Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject in Intellectual Curiosity Book Shelf

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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 g 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. ...more

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