The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (The Macat Library)

Saba Mahmood’s 2005 Politics of Piety is an excellent example of evaluation in action.Mahmood’s book is a study of women’s participation in the Islamic revival across the Middle East.Mahmood - a feminist social anthropologist with left-wing, secular political values - wanted to understand why women should become such active participants in a movement that seemingly promoted their subjugation.As Mahmood observed, women’s active participation in the conservative Islamic revival presented (and presents) a difficult question for Western feminists: how to balance cultural sensitivity and promotion of religious freedom and pluralism with the feminist project of women’s liberation?Mahmood’s response was to conduct a detailed evaluation of the arguments made by both sides, examining, in particular, the reasoning of female Muslims themselves.In a key moment of evaluation, Mahmood suggests that Western feminist notions of agency are inadequate to arguments about female Muslim piety.Where Western