Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject - Tapa dura

Winner of the 2005 Victoria Schuck Award, American Political Science Association
Honorable Mention for the 2005 Albert Hourani Book Award, Middle East Studies Association
"Mahmood's book is a tour de force that provides an alternative prism through which we may understand the women's mosque movement in Egypt."--Cynthia Nelson,Middle East Journal

"The book is of great importance regarding the position of women within the Muslim piety movement in Egypt. It is of interest for those dealing with Islamic revival and women issues not only in Egypt or the Middle East and North Africa but also to those dealing with the role of religion in life and gender issues worldwide."--Rachel Simon, Ph.D., Digest of Middle East Studies

Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. Saba Mahmood's compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal principles by which some people hold such movements to account. The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? Politics of Piety is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.