Saba Mahmood — Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

213 published claims from this book.

• A religious view of human action shapes how women survive patriarchy
• A scholar’s identity distance from the object of study predicts Orientalism accusations.
• A woman preacher legitimized prayer leadership through juristic disagreement, not gender equality
• Adversarial critique is weaker than self-transformative engagement
• Agency only has meaning within its own conceptual and institutional grammar
• Analysis is being subjected to the demands of political attestation
• Applying theory across cases as mere illustration can misrepresent the cases.
• Asad’s account of tradition adds power and embodied capacities that MacIntyre omits
• Ataturk’s secularism was enforced through dress, script, and education bans
• Attendees judged a daeiya by rhetorical passion as much as doctrinal knowledge
• Benjamin’s concern about lost aura was really about historicity
• Benjamin’s concern with the aura’s loss is really about historicity, not tradition itself
• Bodily practice endows subjects with capacities to act in the world
• Both feminism and liberalism treat freedom as an unquestioned norm.
• Bourdieu reduces embodied practices to symptoms of deeper social structures, missing their intrinsic significance
• Butler’s agency theory is a political praxis against heterosexual normativity’s violence
• Butler’s agonistic frame cannot see norms doing anything but suppress or be subverted
• Butler’s semiotic theory of performativity may not fit embodied self-formation traditions.
• Cairo’s al-Azhar university refused self-taught women religious scholars admission.
• Canonical authority can circulate through oral and popular channels
• Colonial discourse assigning the veil a key role drives its political salience
• Colonial legal reform reduced sharia courts to family and endowment law
• Conscious deliberation is inherent to learning any skilled practice, including tradition
• Cross-identity intellectual solidarity must rest on acknowledging differing privileged locations, not ignoring them.
• Da’wa remains exhortation while amr bil ma’ruf can legitimate physical force
• Daewa is a modern organizational term rather than a classical doctrinal category.
• Daily moral attention to sins governs the ability to pray
• Devout Muslim women distinguish religious acts from mere custom when justifying the veil
• Different accounts of human agency shape women’s capacity to endure inequality
• Direct marriage proposals by men are legitimate under Islamic precedent
• Disciplining anger is reframed as organizing conduct toward God rather than suppressing feeling.
• Discourse establishes authority through the formation of subjects, not mere assertion
• Dissenting participants stay in pietist groups to sharpen arguments within Islamic reasoning.
• Docility literally means teachable malleability, implying struggle and exertion rather than passivity.
• Each era’s belief in its culture’s permanence is a necessary illusion
• Egypt mosque construction rose 330 percent between 1975 and 1995.
• Egypt’s mid-nineteenth-century adoption of French civil law restricted shari’a to family law
• Egyptian law is compatible with sharia despite European derivation
• Egyptian law’s success proves its compatibility with sharia
• Egyptian secularists oppose the veil while still endorsing modesty as a feminine virtue
• Egyptian social conservatism partly stems from Gulf laborer repatriation
• Egyptian state secularism regulates religious practice into state-endorsed forms
• Egyptian women students pragmatically push back against the modesty doctrine they are taught
• Egyptian women’s religious organizing began as charity work in the late 1930s
• Embodied practices make linguistic resignification alone unable to destabilize norms
• Emotions are constitutive conditions giving acts their excellence, not just causes.
• Enjoining good legitimates force more readily than da’wa does.
• Ethical habituation aims to make conscious choice redundant yet still requires vigilant self-monitoring
• Ethics is best studied through lived practice, not moral codes alone
• Ethics is constituted by practical activities and embodied dispositions, not by norms or ideas
• Even feminist-leaning Muslim scholars retain the premise that female appearance threatens communal integrity.
• External bodily acts like prayer are understood to produce inward moral dispositions
• Fear is internal to the prayer act itself, not merely its motive.
• Female mosque participants invoke juristic plurality to challenge male religious authority.
• Feminist reform of others’ lifeworlds risks destroying forms it fails to comprehend
• Feminist theory has integrated racial, class, and national difference but neglected religious difference.
• For these Muslim women outward bodily practice is the means of acquiring virtue
• Foucault’s fourfold ethics scheme is a question-posing tool, not a blueprint
• Guha treated women and peasants alike as agents needing historical restoration
• Habitual sin erodes the very capacity to distinguish right from wrong
• Habitual veiling and custom-based veiling both miss its ethical-training function
• Habitus is a permanent character trait whereas habits are changeable
• Hadith practice is a living discursive field, not fixed citations
• Honest analysis may have to unsettle a scholar’s own deepest values
• Housework can be experienced as harmony between hand and object
• In Arabic, piety and fear of God share one word, taqwa.
