Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject [Paperback]

Saba Mahmood (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0691086958 | ISBN-13: 978-0691086958 | Publication Date: October 25, 2005 | Edition: Second Revised

Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal principles by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Mahmood's book is a tour de force that provides an alternative prism through which we may understand the women's mosque movement in Egypt. -- thia Nelson,"Middle East Journal

The book is of great importance regarding the position of women within the Muslim piety movement in Egypt. It is of interest for those dealing with Islamic revival and women issues not only in Egypt or the Middle East and North Africa but also to those dealing with the role of religion in life and gender issues worldwide. -- Rachel Simon, Ph.D., Digest of Middle East Studies

From the Inside Flap

"This very timely book opens doors into spaces of Islamic piety that shatter the stereotypes which dominate thinking in the West. Mahmood carefully unpacks the distortions that common modes of liberalism and feminism impose on the Muslim world. She combines richness of description with theoretical sophistication to provide insight into the struggle of some Muslim women to live their faith, often in the face of not only Western liberal influences but also Arab nationalism and political Islamism. The reader is forced to face dilemmas that cannot be easily resolved. This is social science at its most illuminating.."--Charles Taylor, Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy, Northwestern University, author of Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity

"This brilliant study of women in the contemporary mosque movement in Egypt is a provocative challenge to secular feminists and a testament to what anthropology can still offer--through its insistence on serious listening to other worlds--to critical social theory. No feminist theorist or anthropologist of modernity will be able to think the same way about liberalism, agency, or religion after reading this book. I hope that Mahmood's incisive analysis of the Islamic movement will also finally put an end to the banalities that currently masquerade as knowledge about this meaningful social movement."--Lila Abu-Lughod, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University, author of Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

"My enthusiasm for this brave and stunning book is unqualified, and I learned something on every page. Politics of Piety will reorient the way in which cultural theorists regard religious practice and the account of moral agency. It will be of widespread interest not only to anthropologists of various persuasions but also to scholars of Middle East studies, to moral philosophers, to religious studies scholars and lay readers, and to theorists of embodiment across the disciplines."--Judith Butler, Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, author of Bodies That Matter

"Mahmood's keenly anticipated and very brave book is a brilliant contribution to the theoretical project for the anthropological study of Islam and to our understanding of Islam in the Middle East, especially as it is practiced by women. There is no question that it is highly significant for all kinds of reasons. The kind of data that the author presents is fresh and relatively unknown in the literature."--Steve Caton, Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies and Social Anthropology, Harvard University, author of Peaks of Yemen I Summon --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 233 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press; Second Revised edition (October 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691086958
• ISBN-13: 978-0691086958
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #68,200 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Politics of Piety, February 18, 2010

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Shelly Lauren "shelly" (New York) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Paperback)

I used this book in my Muslim Societies class last semester as one of three books I wrote a paper on. The book goes into much details about the specifics of Muslim piety and the role it plays on women. This can be a slow read because there are a lot of unfamiliar terms, but Mahmood will define them and explain them in context to her thesis. I highly suggest this book because it will give you an alternate view of Muslim Egyptian women.

12 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Where are the women?, June 26, 2008

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Nora R. Hope "Nora R. Hope" (Philadelphia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Paperback)

Although Mahmoud makes fine arguments about Muslim women and she questions the inevitability/desirability of secularism for all peoples, her pure pleasure in wielding theory outweighs "the stuff" of the book. This reader came away wondering who, other than the author, actually inhabits the book. Certainly there were memorable women whose stories were edited out in favor of discussions about western theoreticians. Mahmood's audience cannot include students; they are mystified. This is a shame because perhaps there is no subject that begs more for good, clear writing by scholars than works about Muslim women.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Radically New Way of Thinking About Feminist Issues in the Arab World, March 7, 2006

By 

Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE (Paris, France) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Paperback)

Radical feminists, of the post-structuralist or deconstructionist blend, have accustomed us to put into question notions that have long been a constitutive part of the liberal/progressive agenda and to critically reexamine well-established categories such as gender, class or race. It should therefore come as no surprise if Saba Mahmood, an anthropologist trained in the intellectual hotbed of UC Berkeley, provides a description of the Muslim world that goes against the grain of conventional wisdom and shatters many certainties held dear by feminists and liberals alike.

Mahmood's Politics of Piety is an ethnographic account of the Islamic revival in Egypt, viewed from the perspective of women of different walks of life who regularly attend religious lessons delivered by female preachers in mosques of Cairo. Teachings focus on the study of Islamic scriptures, but also address the social norms, personal orientations and bodily comportments deemed necessary to cultivate a pious and virtuous life.

This is the first time in Egyptian history that such a large number of women have mobilized to hold public meetings in mosques to teach each other Islamic doctrine, thereby altering the historically male-centered character of mosques as well as Islamic pedagogy. On the other hand, the women's mosque movement emphasizes conducts and virtues that are traditionally associated with feminine passivity and submissiveness, such as shyness, modesty, perseverance and humility (although these virtues have to be interpreted in an Islamic context).

Traditional feminist interpretations would tend to analyze this mosque movement through the normative framework of women's autonomy and emancipation, either to decry its participants' submission to oppressive norms or to detect strategies of resistance and reinterpretation that allow these women to articulate a distinctively female voice and agenda. Both interpretations would miss the point. They posit that women's self-realization and autonomy can only be asserted in opposition to prevailing social norms and institutions, whereas the women described by Mahmood draw their very raison d'etre and sense of identity from their submission to God's commands and their emulation of a virtuous self.

To illustrate this point, Mahmood takes the case of the Islamic veil, which has been the object of numerous studies. Although many explanations have been provided for its resurgence in modern Egypt, identifying the veil as a symbol of resistance to the hegemony of Western values or as a convenient device to navigate through urban space, few attention has been devoted to ideas of female modesty or piety as Islamic virtues, although it is in these terms that many women who decide to wear the veil frame their decision. According to their own words, the veil is not something that could be separated from the pious virtues of modesty and submission, as if one could oppose an "inner" self from its public display. Instead, bodily acts such as wearing the veil or conducting oneself modestly in the presence of men are both a mean for acquiring these virtues and these virtues themselves. The veil in this sense is the expression of the process of both being and becoming a certain kind of a person, and not the manifestation of a preformed self.

Mahmood's consideration for her informants' own words and justifications is not motivated by the anthropologist's desire to remain "true" to her subject: rather, the terms and concepts used by the mosque movement "talk back" to the analytical tools used in social science and to the presuppositions of the feminist agenda. She concludes by arguing that "the liberatory goals of feminism should be rethought in light of the fact that the desire for freedom and liberation is a historically situated desire whose motivational force cannot be assumed a priori, but needs to be reconsidered in light of other desires, aspirations, and capacities."