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  • An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women's Islamic Movements by Sherine Hafez
  • Laura Bier
An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women's Islamic Movements Sherine Hafez . New York; London: New York University Press, 2011. 191 pages. ISBN 978-0-8147-7303.

After the publication and reception of Saba Mahmood's pathbreaking work, The Politics of Piety (Princeton University Press, 2005), one might be forgiven for thinking that little new was left to say about Egyptian women's participation in grassroots Islamic movements. Sherine Hafez's An Islam of her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women's Islamic Movements demonstrates that much remains to say, most of it leading to new insights about these movements and their members.

Hafez focuses her study on Gamiyat al-Hilal, an Islamic women's private voluntary organization established in the 1990s. With tens of thousands of members and branches throughout Cairo, al-Hilal aims to promote Islam as a way of living both in the lives of its members and through social activism in the community at large. Run primarily by educated middle-class women, its activities run the gamut from lessons in fiqh (jurisprudence) and sharia to social service provision and rural development projects. Taking al-Hilal as her departure point, Hafez asks, "What are the processes which shape, shift, incite and produce the desires and subjectivities of women in Islamic movements? How do Islamic women activists articulate their desires, and how do those desires mirror the complexity of... individual experience?" (5)

Hafez persuasively argues that bounded, dichotomous categories of "religious" and "secular" are inadequate to understanding the activities, desires, and selfhood of al-Hilal's members. Faulting other studies, Mahmood's among them, for analyzing the devotions of Islamic women as a manifestation of an ultimately reified notion of "non-liberal" subjectivity, Hafez takes the position that the piety and selfhood of female Islamic activists in contemporary Egypt are shaped as much by historical process of secular state-building as they are by religious teachings. She writes:

As modern subjects of a so-called secularizing state, activist Islamist women experience and reproduce the projects of modernization, [End Page 111] which in Egypt have been particularly interested in reordering female minds and bodies.... Their desires and subjectivities embody the mutual embedded ideals of historically produced Islamic traditions and secular liberal projects of modernity. Each of their lives is a rich and multidimensional terrain on which their desires flow, merge, conflict, and follow no particular geography.

(155)

At the heart of her analysis are big theoretical questions—about subjectivity, the relationship between religion and secularism, and desire—that transcend the particularity of her study. Approximately half of the book is devoted to laying out her theoretical interventions.

While Hafez's extensive critique of the literature on religion and secularism, particularly in anthropological literature, is incisive (graduate students taking comprehensive exams may want to read these chapters for a map of the field), the real highlights of the book are the three ethnographic chapters focusing on the members and activities of the women of al-Hilal, whose personal stories she chronicles with sensitivity and nuance. Hafez charts the surprisingly complex processes of pious self-fashioning among al-Hilal's members in sections focusing on women's personal narratives of activism and on ideals of pious womanhood promoted by the organization and its membership's struggles to uphold them in their own lives. The final ethnographic chapter is a fascinating analysis of a rural development scheme that al-Hilal runs in the Egyptian Delta. The project is a graphic illustration of the ways in which the premises and goals of secular state building are reproduced within religious projects. With its emphasis on hygiene, efficiency, and domestic uplift and its focus on transforming women, the al-Hilal project, in some respects, differs very little from rural reform projects of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Other aspects of al-Hilal's program, including a microfinance program, the idea of individual responsibility, and the vision of social reform as a contractual enterprise between the organization and the women it helps, reproduce the more recent logic of neo-liberalism...

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