Week 5: Sara Mahmood. Modernity, Emancipation and the Western Liberal Subject

This week’s readings written by Sara Mahmood discussed the women’s mosque movement which is a part of the Islamic Revival. The women’s movement arose twenty-five to thirty years ago as women started to organize religious lessons at each other’s homes or in mosques. The movement came together as a result of the increasingly secularized surroundings of their country and as a way to educate Muslim women how to live their everyday lives with principles of Islamic piety and to perform religious duties and acts of worship. To live a life of piety involves subordination to feminine virtues: shyness, modesty and humility, and the donning of the veil. Mahmood’s work is an attempt to challenge and dismantle normalized assumptions about human nature: that all have an innate desire for freedom (a specific liberalized freedom), that we all seek to attain our autonomy and that human agency consists of challenging social norms as opposed to upholding them. Mahmood is also challenging the common feminist accounts of this movement which have reduced women’s issues to those of submission and patriarchy.

Often feminist accounts of the non-liberal mosque movement are analyzed from a liberal perspective, one where freedom is an innate desire of all humans, and free will cannot be expressed through actions of custom, tradition or social coercion. Feminism offers both a diagnosis and a prescription for changing the situation of women who are understood as marginalized and oppressed. Those who do not abide by the prescription set out by feminists, which would be to challenge male domination and relations of subordination, are seen as being tied down to the patriarchy of their society and if given the chance would seek freedom (Mahmood 5). The women’s mosque movement challenges this assumption as the women involved in this movement not only live a life of piety by their own free will, but are challenged in both their public and private lives to uphold these standards. The women are actively participating and reproducing, what in a Western context would be viewed as female subordination. There is an “overwhelming tendency within feminism to conceptualize agency in terms of subversion of social norms, to locate agency within those operations that resist the dominating modes of power” (Mahmood 15). Thus as Mahmood argues, the political subject remains a liberatory one, “whose agency is conceptualized on the binary model of subordination and subversion” (Mahmood 16). The women from the mosque movement do not identify with this “liberated” subject. The concept of free will in this context is challenged under the liberal definition of freedom, which states in order for an individual to be free, actions must be consequence of own free will rather than of custom, tradition or social coercion (Mahmood 11). While women in the mosque movement are following the rules of their religion, they are doing so out of their own accord. 

This week’s readings challenged some notions I myself have in regards to the little I know about the women’s mosque movement. The duties ascribed to women under Islamic tradition are not duties I myself, as a woman, identify with or think any woman should be confined to. What I found most challenging was that the concept of piety involved women behaving in there “assumed” gender roles, even if they didn’t feel these were qualities they naturally possessed. For example, one woman “created” her shyness as she naturally lacked this quality. Though this was not the focus of Mahmood’s piece, and her work challenged my notions by providing perspectives of women who abide to these roles because it was seen as the right thing to do in the path of God. The women’s mosque movement is aimed toward goals whose sense is not summarized through black and white binaries like obedience verses rebellion or compliance verses resistance. As a result of working with these binary models, analyses on the subject tend to leave out crucial aspects of the mosque movement. I found these articles compelling, and also quite difficult to fully grasp. As belonging to the “West”, many of the points she raised were things I rarely consider, and yet I can see how these Western ideals play out in how I relate to myself and to others.