader plenty of information and discription to picture themselves as a traditional passive and submissive female in the muslim world. Instead of women being forced into doing religious acts/living they created a paradigm shift to believe it is their choice to live the way they are living. This is progression. However, I believe that a more active form of choice is still needed (in their life and in ours as Americans). I respect these women for the steps they are taking, but paradigm shift or not, they are still living in oppression. We still have a long way to go.

[Nadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting approach to feminist discourse and ethnocentric ideals that run throughout feminist anthropology. Mahmood writes wonderfully about how we may shift our understanding of female agency in Islamic society, and the ways in which our views on certain practices, such as veiling, need to be re-worked.

Although I did enjoy this ethnography and the many insights it offers, I did find it difficult to fully engage with due to the complex theory discussed throughout. Further study of the book is definitely required to fully grasp the many ideas Mahmood put forward.

[Chanatip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety offers a rigorous investigation of Western feminist politics and secular-liberal political imaginations through her ethnographic account of women’s mosque movement which is a part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt (2). Unlike other feminist ethnographers of non-liberal societies, she explicitly says that her project does not aim to “recuperat[e] latent liberatory potentials so as to make the movement more palatable to liberal sensibilities” (5). Rather, she aims to provide a critical reflection of the mainstream use of the concept “human agency” as acts of resistance, transgression, and violation of the norms (5). Sketching out a brief intellectual historical timeline of modern anthropology, she argues that there has been an obsession with identifying moments of resistance which she finds problematic. This is because this project presupposes the “universality of desire” that considers the liberal notion of freedom as an innate human desire universalizable (10).

Invoking poststructuralist scholarships, especially that of Judith Butler, she explicates how the romanticized concept of agency as resistance that assumes a human ability to self-liberate beyond the social norm cannot happen. Butler’s significant intervention into this idea comes from her denying that a pre-discursive, pre-gendered/sexed, therefore pre-representational body exists (18). Rather, a process of self-fashioning is fundamentally discursive and our identities constitute what is intelligible, speakable, and iterable in the realm of human linguistics (19). The binary juxtaposition of the internal and external is therefore deconstructed, invalidating the political teleology that dictates an emancipatory project which aims to free individual form the social.

Despite her agreement with Butler’s rejection of the humanist concept of agency, Mahmood insists that Butler still falls into the binary categorization of human actions in society as compliance and resistance. Rather, she points to the importance of diversifying our understanding of actions outside such a narrow frame by suggesting Foucault’s theory of ethical formation (29). For Foucault, agency is not simply the act of resistance, but a historically and culturally determined capacity to undertake moral actions. In other words, it is a capacity to act which necessitates a subject’s entrance into the social norms to make their actions not only intelligible but felicitous (29-30). In her later chapters, she lays out the way different agents in the Islamic Revival produce discourses under which women in the mosque movement appropriate, inhabit, and at times, contest.

In the last chapter, Mahmood provides two important stories during her fieldwork: (1.) the story of Nadia who gave advice to her friend who was approached by a married man and asked to marry him, and (2.) the story of Abir who had an impious husband. In both stories, especially in Abir’s, there are aspects that liberal feminists may consider a contestation of patriarchal norms; for instance, her defiance against her husband’s authority and persistence to continue her religious training in da’wa. However, if we look closely into the discursive forms through which her actions unfold, Mahmood argues that the careful evaluation and management of her engagement with her husband, Jamal, strictly operated under the normative logic of Islam, yet evades its exact teleology because of her risk-taking in standing up against her husband (180). The liberal-secular binary of “compliance versus resistance” is therefore inadequate to capture this particular form of sociality (180). Importantly, Mahmood also notes that this is not to create, once again, a reifiable “folk categories” but to criticize the dominant paradigm of analysis.

