Content area
Full text
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Saba Mahmood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 233 pages.
Politics of Piety is a study of the formation of Muslims as ethical subjects grounded in authoritative Islamic discursive traditions. In terms of its subject and modes of inquiry, this book breaks new ground for the understanding of Muslim subjectivities and the ethical and moral registers which inform a significant component of the Islamist movement in contemporary Egypt. Taking as its object of inquiry the women's piety movement active in mosques throughout Cairo's varied neighborhoods, Saba Mahmood interrogates and challenges prevailing liberal and feminist assumptions on freedom, agency, subordination, and resistance. Her thoughtful interrogation culminates in a recalibration of how these concepts should be thought out, understood, and deployed.
In an introductory chapter, Mahmood outlines her theoretical approach to agency, arguing convincingly for the need to think the concept outside the dichotomy of resistance and subordination. In later chapters, she shows that the mosque women's cultivation of pietistic dispositions, attitudes, and emotions and their acting on their cultivated virtues aims to accomplish closeness to God, and that the performances required to successfully enact a pious self cannot be reduced to either resistance or subordination. Mahmood also engages with liberal and communitarian traditions, which assert that being an autonomous agent is conditional on having desires that spring from an inner self, unencumbered by socially or religiously prescribed rules. In rejecting this assumption, Mahmood argues that desires developed in relation to externally prescribed rules do not negate the subject's agency. However, it is important to note that for Mahmood this agency is historically located and is enabled through a particular discursive formation.
This contending premise is situated within a framework of inquiry grounded in Michel Foucault's conception of the subject according to which agency is acquired through the processes of subjectification: The operations of power that accomplish the production and subordination of the subject are the very processes through which the subject acquires capacities for action. In further elaboration, Mahmood draws on Judith Butler's concept of "perfomativity" to demonstrate how embodied performances are constitutive of the subject in terms of both subjection and agency. Proceeding from this conception of the subject, Mahmood goes on to examine questions pertaining...