Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

Abstract

WOMEN Politics of Piety: Islamic Revival and Feminist Subject, by Saba Mahmood. Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2004. xvi + 199 pages. Gloss, p. 203. Refs. p. 223. Index p. 233. $55 cloth; $17.95 paper. This book explores the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in Islamist poses feminist theory in particular and secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of urban women's mosque that is part of Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt (p. 2). However, Saba Mahmood promises more than an ethnography based on two years of fieldwork (1995-1997). She embarks on an intellectual journey of selfreflection in which she has come to believe that a certain amount of self-scrutiny and skepticism is essential regarding certainty of own political commitments, when trying understand lives of others who do not necessarily share these commitments (p. xi). By refusing take her own political stance as necessary lens through which analysis proceeds, author opens up possibility that my analysis may come complicate vision of human flourishing that I hold most dear and which has provided bedrock of personal existence (p. xii). It is necessary, author cautions as she embarks upon her inquiry, not assume that political position we uphold will necessarily be vindicated or provide ground for our theoretical analysis. As readers, we are invited join her in parochializing our assumptions, about constitutive relationship between action and embodiment, resistance and agency, self and authority - that inform most feminist judgments from across a broad range of political spectrum about non-liberal movements such as women's mosque movement (p. 38). It is within that spirit that I have critiqued this book. five chapters are a running argument with and against key analytic concepts in liberal thought as these concepts have come inform various strands of feminist theory through which non-liberal movements, such as women's mosque movement, are analyzed. Through each chapter Mahmood makes her ethnographic talk back normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a is held accountable. The Subject of Freedom illustrates different ways in which activism of mosque challenges liberal conception of politics. Mahmood analyzes conception of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird practices of this non-liberal in order come an understanding of historical projects that animate it. pious subjects of mosque occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded in a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status. Topography of Piety Movement provides a brief sketch of historical development against which contemporary mosque has emerged and critically engages with themes within scholarship of Islamic modernism regarding such movements. We sense broad-based character of women's mosque through author's description and analysis of three of six mosques where she concentrated her fieldwork. Despite differences among mosque groups - ranging from poorest upper-middle income neighborhoods of Cairo - they all shared a concern for increased secularization of Egyptian society and illustrate increasing respect accorded da 'iya preacher/religious teacher (who undertakes da'waliterally call, summons or appeal that in 20th century came be associated with proselytization activity). Women and Da'wa (pp. 64-72) is particularly insightful, as author juxtaposes emergence of secular liberalism with da'wa and concludes that the modernist project of regulation of religious sensibilities, undertaken by a range of postcolonial states (and not simply Muslim states), has elicited in its wake a variety of resistances, responses and challenges. …