Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood Read Free Book Online

case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view, may actu.. ally be a form of agency-but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment. In this sense, agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms.
    It may be argued in response that this kind of challenge to the natural sta.. tus accorded to the desire for freedom in analyses of gender runs the risk of Orientalizing Arab and Muslim women all over again-repeating the errors of pre.- 1 970s Orientalist scholarship that defi Middle Eastern women as passive submissive Others, bereft of the enlightened consciousness of their "Western sisters," and hence doomed to lives of servile submission to men. I would contend, however, that to examine the discursive and practical condi.. tions within which women come to cultivate various forms of desire and ca.. pacities of ethical action is a radically different project than an Orientalizing one that locates the desire for submission in an innate ahistorical cultural essence. Indeed, if we accept the notion that all forms of desire are discur.. sively organized ( as much of recent feminist scholarship has argued), then it is important to interrogate the practical and conceptual conditions under which different forms of desire emerge, including desire for submission to recognized authority. We cannot treat as natural and imitable only those desires that en.. sure the emergence of feminist politics.
    Consider, for example, the women from the mosque movement with whom I worked. The task of realizing piety placed these women in confl with sev.. eral structures of authority. Some of these structures were grounded in insti.. tuted standards of Islamic orthodoxy, and others in norms of liberal discourse; some were grounded in the authority of parents and male kin, and others in state institutions. Yet the rationale behind these confl was not predicated upon, and therefore cannot be understood only by reference to, arguments for gender equality or resistance to male authority. Nor can these women's prac.. tices be read as a reinscription of traditional roles, since the women's mosque movement has signifi reconfi the gendered practice of Islamic ped.. agogy and the social institution of mosques (see chapters 3 and 5). One could, of course, argue in response that, the intent of these women notwithstanding, the actual effects of their practices may be analyzed in terms of their role in re.. inforcing or undermining structures of male domination. While conceding that such an analysis is feasible and has been useful at times, I would never.. theless argue that it remains encumbered by the binary terms of resistance and subordination, and ignores projects, discourses, and desires that are not cap.. tured by these terms (such as those pursued by the women I worked with).
    Studies on the resurgent popularity of the veil in urban Egypt since the
    1970s provide excellent examples of these issues. The proliferation of such studies ( El Guindi 1 981 ; Hoffman..Ladd 1 987 ; MacLeod 1 991; Radwan 1 982 ; Zuhur 1992 ) refl scholars' surprise that, contrary to their expectations, so many "modem Egyptian women" have returned to wearing the veil. Some of these studies off functionalist explanations, citing a variety of reasons why women take on the veil voluntarily ( for example, the veil makes it easy for women to avoid sexual harassment on public transportation, lowers the cost of attire for working women, and so on). Other studies identify the veil as a symbol of resistance to the commodifi of women's bodies in the media, and more generally to the hegemony of Western values. While these studies have made important contributions, it is surprising that their authors have paid so little attention to Islamic virtues of female modesty or piety, especially given that many