Agency and the Virtue of Humility in Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety

Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005, 264 pages, £12.95, ISBN: 0–691–08695–8 (PB)

It has been over two years since Saba Mahmood passed away. She is undoubtedly one of the most eminent ‘post-secular’ scholars in feminist academia who “talked back to liberalism” at a time at a time when the world was increasingly becoming obsessed with ‘illiberal’ representations of Islam (Dutta, 2018). For some inexplicable reason, the fact that she was born and bred in Pakistan instilled a sense of pride in me long before I properly began reading her work. Hence, one of the reasons why I am writing this book review is to honor the legacy and memory of a scholar who has a connection to where I belong, and underscore the gaping absence she has left behind in the larger feminist community.

Another reason why I wish to embark on this book review is to make sense of the critiques that have emerged regarding Saba’s oeuvre, especially from feminist scholars who espouse ‘secular politics’. Generally, there are a lot of reservations among some of Pakistan’s urban feminists (Zia, 2018) regarding “diaspora intellectuals” who make the decision to write about Muslim women, but who are subsequently accused of writing for a Western audience and being out of touch with the lived realities that ‘non-Western’ Muslim women have to experience everyday (Toor, 2012). They allegedly ignore the political implications of gender relations in Muslim contexts, and are somehow considered as ‘outsiders’ in the feminist movements existing within Muslim contexts; they are repeatedly chastised for not being in a position to defend Islamist practices without actually living the harsh realities of patriarchal laws and customs within that context.

In a way, I approached this book just like Saba approached the idea of writing it: from questions I inherited from my involvement in the feminist movement of Pakistan. The fact that Saba never made Pakistan the focus of her research is a telling decision on her part as an anthropologist. It was exactly this decision of deliberate detachment, along with the ongoing feminist debates in Pakistan, that compelled me to delve into her work.

In Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba charts the Egyptian Islamist Revival movement with painstaking nuance and sensitivity. Mahmood’s ethnographic research connects fieldwork conducted from 1995 to 1997 in three mosques within Cairo, as she follows Salafi Muslim women in their ‘pious’ lives within the larger women’s mosque movement.

The book is divided into five chapters enclosed between a preface and epilogue. Saba begins by questioning the premise of “neoliberal processes of subjectivation” (Spanò, 2013) and philosophy in the conceptual construction of ‘agency’ from a post-structuralist lens, and then applies this discussion to her anthropological findings to redefine what agency means for the Muslim women who she observes in Egypt. Much like other ‘Islamic feminists’ (Abu-Lughod, 2002), she criticizes essentialist views and warns against treating Muslim women as “pawns in a grand patriarchal plan” (pg. 1) by assuming their needs and delegitimizing their agency on their behalf. Later on, after charting the Islamic Revival in Cairo and the political obstacles it faces, she proceeds to focus on the unique methods of knowledge production, preaching styles and subjectivities that the women of the movement employ in their understanding and practice of Islamic conduct and ethics.

Saba’s role as a thorough ethnographer is evident in the way she recalls what her female interlocutors in Cairo had to say in their accounts of what the path to salvation in the afterlife meant to them, and how they individually proceed to acquire virtue through bodily discipline. These accounts are meant to transcend a reductive binary of domination/submission or political action/dormancy, as these women perceive their own bodies and sources of knowledge as a representation of their personal and social commitments. It is ultimately Saba’s concern with accountability that allows her to move past her “political certitude” (pg. xii) and distinguish her analysis from her personal politics, which shows that she is able to maintain a sense of ethical detachment from the themes she is exploring.

However, one could say that perhaps Saba Mahmood’s work sometimes falls prey to the same essentialist categories that she is trying to eschew. For instance, her conceptions of piety, ethics and agency are too static and never seem to stem from outside the ritual spheres that the Salafi women inhabit (Jamal, 2008). She has also been criticized for presenting an ahistorical account of da’wa (Bangstad, 2011), without linking the practices of the women to other women in the Egyptian context, particularly the vibrant feminist movement of Egypt (Selim, 2010). While not presenting the endurance of the moral selves of these women in other spaces, perhaps Saba invariably leaves them in a vacuum, which shows that the binary she tried to displace (pg. 190) cannot be dismantled so easily. Another criticism that has been leveled at Mahmood regularly is that she fails to explore the very real and tangible inequalities that Muslim women experience that are not mentioned in this book, which downgrades the work of the feminists who are striving to address these challenges laboriously in Muslim contexts (Selim, 2010).

