Politics of Piety, by Saba Mahmood, is an ethnographic account of women’s participation in the Islamic revival movement in Cairo, Egypt. Published in 2005, this book examines the theoretical challenges that women’s involvement in the movement poses to liberal feminism and secular-liberal thought more broadly. Mahmood compellingly argues that, in order to thoughtfully inquire into the practices of pious self-making and discursive pedagogies that are central to the women of the mosque movement, one must question the foundations of the liberal subject. Her work is expansive in its scope and in its contribution to anthropological literature on gender, agency and Islam.
The strength of Mahmood’s work lies in her ability to challenge hegemonic academic discourse, not simply to denounce their importance, but to breadthen the scope of inquiry to include fundamentally different life worlds, subjectivities and “forms of human flourishing” (Mahmood, 2005, p.155) that have otherwise been ignored or reduced. She begins this by excavating the assumptions underlying the liberal subject. The liberal subject is presumed to be universal, Mahmood explains, and to have formed a priori to relations of power, such that the subject has its own autonomous free will that opposes the social norms that surround it. In this way, agency is articulated as resistance to norms and action is confined to a dichotomy of subordination or resistance. Mahmood argues that this mode of analysis dominates much anthropological literature about Muslim women. She fruitfully uses Boddy’s and Abu-Lughod’s work to demonstrate this, whilst still paying tribute to the contributions they have made to feminist scholarship of the Muslim world. Here again, Mahmood demonstrates her strength: she moves beyond academic knowledge production as simply “exercise in denunciation and judgment” (Mahmood, 2005, p.xii), and brings in the work of other authors to push forward her own theories. For example, she discusses how Boddy and Abu-Lughod focus wholly on locating a “feminist consciousness” (Mahmood, 2005, p.8) that exerts itself against male hegemony, without questioning whether such a consciousness exists. In this way, Mahmood challenges the assumption that every Muslim woman seeks to oppose hegemonic norms as a coefficient of her personhood.
Mahmood moves on to reformulate agency in a way that avoids analysing the mosque participants’ actions as simply a passive submission to norms. She draws on Foucault’s analysis of subject formation, wherein the subject’s desires, capacities and modes of being are produced through relations of power. This avenue conceptualises agency as a “modality of action” (Mahmood, 2005, p.157) which includes how norms are “performed, inhabited and experienced” (Mahmood, 2005, p.22). With this analytical foundation, Mahmood is then able to delve into the complex ways in which members of the da’wa cultivate a pious and embodied subjectivity through repeated actions, such as prayer. This book not only provides a rich account of a specific ethnographic concept, but also channels its analysis to reflect upon the discipline of anthropology, its scholarship on Islam and liberal feminism, in broader terms.
Whilst Politics of Piety is often considered a seminal work (Hamdy, 2008), it has also been faulted by academics within the discipline for its limited scope. Schielke writes that Mahmood restricts the field of religious expression to a “strive towards perfection” (Schielke, 2010, p.36), and says that by focusing on very pious Muslims, and examining the aims rather than the outcomes of their pious desires, Mahmood overlooks the ambiguity that characterises many Muslim lives. Similarly, Menin argues that “its focus on the coherence of the ethical self-cultivation under examination elides the complexity of everyday lives” (Menin, 2015, p.894).
I would argue that these criticisms are, in fact, addressed in Politics of Piety, and that they also ignore the primary aims of the book. Mahmood dedicates much intellectual labour to challenge academic assumptions that foreclose the possibility of understanding the richness of the mosque participants’ lives. She does not set out to chronicle every single aspect of the complex lives of Muslims, but rather to pursue a reflection on the pious subject-formation of members of the da’wa and on secular-liberalism. Furthermore, she leaves space for difference, contradiction and paradox at various stages in her work: from her discussion of the different mosques, the various da’iyats and their respective teaching methods, and her exploration of how veiling and prayer are constituted for some Egyptian nationalists, in contrast to the da’wa members. Mahmood acknowledges that various forms of being-human spring from the same social fabric. Her focus on cultivation of piety could be interpreted as over-emphasising coherence. However, this coherence provides the analytical backbone for Mahmood’s questioning of the liberal subject, which is a crucial aim of her book. This interrogation provides an important point of departure for Menin’s article about destiny and agency in Morocco. Menin explores expectations of love by following a young professional woman, Ghilzan. Her core argument is that modalities of agency can transcend the intentionality, will and desire of individual subjects, and can be located within a wider divine destiny. Thus, she evidences that Mahmood’s work on agency can expand beyond the Politics of Piety, and be valuable in other ethnographic contexts.
