Pious women’s conflicts with authority do not reduce to gender-equality arguments.

Evidence

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). — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 121

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the binary terms of resistance/subordination that structured the learned Milgrom institutional work — here institutions are contested from within rather than imposed from without. — connects to: Women’s legal equality arose from economic shifts, not ideology or religion. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 209; Liberal reforms add expectations without removing the demand to be feminine — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 692; Both patriarchal and liberatory marriage scripts equally enable and constrain women through savoir-bound power — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1205 (+1 more)