Reading Politics of Piety was indeed an uncomfortable experience for me like Mahmood predicts. However, after taking a second, close look at her work, I have started to appreciate a number of her brilliant remarks and critiques against our familiar way of thinking. The deconstruction of the binary “compliance versus resistance” and a turn to different modalities of agency are definitely one of the most compelling arguments of her book. While she feels herself not in the place to address a prescriptive political project for women in Cairo, she actually says that she does not deny, or think badly of, the possibility of normative disruption or resistance; she just wants Western academics to not think of it as the only plausible mode of agency. After having read Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities and subsequently revised this book, I find it even more necessary to be reflective about our “repugnance” against non-liberal politics (37). Her book, unpalatable as it is, introduces us to the unexpected arrival of foreigners, aliens, and strangers and urges Western feminist movements to take a step back from their emancipatory projects and re-evaluate our sense of self-sufficiency as both Gandhi, and perhaps Mahmood, may suggest.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A PAKISTANI SCHOLAR LOOKS AT WOMEN’S ISSUES IN EGYPTIAN DIALOGUES

Saba Mahmood (1962-2018; she died of pancreatic cancer) was professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley; she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Institute for South Asia Studies.

She wrote in the Preface to this 2005 book, “Even though this book is about Islamist politics in Egypt, its genesis owes to a set of puzzles I inherited from my involvement in progressive left politics in Pakistan, the country of my birth. By the time my generation of Pakistanis came to political consciousness… there was … still a sense among the feminist left in Pakistan that some form of critical Marxism, combined with a judicious stance toward issues of gender inequality, could provide a means of thinking through our predicament and organizing our pragmatic efforts at changing the situation in which we lived… This sense of stability and purpose was slowly eroded for a number of us in Pakistan for reasons … [such as] the solidification of the military dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq… who, while using Islam to buttress his brutal hold on power, turned Pakistan into a frontline state for the United States’s proxy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan… A second development … started with the eruption of the Iranian revolution in 1979, an event that confounded our expectations of the role Islam could play in a situation of revolutionary change and, at the same time, seemed to extinguish the fragile hope that secular leftist politics represented in the region.” (Pg. ix-x)

She continues, “The reason progressive leftists like myself have such difficulty recognizing these aspects of Islamic revival movements, I think, owes in part to our profound dis-ease with the appearance of religion outside the private space of individualized belief… the slightest eruption of religion into the public domain is frequently experienced as a dangerous affront, one that threatens to subject us to a normative morality dictated by mullahs and priests… I want to communicate my profound sense of dissatisfaction … about my ability... to understand how it is that the language of Islam has come to apprehend the aspirations of so many people around the Muslim world.” (Pg. xi) She adds, “this book focuses on the Islamist movement in Egypt… I do not think I could ever have been able to see what I was made to see during the course of my fieldwork in Egypt had I remained within the familiar grounds of Pakistan.” (Pg. xii)

She begins the first chapter with the statement, “Over the last two decades, a key question has occupied many feminist theorists: how should issues of theoretical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and the politics of any feminist project?... questions regarding religious difference have remained relatively unexplored. The vexing relationship between feminism and religion is perhaps more manifest in discussion of Islam.” (Pg. 1)

She explains, “In this book I will explore some of the conceptual challenges that women’s involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular, and to secular-liberal thought in general, through an ethnographic account of an urban women’s mosque movement that is part of the later Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt. For two years, in conducted fieldwork with a movement in which women from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds provided lessons to one another that focused on the teaching and studying of Islamic scriptures, social practices, and forms of bodily comportment considered germane to the cultivation of the ideal virtuous self. The burgeoning of this movement marks the first time in Egyptian history that such a large number of women have held public meetings in mosques to teach one another Islamic doctrine, thereby altering the historically male-centered character of mosques as well as Islamic pedagogy.

“At the same time, women’s religious participation within such public arenas of Islamic pedagogy is critically structured by, and serves to uphold, a discursive tradition that regards subordination to a transcendent will (and thus, in many instances, to male authority) as its coveted goal… This sensibility … [is] manifest in … a dramatic increase in attendance at mosques by both women and men, and in marked displays of religious sociability. Examples of the latter include the adoption of the veil (hijab), a brisk consumption and production of religious media and literature, and a growing circle of intellectuals who write and comment upon contemporary affairs in the popular press from a self-described Islamic point of view.” (Pg. 2-3)