One dimension that could be explored further by feminist scholars who write about Muslim women in the future is that of the burden of representation we grapple with throughout our lives, regardless of whether we follow a model of piety and adhere to religious conventions or not. I feel that Saba could have complicated her thesis of what it means to represent a ‘Muslim woman’ who is constantly answerable on behalf of the reductive trope of the “Muslim issue” (Braidotti, 2008). She could have done what she asked her readers to do by making a more meaningful attempt to move away from visual images of Islam that are allegedly oppressive, such as the veil/burqa. The way Muslim women ‘practice’ Islam and the hyper-surveillance surrounding this phenomena is a perennial source of contention, and an inescapable part of our reality. Therefore, I feel that Saba’s intense academic focus on Western conceptions of Islam and their harmful manifestations in postcolonial contexts obscures the range of stereotypes and experiences that all kinds of Muslim women have to face in the postcolonial context.

Despite some shortcomings, her book does makes me critically examine my own biases and politics as a ‘secular’ feminist through her questions and searingly self-aware explorations of the movement in Egypt. Saba never shies away from her ethical duty as an anthropologist and researcher, and, through the task thrust upon her (pg. 191), she reminds us of our responsibility as postcolonial feminists to shun liberal explanations of what it means for us to have agency in today’s world. Through her research as well as her personal reflections, she proves that a “virtue of humility” (pg. 6) is key in denouncing coercive modes of power that we sometimes, albeit inadvertently, pay lip service to through our resistance, when we position ourselves as having “a sense of foreknowledge” (pg. 198) against women who do not necessarily agree with our politics, and embark on “rescue missions” to save other Muslim women from oppression (Abu-Lughod, 2002).

In conclusion, the question of the extent to which Politics of Piety is relevant as a ‘feminist’ text may lead readers to think that the book renders Mahmood’s position and motives as a feminist rather ambiguous when she endeavored to write this book. But instead of asking this question, the more important query would be to continuously question Western knowledge production as a means of deflecting the responsibility and consequences of colonialism. We must keep questioning top-down approaches, whether it is by states or feminists, both in Western and local contexts, and complicate the common perception of Muslim women as being oppressed, as we have to recognize the complicity of such perceptions in reifying the larger project of the Empire. Instead, reconstructing what agency means to us would lead to new, and perhaps more incisive, answers regarding the many ways in which we, as Muslim women, negotiate our freedoms and realize our own politics, even if it is through patriarchal bargains. This is hardly a novel problem, since all women are complicit in making individualized choices in today’s world. Ultimately, Saba urges her feminist readers to not placate liberal sensibilities through their feminism by shunning non-liberal movements at the very outset. Saba displays poignant self-awareness in her book in order to hold herself accountable as per her own set of values, not just as an anthropologist who strives to be ethical but also as a feminist who does not take anything at face value.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Articles

1. Abu-Lughod, L. (2002) ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others’, American Anthropologist, 104(3), 783–790.
2. Bangstad, S. (2011) ‘Saba Mahmood and Anthropological Feminism After Virtue’, Theory, Culture & Society, 28(3), pp. 28–54.
3. Braidotti, R. (2008) ‘In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25(6), pp. 1–24.
4. Toor, S. (2012) ‘Imperialist feminism redux’, Dialectical Anthropology 36(3–4):147–60.
5. Vasilaki, R. (2016) ‘The Politics of Postsecular Feminism’, Theory, Culture & Society, 33(2), pp. 103–123.

Books

1. Zia, A. S. (2018) ‘Faith and feminism in Pakistan: Religious agency or secular autonomy?’ Eastbourne ; Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press.

Book Reviews

1. Jamal, A. (2008), review of Saba Mahmood: Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Lara Deeb: An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon, and Azam Torab: Performing Islam: Gender and Ritual in Iran. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 4(3), 121–128.
2. Spanò, M. (2013), review of Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Foucault Studies, №16, pp. 191–196, September 2013

Links

1. Dutta, S. (2018). Remembering Saba Mahmood, a Pioneer in Redefining Ideas of Rights and Freedom. [online] The Wire. Available at: https://thewire.in/gender/remembering-saba-mahmood-a-pioneer-in-redefining-ideas-of-rights-and-freedom [Accessed 23 Dec. 2018].
2. Selim, S. (2010). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. [online] Jadaliyya — جدلية. Available at: http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/23539/Politics-of-Piety-The-Islamic-Revival-and-the-Feminist-Subject [Accessed 23 Dec. 2018].