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Book Review: Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.
264 pp. ISBN 978—0—691—08695...

Article  in  Feminist Theory · August 2010

DOI: 10.1177/14647001100110020802

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216 Feminist Theory 11(2)

The Battle of Algiers, before complicating these according to the nationalist secu-
larist vision of Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years. She moves radically beyond such
classic postcolonial concerns in Chapter 3, though, where she turns to what she terms
‘mother–daughter plots’ in writing and film from the Maghrib (North African Arab
west). Here, her reading of Tlatli’s film Silences of the Palace stands out for its
marriage of psychoanalytic and postcolonial analysis of the sexual and national
traumas played out through mother and daughter, suggesting the complexity of
the postcolonial condition. She explores spatiality as a form of postcolonial experi-
ence and mode of expression in the final two chapters, where she examines national
and faith-based notions of ‘home’ before exploring the personal, genre-based and
critical ‘border-crossings’ that take place in writing and film. This final chapter’s
emphasis on mobility and transgression is highly successful, countering static con-
ceptualizations of Arab Muslim women’s self-expression by emphasizing multiplic-
ity of subject-positions at play in their work.
At a technical level, Arab, Muslim, Woman is extensively researched and
includes both explanatory endnotes for the non-expert and an array of interesting
observations for those more familiar with the field. Her use of illustrations is
informative and is complemented by a useful filmography. The contextual focus
of the text feels mildly askew, however, with a slight authorial preference for texts
from the Maghrib, and specifically Algeria. As Moore readily acknowledges, her
choice of texts is driven by the availability of translations, and the author’s profi-
ciency in French may have something to do with this. This does mean that
Arabophone specialists in Arab women’s writing may find Moore’s textual choices
frustrating, excluding a wider selection of work available in Arabic. Moore herself
is clearly aware of the limitations of her own subject-position, and to her credit, she
makes careful use of translators’ advice to ensure accuracy of transliterated termi-
nology. This approach also, of course, speaks to an Anglophone audience who may
otherwise be denied linguistic access to the field. What Moore’s work really
achieves, though, is a rare example of a critical text that seeks to ‘write women
back into history in a manner which also teaches us how to read responsibly’ (p.
76). Moore’s work achieves this dialogue among not only the visions and voices of
Arab Muslim creative practitioners but also those who view and read across the
disciplines, whether in postcolonial, feminist, literary, filmic or Middle Eastern
studies. Challenging as this approach will appear to some, it is of the utmost
importance and places Moore at the forefront of a situated and self-aware femi-
nism that is unafraid both to acknowledge and to push its own boundaries.

Saba Mahmood
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2005. 264 pp. ISBN 978–0–691–08695–8, $23.95 (pbk)
Reviewed by:
Sindre Bangstad, Oslo University College, UK
This book by a social anthropologist affiliated to the University of California at
Berkeley has attracted a lot of attention from academics in the fields of

