Progressive scholars’ visceral repugnance toward piety movements blocks understanding

Evidence

My strategy in dealing with this repugnance has been to avoid the denunci.. atory mode that characterizes many accounts of the Islamist movement popu.. lar in the academy today. I fi such a mode unhelpful in the task of under.. standing what makes these practices powerful and meaningful to the people who practice them. But more importantly, I have been fascinated and com.. pelled by the repugnance the mosque movement provokes in feminist.. progressive scholars like myself and by our inability to move beyond this vis.. ceral reaction. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 266

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘ethical self-cultivation’ literature and to discussions of researcher positionality in anthropology.