Mahmood’s book thus contains many strengths and the majority of her intentions are met. However, her promise to “link what are often presumed to be two distinct domains of human life in liberal political theory: politics and ethics” (Mahmood, 2005, p.xii) is not entirely fulfilled. Chapter Four, in particular, sets out to explore this. Early on, her argument is compelling: she pursues a theorisation of Aristotelian ethics, where the precise form a moral action takes, as well as its intent, is instrumental in the creation of a moral self. This discussion is valuable in further understanding the practices of ethical self-cultivation that mark the piety movement. It also elucidates the claim made in the preface: that one can apply a similar lens to better understand certain social movements, such as the gay liberation movement, or even other practices such as martial arts.
Mahmood then seeks to “show how such an analysis of bodily practices helps us understand the question of politics, particularly the relationship between social authority and individual freedom” (Mahmood, 2005, p.122). Her argument here is not entirely convincing because she does not study how the specific subjectivities engendered and affected by the mosque movement relate to figures of social authority, and to the wider political fabric of Cairo. I was left to ask myself: Does the cultivation of an embodied disposition, one that orients the self towards submission to a transcendental authority, affect how other forms of authority are related to by the mosque participants? Mahmood goes on to touch on the tension between the da’wa and Islamic nationalism, but does not further explore what exactly about the da’wa troubles nationalists so. Her final point on this topic is that any “world-making project” (Mahmood, 2005, p.194) will necessarily have to encounter forms of political governance, and thus, should be considered political. This analysis is fairly rudimentary and universalising in comparison to the rest of the book, which rigorously interrogates many universalising statements and concepts. Thus, her analysis here is limited to pointing out the issues at stake, but does not satisfactorily resolve or connect them.
Politics of Piety is much more than an ethnographic account of the mosque revival movement in Cairo. It is a mirror, held up to a discipline that Mahmood holds dear, unearthing assumptions that are entrenched within anthropology; ones that limit the discipline’s exploration of what it means to be human. Mahmood’s reformulation of agency enables other ethnographers to better unravel the complex lives of their interlocutors without relying on reductive frameworks of freedom and resistance. Whilst she does not fully resolve how the particular subjectivities of the mosque participants affects the political topography of Egypt, Politics of Piety is itself a fundamentally political text. Her work marks a critical intervention into liberal feminism, in a geopolitical context where the concept of liberal freedom is exported and feminism is used as a justification for military intervention into the lives of Muslim women (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Hirschkind & Mahmood, 2002). This has implications beyond the context of her ethnographic site, and is a step towards “a vision of coexistence that does not require making others lifeworlds extinct or provisional” (Mahmood, 2005, p.199).
Bibliography
Abu-Lughod, L. (2002). Do Muslim women really need saving? Anthropoligical reflections on cultural relativism and its others. American Anthropologist; Oxford, 104(3), 783–790.
Hamdy, S. (2008). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood. American Ethnologist, 35(3), 3063–3067. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00085.x
Hirschkind, C., & Mahmood, S. (2002). Feminism, the Taliban, and politics of counter-insurgency. Anthropological Quarterly; Washington, 75(2), 339–354. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/10.1353/anq.2002.0031
Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject / Saba Mahmood. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.04721
Menin, L. (2015). The impasse of modernity: Personal agency, divine destiny, and the unpredictability of intimate relationships in Morocco. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 21(4), 892–910. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12293
Schielke, S. (2010). Being Good in Ramadan: Ambivalence, Fragmentation, and the Moral Self in the Lives of Young Egyptians. In Islam, Politics, Anthropology (pp. 23–38). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444324402.ch2