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Book Reviews 217

anthropology, gender studies, philosophy and political science in recent years – and
rightly so. For Mahmood’s at times overtly polemical intervention raises challen-
ging questions about the ‘imperialism of categories’ which provides the prism
through which Muslim women’s social and religious practices and agency are
often seen by many Western secular feminists. Mahmood has received numerous
accolades for her book, so I will concentrate on providing some points of critique
here.
Politics of Piety is based on ethnographic fieldwork among pious Muslim
women in Cairo. Mahmood is concerned with how these women’s agency is under-
stood within secular feminist analysis: she wants to ‘question the overwhelming
tendency within poststructuralist scholarship to conceptualize agency in terms of
subversion or resignification of social norms’ (p. 14). Mahmood takes feminist
scholars in anthropology in particular to task for failing to ‘problematize the
universality of the desire. . . to be free from relations of subordination and, for
women, from structures of male domination’ (p. 10). This failure, she notes, is
attributable to a tension within feminism owing to its dual character as both an
analytical and politically prescriptive project.
Mahmood’s ethnographic monograph follows a select group of female Muslim
informants – deeply pious women of a Salafi reformist orientation – in their ritual
lives. Central to their reformist orientation is a very particular conception of what
being a pious and virtuous Muslim entails in terms of embodied comportment
and commitment. For all of the author’s insistence on the need to explore actual
practices and self-understandings, however, there is relatively little of this in the
book: Mahmood rarely follows these women outside the ritual sphere. This
means that her conception of their agency within and between different social
fields has very specific limitations. One gets little sense of the extent to which the
moral dispositions cultivated by these women in the ritual sphere are consonant
with their behaviour in other social fields, to what extent these reflect non-
conflicted and coherent moral selves which endure over time, and of the social
status and class position of these women. In a subtle critique of Mahmood,
sociologist Asef Bayat in Making Islam Democratic has noted that the halaqa‘at
or Islamic prayer groups for women which Mahmood studied became a central
feature of the Islamic landscape of urban Egypt (particularly Cairo) in the 1990s.
He argues that these groups primarily attracted well-off Egyptian women. These
women’s turn to religion, he claims, may well have enhanced their own personal
autonomy, but in reproducing patriarchal constraints effectively delimited the
agential possibilities of Muslim women from other social strata and ideologies
(Bayat, 2007: 155–61).
Mahmood also contends that secular feminism draws on the imaginaries of
secular liberalism, which for Mahmood defines and prescribes nothing short of
‘a way of life’. Mahmood here conflates secularism and liberalism. As prominent
modern political philosophers such as Akheel Bilgrami and William Connolly have
pointed out, secularism and liberalism are not reducible to each other, and there
can of course be perfectly illiberal forms of secularism. This is a fact which one

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218 Feminist Theory 11(2)

knows only too well in the Middle East, where modern secular regimes more often
than not have turned out to be of a totalitarian nature.
Furthermore, Mahmood’s informants assume the role of ideological ciphers in
an analytical battle between the categories of secular feminist thought and pious
Muslim reformist thought. This is unhelpful, since it does not adequately reflect the
extent to which these modes of thought in a globalized and intertwined world are
implicated in one another. One might ask whether this isn’t a form of what the
anthropologist Sherry Ortner in a memorable turn of phrase in 1995 referred to as
a ‘politics of ethnographic refusal’. At the end of her book, Mahmood asserts that
her attempt at comprehension ‘offers the slim hope of yielding a vision of coex-
istence that does not require making other lifeworlds extinct or provisional’ (p.
199). These are rather strong allegations about what secular feminist politics does
and does not do. Extinction of lifeworlds has to the best of this reviewer’s knowl-
edge not been among the aims of any kind of secular feminist politics. The alter-
native which Mahmood offers is one in which women’s rights in the Muslim world
are subordinated to the overriding aim of a so-called ‘preservation of life forms’. It
doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that it would, in the so-called Muslim
world as elsewhere, be male patriarchal definitions which would assume priority in
the definition of what these forms of life are, should and could be. The alternative
for Mahmood appears to be a normative cultural relativism which regretfully does
not provide any sustainable ground for a much required critical feminist engage-
ment with the lives of contemporary Muslim women.

Reference
Bayat A (2007) Making Islam Democratic. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Georgina Waylen
Engendering Transitions: Women’s Mobilization, Institutions, and Gender Outcomes. ‘Gender
and Politics’ Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 241 pp. (incl. index). ISBN
978–0–19–924803–2, $49.95
Reviewed by:
Valerie M. Hudson, Brigham Young University, USA
Georgina Waylen, Reader in Politics at the University of Sheffield, asks under what
conditions democratization produces positive outcomes for women. This is a very
important conceptual question, for it is often lightly assumed that transitions to
democracy, or to greater levels of democracy, will bring about progress for women
as surely as day follows night. During the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush
Administration asserted that the US intervention there, with its dual aim of elim-
inating the Taliban and instituting democracy, would emancipate Afghan women
from an almost medieval existence. However, as Caprioli and Douglass (2008) have
demonstrated, third party state intervention to promote democracy does not
appear to affect the situation of women for either good or ill. The link, then,
between democratization and a better situation for women must be viewed with
some suspicion.

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