Later, she adds, “the mosque movement is unique in the extraordinary degree of pedagogical emphasis it places on outward markers of religiosity---ritual practices, styles of comporting oneself, dress, and so on. The participants in the mosque movement regard these practices as the necessary and ineluctable means for realizing the form of religiosity they are cultivating… The mosque lessons are one important space where training in this kind of ascetic practice is acquired… women learn to analyze the movements of the body and soul in order to establish coordination between inner states… and outer conduct… The teleological model that the mosque participants seek to realize in their lives is predicated on the exemplary conduct of the Prophet and his Companions.” (Pg. 31)

She observes, “The piety activists seek to imbue each of the various spheres of contemporary life with a regulative sensibility that takes its cue from the Islamic theological corpus rather than from modern secular ethics… the mosque movement’s goal is to introduce a common set of shared norms or standards by which one is to judge one’s own conduct, whether in the context of employment, education, domestic life, or other social activities… Insofar as this strategy makes Islamic ethics central to the process of acquiring different kinds of knowledge and skills, it infuses the current educational institutions with a sensibility that is potentially transformative.” (Pg. 48)

She acknowledges, “women, while encouraged to carry out da’wa [outreach] among other women, are not allowed to do so among men… The reasoning behind these restrictions is… the general belief that since the Quran makes men the guardians of women, the latter should not serve in significant positions of leadership over men. Second is the prevailing notion that a woman’s voice can nullify an act of worship because it is capable of provoking sexual feelings in men---though it must be noted that this view is not shared across all Muslim societies, and in places like Indonesia some of the most popular and respected Quranic reciters are women… Women’s entry into the field of da’wa… has also been facilitated by conditions of higher literacy and increased social mobility afforded to women in postcolonial Egypt.” (Pg. 65-66)

She recounts, “Women’s increasing familiarity and engagements with canonical sources---such as hadith commentaries---tends to push forms of juristic reasoning to address new … points of concern that had hitherto been outside the purview of scholarly debates. The mosque participants often encounter practical problems when trying to realize an ethical life based on orthodox readings of Islamic scriptures. For example, while a majority of the participants within the piety movement argue that women and men should abide by strict protocols of sex segregation, most working women and students find it impossible to follow this edict.” (Pg. 99)

She states, ‘Tradition, viewed in this way, is not a set of symbols and idioms that justify present practices, neither is it an unchanging set of cultural prescriptions that stand in contrast to what is changing, contemporary, or modern. Nor is it a historically fixed social structure. Rather, the past is the very ground through which the subjectivity and self-understanding of a tradition’s adherents are constituted… The central question privilege by such an understanding of tradition is: how the present made intelligible through a set of historically sedimented practices and forms of reasoning that are learned and communicated through processes of pedagogy, training, and argumentation.” (Pg 115-116)

She summarizes, “my analysis of the overall aims of the mosque movement shows that challenging secular-liberal norms---whether of sociability or governance---remains central to the movement’s self-understanding… [But] it would be a mistake to analyze the complexity of this movement through the lens of resistance insomuch as such a reading flattens out an entire dimension of the force this movement commands and the transformations it has spawned within the social and political fields.” (Pg. 175)

She notes, “When viewed from a feminist perspective, the choices open to the mosque participants appear quite limited. The constraining nature of these alternatives notwithstanding, I would argue that they nonetheless represent forms of reasoning that must be explored on their own terms if one is to understand the structuring conditions of this form of ethical life and the forms of agency they entail.” (Pg. 187)

She acknowledges, “The veil, more than any other Islamic practice, has become the symbol and evidence of the violence Islam has inflicted upon women… I am often struck by my audience’s lack of curiosity about what else the veil might perform in the world beyond its violation of women… In understand the political demand that feminism imposes to exercise vigilance against cultural argument that seem to authorize practices that underwrite women’s oppression. I would submit, however, that our analytical explorations should not be reduced to the requirements of political judgment… By allowing theoretical inquiry some immunity from the requirements of strategic political action, we leave open the possibility that the task of thinking may proceed in directions not dictated by the logic and pace of immediate political events.” (Pg. 195-196)

This book will be of great interest to those studying women’s issues and Islam.

[Fatima Sarder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it alright to scrutinize Islam and all it entails through the lenses of Eurocentric philosophy with it's dominant themes of liberalism?

The Feminist agenda, it seems, has shifted from it's original goal of women upliftment and empowerment to a women versus men paradigm.

