Progressive leftists explained Islamic revival as ignorance or foreign imposition

Evidence

Progressive leftists like myself explained this turn of the “masses” to Islamic forms of sociability in a number of ways: sometimes we attributed it to the lack of education and enlightened thinking among the vast majority of the population, sometimes to the conservative form of Saudi Islam that immigrant laborers return from the Arabian Gulf states had brought back into Pakistan, and sometimes to the mimetic effects that Zia ul— repressive regime had inevitably engendered in the populace. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 21

Categorization

• XREF: These explanations are classic epistemic frames that the vault’s postcolonial cluster (Spivak) critiques—condescension encoded as analysis.