It is impossible to read Saba Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety in an American context without noting its publication year, 2005. While the book’s ethnographic research took place prior to 9/11, its theoretical contribution is inextricable from it. Specifically, Mahmood confronts the problem of feminist participation in the subsequent militant reaction to 9/11. She mounts a critique of normative liberal feminist ethics through a thick ethnography punctuated by philosophical excurses, which aims to explicate the role that Islamic practices have in creating the women’s subjectivity.
The mosque movement in Egypt that Mahmood observes is an outgrowth of a transnational Islamic revival that began in the 1970s. The specific groups she observes consist of women who gather in mosques for weekly lessons in piety, often consisting of textual study and moral advisement. This movement is simultaneously anti-modern in its political orientation and facilitated by modern increases in education and literacy. Recent developments in Muslim scholarship also enable the movement by defining da’wa (the duty of Muslims to call one another to greater piety) as a general vocation rather than a specific employment. Women can, therefore, fulfil this general duty to one another.
With Western eyes, it is easy to assume that the external practices of Muslim piety that these women exhibit are forms of cultural or national signification, designed to delimit belonging and social cohesion. But Mahmood’s close observation of these women reveals that these practices (such as prayer, veiling, and fasting) are directed toward the cultivation of inward dispositions. Participating in prayer creates the desire for prayer, weeping creates fear of God, and veiling creates modesty. Ultimately, the goal of these practices is the creation of a pious self.
This ethnographic data is keyed to Mahmood’s theoretical framework, critiquing liberal conceptions of the individual as an autonomous moral agent. Foucault’s notion that the subject does not precede power relations is a cornerstone of this theory. Ethics, as cultivation of one’s own subjectivity, occurs in the matrices of one’s living. Taking this notion seriously leads Mahmood to critique theories of moral agency that prioritize subversion and resistance as their paramount examples. Indeed, if liberal feminists take seriously the primacy of particularity, they will allow their normative ideas to be revised through contact with locality.
The titular question of politics hovers in the background for the majority of the text. Mahmood argues that religious movements like the one she studies bear a transformative power that exceeds many political groups. And that the creation of subjects that occurs through practices has intrinsic political consequences. And contra to Western misconceptions, the intensity of this piety occasionally engenders the suspicion of Egypt’s government. This coheres with Mahmood’s agential point, that political change is not merely a result of radical adversarial resistance.
While Mahmood takes both philosophical conceptions of the self and the women’s mosque movement in Egypt as the objects of her study, The Politics of Piety also contains subtly important autobiographical data. She opens the book by explaining her context as a member of the progressive left in Pakistan. And she closes by saying that her analytic method caused her to understand practices that she had initially found objectionable. This autobiographical component, which admits to the unsettling of certainties, explains in part why the book never shifts back into a normative mode. Mahmood wants to honor the analytical task without collapsing it into the normative political one. While she calls for a revision of normative paradigms, she consigns this work mostly to their critique, concluding with a brief gesture toward the possibility of coexistence.
Questions
- Mahmood is highly critical of the terms of liberal normative political ethics. She problematizes them through her ethnographic observations and argues that they should be remade through this critique. Do you think that she leaves room for this? Or does she simply prefer a different sort of analytic project that is incommensurable with the normative projects that she critiques?
- Mahmood is staunchly against philosophical concepts of normativity and universality. But in her analysis, she argues that the religious practices she observes function as a means of virtue cultivation, rather than as identity signifiers. While she does this to parochialize these practices, does it render them legible to other religious practitioners to the point of gesturing toward universality?
- Mattingly went out of her way to distance herself from Foucault in an effort to underscore her study subjects as moral agents. Mahmood employs Foucault to underscore her subjects’ creation of moral subjectivity. How do their definitions of agency differ? Which do you find more philosophically compelling?
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