Of course, each one of us sees the world differently and this book is one such way. There are aspects I do not agree with and aspects worth criticizing but that is besides the point: the author provides a poignant account of Egypt's piety movement and related this movement from several points of views, notably the differences in attitudes and styles of preaching in low-income to middle and high-income social classes.

This movement is also exhaustively compared with western philosophical models and the author questions why women, with a subjugate status in Islam, would want to willingly conform to such a religion. Subjugate it may seem to the liberal minded but the question remains; in this war of women vs. men, the women are still losing in new and inventive ways.

Reading the Politics of Piety required a dictionary, lots of furrowed eyebrows, re-reading paragraphs, some frustration and soul-searching. I have come to appreciate the manner in which I approach prayer, gained new understanding of respect and virtuous fear of God and perceived how preaching in Islam appeals to people from different socio-economic backgrounds.

It is heartening to know about the subtleties and struggles of women in Islam; it's like a universal language.

[Zainab Bint Younus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Politics of Piety is perhaps one of the best #IslamAndWomenReads academic books I've come across, for its sheer integrity alone.

In her fieldwork with Egyptian women involved in the religious project, Saba Mahmood does what I have seen no other self-professed feminist academic do: interrogate her own assumptions, and the assumptions of secular feminism, of what is "good" and "right" for women, in the name of women's rights.

Her work explores what is, essentially, women in da'wah spaces - from the rural to the urban, the political and the apolitical (which is never true apolitical).

From Islamic pedagogy in women's spaces to women like Zaynab al-Ghazali, whose affiliation with the Ikhwan rendered her a political figure, to the ways that Muslim women in Egypt sought to embody piety in private and public spaces, this book is a brilliant examination of the complex realities of "Islamist" women... and more importantly, through their stories being told, serve as a thorough critique to feminist and secular-liberal attitudes held about Muslim women and religion.

Honestly, I found myself unexpectedly immersed in the discussions around da'wah methodology - something very relevant to anyone, male or female, involved in community work or Islamic teaching.

This book is a necessary read for anyone who wants to harp on about Islam and women/ feminism/ Muslim women. Mahmood's brutal honesty with herself, and the academy's bias against "Islamist women," is what makes this book especially valuable for anyone who engages with #IslamAndWomen discourse.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saba Mahmood’s ethnographic study of the women’s mosque movement in Egypt challenges feminist theory by asking if its goals can appropriately be applied universally. She notes that feminists tend to privilege resistance narratives. What goes unsaid is that feminists often fail to understand women who do not resist patriarchy. According to Leila Ahmed, feminism was used as a tool of colonialism and to assert European superiority. In that context, it makes sense the Arab Muslims might resist feminist narratives.

I loved the ethnographic descriptions of the participants of the mosque movement. I loved the sophisticated engagement the women demonstrated with Islamic texts. I love how they embody virtue through their acts of piety. I love their ideal that by acting pious, they become pious. I loved that these women tell us they are submitting to God and that they value Islam. I love that Ahmed is respectful of their agency and autonomy and allows them to speak on their own accord.

Mahmood’s discussion of the theory underpinning her research is very complex and challenging. I needed more time to dig into it than I had. If you do read this, you will need to look up terms, unless you are deeply grounded in philosophy, feminist theory, and Foucault.

But yes, you should read this.

[Terese · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, a very readable and interesting study, challenging in particular liberal notions of agency and feminist tendencies to wed agency to a false binary of subordination/resistance by demonstrating a variant of modalities of agency and different perceptions of performativity. Most importantly there is no homogenization or uniformity in the presentation of the women of, and without, the women's mosque movement. The ethnographic vignettes are brief but colorful and well presented to make a clear and concise point.

I wish there was a similar but more recent study to consult as well (this was performed during 1995-97).

I read an online version and I the font style made reading unnecessarily dense and references cumbersome and interruptive of textual flow. There was also a feeling of repetition which got a bit tiresome. I would recommend a printed version of this book and am contemplating buying one myself in order to further engage with her understandings of Aristotelian habitus and ethics, as well as her differentation of performance in her study and against Judith Butlers.

All in all, interesting and very worthwhile to engage with.