The mosque movement arose against religiosity reduced to abstract belief detached from daily practice

Evidence

According to participants, the women’s mosque movement emerged in re.. sponse to the perception that religious knowledge, as a means for organizing daily life, had become increasingly marginalized under modem structures of secular govern Many of the mosque participants criticized what they con.. sidered to be an increasingly prevalent form of religiosity in Egypt, one that ac.. cords Islam the status of an abstract system of beliefs that has no direct bearing on how one lives, on what one actually does in the course of a day. This trend, usually referred to by the movement’s participants as “secularization” ( �almana or �almaniyya) or “western ( tagharrub), is understood to have reduced Islamic knowledge ( both as a mode of conduct and as a set of principles) to the status of “custom and folklore” ( �ad wa fulklur). — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 311

Categorization

• XREF: Connect to Foucault and Asad on the secular as a governing rationality, and to the reader’s work on embodied practice as distinct from belief.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘secularization’ as used by the movement participants — a distinct meaning from the standard Western-social-theory sense.