Saba Mahmood

Works

• 2005Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

  Fieldwork with the women’s mosque movement in Cairo: these women cultivate virtues through bodily practice, and to understand them feminist theory has to separate agency from the wish for freedom and resistance.

• 2016Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report

  The situation of Copts and Bahais in Egypt shows that the modern secular state does not stand above religion but regulates it, and in doing so sharpens conflicts between majorities and minorities.

Position

“Politics of Piety” (2005) studies women in Cairo who met in mosques to study the Qur’an and to cultivate pious virtues such as modesty and patience through repeated bodily practice. Liberal and feminist theory, Mahmood argued, tends to recognise agency only where people resist norms or express their own autonomous will; it therefore cannot understand women who seek to inhabit norms rather than overthrow them. Drawing on Foucault’s late work on ethics as self-formation and on Talal Asad’s anthropology of religion, she proposed to understand agency as the capacity for action that particular relations of power and practice create. She took up Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, but argued that Butler’s emphasis on subversion still tied agency to resistance. In “Religious Reason and Secular Affect” (2009) she used the controversy over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet to show how secular assumptions shape what counts as injury. “Religious Difference in a Secular Age” (2016) examined Copts and Bahais in Egypt and argued that the modern secular state does not stand above religion but regulates it, and in doing so can sharpen the divide between majority and minorities. Critics asked whether her approach left room for judging coercion; Mahmood answered that understanding had to precede judgement.

Life & context

Saba Mahmood was born on 3 February 1962 in Quetta, Pakistan, and moved to the United States to study. She first studied architecture and urban planning at the University of Washington in Seattle and then took a doctorate in anthropology at Stanford University in 1998. From 1995 to 1997 she did fieldwork with the women’s mosque movement in Cairo. In 2004 she joined the University of California, Berkeley, where she became professor of anthropology and was also active in critical theory. With Talal Asad, Wendy Brown and Judith Butler she published “Is Critique Secular?” (2009), and she co-directed a research project on the politics of religious freedom. She died of pancreatic cancer in Berkeley on 10 March 2018, aged 56.

Further main works

• Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide? (in Is Critique Secular?, 2009)
• Politics of Religious Freedom (co-editor, 2015)