Saba Mahmood examines the challenges Muslim
women’s involvement in the Egyptian mosque movement poses to feminist
scholarship and secular-liberal politics. Due to the growing secularization
within Egyptian society, many women felt as though it was necessary to form a
movement that would enable Muslim women to engage in religious practice and
more specifically, to cultivate a practice of personal piety. Because piety has
been accorded such a valuable position within Islam, the participants believe by
training themselves through embodied ethical rituals, they can become pious subjects.
Some of these practices include cultivating shyness, modesty,
humility, and donning the veil. According to Mahmood, feminist scholars are particularly
critical of Muslim women's involvement in the mosque movement because of their willingness
to position themselves into traditionally male-dominated spaces (mosques) and participate
in religious traditions and practices that uphold principles of female
subordination; not to mention, the qualities and embodied actions participants
seek to cultivate have been associated with feminist ideas of female passivity
and submissiveness.
Mahmood explains how feminist scholarship tends to
scrutinize Islamist movements because of its assumed associations with social
conservatism, cultural backwardness, fundamentalism, women's subjugation and all
other supposed oppressive means that seek to limit women's freedom and agency. Mahmood argues that feminist scholarship, which is embedded in
ideas of universalism, suffers from an 'analytically and politically prescriptive
project' that basically claims because society is structured to serve male
interests and desires, the result will almost always create a universal outcome
for women, that which consists of an oppressed and dominated female figure.
Furthermore, it concludes that women must unceasingly resist male domination by
refusing to comply to authority in order to enact agency and be free. It's quite evident that feminist scholarship narrowly constructs
the normative subject as one who should oppose structures of domination, not
adhere to them. Mahmood explains how this simple
binary of subordination/resistance creates a rather rigid understanding of
agency; suggesting that resistance against authority is really the only significant
form of agency. A critical aspect Mahmood focuses on throughout her reading is how
agency can also be located within structures of power. Simply understanding agency
as resistance against power relations or male authority in this case, fails to recognize the other various forms and modalities
of agency.
Mahmood examines the cultivation
of piety among members of the mosque movement in terms of agency. In
one of her examples, Mahmood tells us of Abir, a mosque participant who decides
to pursue da'wa work despite her husband's disapproval. Mahmood explains the consequences Abir may face
in failing to obey her husband's wishes including the threat of divorce or
Jamal finding a second wife, which is permitted for a Muslim man. In spite of
these threats, Abir continues to attend the institute and uses her training in
da'wa to challenge her husband on matters of proper Islamic conduct and informs
him that his disapproval would be a rejection of her moral arguments;
thus a denial of God's truth. For Abir, in order to live piously, the practice
of Islamic virtues was put first; however, this example cautions us to not misinterpret
Abir's refusal to obey her husband's wishes as a form of rebellion or
resistance against male authority, but more so as an individual commitment to religious
duties with the desire to attain higher moral ground. In this example, agency
can be understood as a "capacity for action that specific relations of
subordination create and enable" (Mahmood 18).
In
this reading I enjoyed how Mahmood problematizes the liberal and progressive concept
of the universalization of the desire for freedom. She argues that all human
beings have their own innate desire for freedom and it cannot possibly be a universally
shared assumption. There are also different ways of thinking about human agency,
religion and freedom and these understandings cannot be solely
conceptualized within a normative
liberal account of politics but must consider the specific historical and political conditions in which these understandings came to be significant.
I really enjoyed reading this response as it was easy to understand yet still serves Mahmood's complex piece justice. I enjoyed how Mahmood challenges the idea that wearing sexy lingerie does not necessarily mean being liberated or working against power relations because it is inherently rooted in "capitalist consumerism and urban bourgeois values and aesthetics" (9). Like Yalda mentions, this text really focuses on agency and resistance and how/why it means different things to Muslim women and feminists versus western feminists. The universalist assumption of what resistance can mean further dehumanizes Muslim women and gives them little to no agency. Additionally, I like when Mahmood questions whether it is even possible to have a set universal definition of practices considered "resistant" and whether the category of resistance suggests progressive politics and thus superiority (and the politics behind that). Like Yalda, I agree that women have their own desire and agency for freedom depending on their social and historical contexts. Western feminists tend to label what "agency" or "resistance" means instead of questioning why they have to put women's experiences in a box --especially if they are not part of the historical and social context themselves. I agree with Mahmood of her definition of agency on page 34 because it allows for self-determination of each one of us.
ReplyDeleteI really liked your summation of what are the main points with Politics of Piety, that being agency and piety and their interconnectedness. It is true that within western feminist discourse the notion of agency is often tied to resistance. Agency in this case is seen as the action taken to subvert a patriarchal power dynamic that suppresses women. This action is taken from a point of distance and autonomy, imbued with a “humanist desire for autonomy and self-expression [that] constitutes the substrate, the slumbering ember that can spark to fame in the form of an act of resistance when conditions permit” (8). As you allude to however, Mahmood is quick to argue for separating agency and resistance in feminist discourse because it flattens what would otherwise be a complex discussion in how women view/create their own sense of agency as you mentioned through piety, and how agency materializes itself through mechanisms that does not fall in to the liberal/secularist feminist paradigm of resistance.
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