Saba Mahmood

Dzieła

• 2005Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Polityka pobożności: islamskie odrodzenie i podmiot feministyczny)

  Badania terenowe z ruchem kobiecych meczetów w Kairze: kobiety te kultywują cnoty przez praktykę cielesną, a by je zrozumieć, teoria feministyczna musi oddzielić sprawczość od pragnienia wolności i oporu.

• 2016Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Różnica religijna w wieku świeckim: raport mniejszości)

  Sytuacja Koptów i bahaitów w Egipcie pokazuje, że nowoczesne świeckie państwo nie stoi ponad religią, lecz ją reguluje, i w ten sposób zaostrza konflikty między większościami a mniejszościami.

Stanowisko

“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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

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