Some social movements aim at ethical self-formation rather than rights and recognition politics

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

• XREF: Directly complicates the recognition/identity politics frame that liberal-secular feminist critique assumes; connects to the strategic-essentialism and postcolonial cluster (Spivak, Ahmad) in the vault. — connects to: Collective identity and dignified recognition define social movements like environmental justice — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 229; Citizenship ranges from state-granted passivity to movement-driven activism — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 819
• DEEPTHINKING: Challenges the near-universal assumption in secular-liberal social theory that all political movements are organized around recognition and rights, offering ethical self-formation as an alternative axis.