Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, and: An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi‘i Lebanon, and: Performing Islam: Gender and Ritual in Iran (review)

Representations of “the religious” and “the secular,” as Talal Asad has suggested, function in both First-and Third-World contexts as processes of evaluating others, and oneself, as adequate and therefore freely acting agents, or as inadequately modern and therefore deluded subjects. The relentless burden of such notions of the secular on those individuals and collectivities that define themselves as Islamic, frames the three texts under review and underlines the significance of their contributions to the study of Islam, gender, and modernity. Engaging very different contexts and dissimilar relationships of women and Islam, the authors successfully move beyond contemporary scholarship on “religious” Muslim women, including most feminist poststructuralist analyses. They build upon and problematize the groundbreaking work of scholars such as Afsaneh Najmabadi, Leila Ahmed, Mervat Hatem, Lila Abu-Lughod, and others who have attempted to dismantle colonial constructs of Muslim women by presenting complex accounts of veiling, bodily practices, and religious engagements of women in Muslim societies. The texts under discussion in this review prod us to think beyond, and in some ways against, those preliminary analyses of “Islamic” feminism and Muslim women’s agency.

Saba Mahmood, in her book, Politics of Piety, proposes that despite their inclusionary intentions, existing feminist accounts of the agency of religiously defined women may obfuscate rather than clarify our understanding of these gendered subjects. Even as poststructuralist accounts disrupt the ungendered autonomous subject of liberal social and political thought, Mahmood argues, they tend to reinstate the secular subject of feminist thought in ways that erase the religious subjectivity and agency of Islamic women. They do so, Mahmood contends, by continuing to rely on secular discursive frameworks built upon ideas such as resistance, autonomy, and self-fulfillment to explain the agency of Muslim women, including Islamic feminists. On the other hand, Mahmood seeks not simply to “restore” the agency of religious women but asks us to recognize that it may be of a different nature than secular agency.

Politics of Piety is an anthropological study of a women’s piety movement that is part of the larger Islamist movement in Egypt. The book is based on fieldwork conducted by the author over two years, from 1995 to 1997, in three mosques in Cairo. Each of these sites, where the da‘iya or female preacher adopts a distinctive pedagogic style, is deemed to represent a different socioeconomic section of the city. In this movement of piety, women from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds provide lessons to one another on proper reading of the Islamic scriptures, Islamic social practices, and forms of bodily comportment that they see as being necessary to the cultivation of a pious Islamic self. The sociopolitical significance of this women’s piety movement is that it marks the first time in Egyptian history that women in large numbers have taken on a task historically appropriated by men in Sunni Islamic practice. In the process, Mahmood points out, they have fundamentally altered both the male character of the mosque and Islamic pedagogical practices associated with this public space. However, she cautions against a feminist inference that would understand these changes as modes of gendered resistance to patriarchal structures. Such a conceptualization of pious women’s agency, Mahmood argues, would reinstate the normative liberal account of politics based on freedoms and rights, since these are also key to feminist ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the gendered body and processes of subject formation. Instead, she argues, agency may be thought of not necessarily in secular terms of self-fulfillment and self-empowerment, but also in religious terms of virtue, fear, and hope...