on Politics of Piety

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject – Saba Mahmood

Ashon T Crawley

Brief Biography

Saba Mahmood is a member of the Anthropology Faculty at UC Berkeley in Berkeley, California. Her research interests, in general, are Anthropology of subject formation, liberalism, and secular modernity; feminist and poststructuralist theory; religion and politics; Islam, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Politics of Piety

The book seeks to disrupt the “arrogantly assume[d]” notion that “secular forms of life and secularism’s progressive formulations necessarily exhaust ways of living meaningfully and richly in this world,” over and above other forms of life (xi-xii). As well, it seeks to “analyze the conceptions of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this nonliberal movement, in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it (5).” Simply put, Mahmood wants to interrogate what are seemingly generally accepted prescriptions of Western feminist projects and rather allow for a feminist discourse to emerge from the Islamic Revival.

The scope of her project necessitates her ethnographic research with women who are apart of this revival and privileging their voices. This is particularly important in a post-9/11 world where the Islamic subject has unjustly been held up for scrutiny and ridicule. The Islamic feminine subject is oft appropriated in Western feminist discourse as a means to show the backward nature of, the non-enlightened mindset and the need for intervention in the Muslim world.

It should be noted that feminist projects run this risk when they refuse to listen to the voices of those for whom they speak. The utilization of the Islamic feminine subject only towards the goal of critiquing what are deemed patriarchal and oppressive practices from a liberal, secularist/humanist standpoint essentially objectifies the Islamic feminine subject. It evinces dishonest scholarship as there is no true engagement of the women and their lives but they stand as symbols for what is wrong in the whole of the Muslim world. Because the women of the mosque movement take seriously what they deem divinely ordered edicts, Mahmood asks the following:

How did the women of the mosque movement practically work upon themselves in order to become the desirous subjects of this authoritative discourse? What were the forms of reasoning and modes of persuasion they used to convince themselves and others of the truth of this discourse? And what were the practical consequences that followed when the truth of this discourse was argumentatively established? (112-3)

Thus speaks Mahmood.

Main Argument

The overarching postulation of the text is that there must be a radically different way to think about and through issues of resistance and power in particular cultures. She tries to untangle one assumption that asserts that resistance is antithetical to and that which works against power structures, taking very particular forms, which are easily recognizable and transferable from one situation to another. For Mahmood, there is a tendency to “romanticize resistance” instead of understanding the “workings of power” in all of their iterations (8).

Likewise, there is an assumption – a secular/humanist, liberal influence, to be sure – that implies that there is something inherently wrong with the practices of women participants in the Islamic Revival and the mosque movement. However, Mahmood wants to problematize these assumptions.

Yet, one may ask, is such an assumption valid? What is the history by which we have come to assume its truth? What kind of a political imagination would lead one to think in this manner? More importantly, if we discard such an assumption, what other analytical tools might be available to ask a different set of questions about women’s participation in the Islamist movement? (2)

Herein lays the crux of Mahmood’s work. She wants her readership to alter the ways in which we understand the workings of resistance and those factors that inculcate assumptions regarding what performative practices are oppressive. Enmeshed in her discussion of rethinking resistance and power, she also puts forth the idea that agency must be rethought as well.

In other words, concepts lodged in secular assumptions can and should be radically reimagined. As an example, she makes the case for the reworking of the concept of agency: “…the meaning and sense of agency cannot be fixed in advance, but must emerge through an analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being, responsibility, and effectivity (14-15).” As another example, she also proposes to disrupt the notion of norms as inherently negative. At the very least, her project wants to alter the understanding of how people exist within cultural norms: “Norms are not only consolidated and/or subverted…but performed, inhabited, and experienced in a variety of ways (22).” In the same vein, she wants to “think about the variety of ways in which norms are lived and inhabited, aspired to, reached for, and consummated (23).”

Simply put, how do women of the mosque movement perform normativity? An ambitious project, to be sure!

Questions Raised

Is the performance of piety the actual living out of piety? Mahmood makes a wonderful discussion of interiority/exteriority and Aristotelian ethics as a means for understanding some of the performative aspects of the women in the mosque movement. The frequently cited concept of veiling of women in Islam raises some interesting queries. Does the subject slip into a state of piety through the very performance of piety?

Utilizing the veil or abstractions such as shyness, some of the women purported that eventually, the performance of the veil (as I’ll call it) leads necessarily to the inculcation of the veiled self. Stated directly: the ability to wear the veil and reflect shyness – even if only façade initially – if done out of pureness and true desire for Allah, the subject will begin to reflect qualities inwardly. The pious subject “does not precede the performance of normative virtues but is enacted through the performance (163).” Moreover, excellence at piety does not expose the vulnerability of the system but consolidates normativity (164).Exteriority, the embodied performance on the self, meets with interiority, the intentions of the inward self.

What is apparent in this staging of exteriority/interiority is the eschatological idea of the exterior exceeding itself and the interior exceeding itself until they liminally meet. Yet, what is the result of such a bifurcation? It is also interesting that some of the women interviewed looked down on the secularization of Islam which they believed transformed the religious beliefs and fear of Allah to “ritual acts of worship in the popular imagination [which] have increasingly acquired the status of customs or conventions, a kind of ‘Muslim folklore’ undertaken as a form of entertainment or as a means to display a religio-cultural identity (48).”, given the attention given to the performance of piety that could lead to the quality of piety.

Mahmood discusses an exchange between older and younger Muslim women regarding the concept of modesty (101-6). In this explication, she says that, “the conversation between these women proceeds along remarkably equitable lines,” as something positive and good. However, I wonder if it is possible that the social status of women is likened to that of girls. More directly, I question if the same multigenerational discourse could have taken place between older women and younger men. If the space only allows for multigenerational woman conversation, what is being said about women and their status, regardless of age in the Islamic Revival context?

Significance

The significance of this work cannot be stated enough. Mahmood is successful in that she allows the voices of the women to issue forth; she stages their performance of piety in ways that cause the reader to ponder the multivocality of seemingly oppressive, patriarchal practices. I believe that she persuasively argues why “a change in the referential structure of the system of signs cannot produce the same effect of destabilization (167).” In the absence of these signs (such as veiling), would the same system of piety exist? Would women be still viewed as the “repositories of tradition and culture, their bodies made the potent symbols of collective identity (119),” and if so, why? We are forced to modify the ways in which we view corporeal significations of piety and redefine how the self relates to a norm (120).