Not all contemporary social movements center on identity politics or rights claims

Evidence

If we examine the material I have presented in this book about the character of the piety movement, it is quite apparent that this particular strand of the Islamist movement is only marginally organized around questions of rights, recognition, and political representation. Indeed, as I have shown, the mosque participants are quite ambivalent about the question of identity and are, in fact, emphatically critical of those Muslims who understand their religious practices as an expression of their Muslim or Arab identity rather than as a means of realizing a certain kind of virtuous life (see chapters 2 and 4). In this sense, it is not toward recogn that the activities of the mosque or the piety movement are oriented but rather toward the retraining of ethical sensibilities so as to create a new social and moral order. In light of this, it would therefore be a mistake to assume that all contemporary social movements fi their genesis in a politics of identity and should be analyzed as responses to the juridical language of rights, recognition, and distributive justice. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1283

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to the broader critique of liberal identity-politics frameworks in social movement theory; echoes the reader’s interest in how paradigms mislabel non-Western movements.
• SEED: Angle: where identity-politics analysis misfits a movement that seeks to retrain ethical sensibilities rather than claim recognition — applying this to religious, performance, or labor movements misread by conventional categories.

Related

• Some social movements aim at ethical self-formation rather than rights and recognition politics (similarity 0.94)
• Liberal discomfort with piety movements exceeds their actual threat level (similarity 0.82)
• Social prescriptions can constitute the self rather than constrain it. (similarity 0.79)
• Movements’ political force depends on their ethical cultivation practices (similarity 0.79)
• Islamic piety movements critique treating religion as abstract values detached from daily practice (similarity 0.78)
• Progressive scholars’ visceral repugnance toward piety movements blocks understanding (similarity 0.78)