Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

I used this book in my Muslim Societies class last semester as one of three books I wrote a paper on. The book goes into much details about the specifics of Muslim piety and the role it plays on women. This can be a slow read because there are a lot of unfamiliar terms, but Mahmood will define them and explain them in context to her thesis. I highly suggest this book because it will give you an alternate view of Muslim Egyptian women.

Radical feminists, of the post-structuralist or deconstructionist blend, have accustomed us to put into question notions that have long been a constitutive part of the liberal/progressive agenda and to critically reexamine well-established categories such as gender, class or race. It should therefore come as no surprise if Saba Mahmood, an anthropologist trained in the intellectual hotbed of UC Berkeley, provides a description of the Muslim world that goes against the grain of conventional wisdom and shatters many certainties held dear by feminists and liberals alike. Mahmood's Politics of Piety is an ethnographic account of the Islamic revival in Egypt, viewed from the perspective of women of different walks of life who regularly attend religious lessons delivered by female preachers in mosques of Cairo. Teachings focus on the study of Islamic scriptures, but also address the social norms, personal orientations and bodily comportments deemed necessary to cultivate a pious and virtuous life. This is the first time in Egyptian history that such a large number of women have mobilized to hold public meetings in mosques to teach each other Islamic doctrine, thereby altering the historically male-centered character of mosques as well as Islamic pedagogy. On the other hand, the women's mosque movement emphasizes conducts and virtues that are traditionally associated with feminine passivity and submissiveness, such as shyness, modesty, perseverance and humility (although these virtues have to be interpreted in an Islamic context). Traditional feminist interpretations would tend to analyze this mosque movement through the normative framework of women's autonomy and emancipation, either to decry its participants' submission to oppressive norms or to detect strategies of resistance and reinterpretation that allow these women to articulate a distinctively female voice and agenda. Both interpretations would miss the point. They posit that women's self-realization and autonomy can only be asserted in opposition to prevailing social norms and institutions, whereas the women described by Mahmood draw their very raison d'etre and sense of identity from their submission to God's commands and their emulation of a virtuous self. To illustrate this point, Mahmood takes the case of the Islamic veil, which has been the object of numerous studies. Although many explanations have been provided for its resurgence in modern Egypt, identifying the veil as a symbol of resistance to the hegemony of Western values or as a convenient device to navigate through urban space, few attention has been devoted to ideas of female modesty or piety as Islamic virtues, although it is in these terms that many women who decide to wear the veil frame their decision. According to their own words, the veil is not something that could be separated from the pious virtues of modesty and submission, as if one could oppose an "inner" self from its public display. Instead, bodily acts such as