• In this moral psychology, fear has epistemic rather than merely motivational value
• Individual moral agency resists being dissolved into larger social movements
• Inquiry must not presume one’s own politics will be vindicated or ground the analysis.
• Invented traditions use claims of continuity with the past to inculcate norms.
• Islamic doctrine is contested within the mosque movement over how principles apply in practice
• Islamic law holds women answerable only for their own piety, not their husbands’.
• Islamic moral cultivation inherits Aristotle’s model of character formed by outward repetition
• Islamic moral norms are self-monitored through ascetic interpretive practices rather than legally enforced.
• Islamic piety movements contain internal contestation over how divine principles apply in practice.
• Islamic piety movements critique treating religion as abstract values detached from daily practice
• Islamic religious concepts cannot be separated from secular institutional change
• Islamic revival found wide middle-class support, not just among the dispossessed
• Islamic revivalism attracted middle classes through critique of Western lifestyles
• Islamic welfare groups filled the service vacuum left by states under neoliberal pressure
• Islamist and liberal discourses are intimately linked, not opposites
• Islamist dress rules protect men’s sexuality, not women’s, from public exposure.
• Islamist groups built parallel welfare networks that outpaced weak secular state institutions
• Judging practices by feminist potential rests on superiority hierarchies that ally with coercion.
• Juridical systems of power discursively produce the subjects they claim to represent
• Juristic pluralism is asserted by working-class women, not only elites
• Kantian ethics made morality rational and shorn of embodied form, displacing Aristotelian ethics
• Leftists dismissed Islamic revival as superficial based on electoral results that later reversed
• Leftists explained religious revival through ignorance, Saudi influence, and regime mimesis
• Liberal autonomy is procedural, so illiberal acts count as free when voluntarily chosen.
• Liberal discomfort with piety movements exceeds their actual threat level
• Liberal feminism reads agency as a latent drive for autonomy awaiting release
• Liberal feminism’s agency frame blinds analysis of pious women’s movements
• Liberal scholarship marginalizes conservative cultural groups it finds repugnant
• Mass-printed Islamic pedagogy blurred the scholar-ignorant distinction.
• Massive demand for everyday Islamic conduct guidance spawned a media industry
• Mastering a subordinating tradition can enable deviation from it
• Modern ethics shifted from being to doing as the supreme value of action.
• Modern legal codification abstracted shari’a from lived daily practice
• Modern print protocols now shape how classical Islamic texts reach lay readers
• Modest dress and veiling function as practical defenses of community
• Mosque da’iyat organize summer programming to reach girls beyond regular attendees
• Mosque-movement morality is individualizing but not juridical, lacking centralized enforcement.
• Movements’ political force depends on their ethical cultivation practices
• New Islamic genres redirect old concerns rather than replace them
• Norms are performed and inhabited, not merely consolidated or subverted.
• Not all contemporary social movements center on identity politics or rights claims
• One cannot understand resistance apart from the embodied attachments a subjectivizing practice enables.
• One daeiya presented contested practices as optional choices rather than fixed rulings
• Outward bodily practices are the material means for cultivating religiosity
• Outward practice produces inward virtue rather than merely expressing it
• Outward practices create inner desires rather than express them
• Outward religious behavior can be a means of producing inner piety
• Performance excellence destabilizes norms in Butler’s model but consolidates them in piety practice
• Persuasion succeeds only when both parties share underlying moral commitments
• Persuasion within a moral tradition depends on shared background assumptions
• Pietist pedagogy is structured by internal disagreement over scriptural interpretation.
• Piety and fear of God are near-synonymous in Quranic Arabic
• Piety distinguishes ethical formation from mere identity signaling in practice
• Piety teachers counsel wives to yield on voluntary practices but resist only obligatory ones.
• Pious fear is internal to action’s structure, a felicity condition of it.
• Pious Muslims distinguish virtue-forming practice from mere identity signaling
• Pious practice aims to make worship govern everyday life, not just fulfill ritual duties
• Pious subjects are constituted by virtuous performance rather than preceding it.
• Pious women’s conflicts with authority do not reduce to gender-equality arguments.
• Pious young women dispute hierarchical readings that forbid even respectful gaze toward known men
• Political agency cannot be grasped apart from ethical agency
• Political certitude must be suspended to understand others’ lives
• Political solidarity, not natural affinity, must ground feminist sisterhood
• Political transformation requires working on embodied registers of life.
• Politically responsible scholarship cannot assume gender equality is universally fulfilling
• Popular mosque teachers faced criticism from educated elites over doctrinal imprecision
• Popular piety practice is often criticized by the more doctrinally educated as imprecise
• Postcolonial feminist lefts across Muslim countries shared a critical Marxist inheritance
• Power operates through passionate attachments, not just constraint
• Power produces subjects and desires rather than merely repressing them
• Practices that destabilize male authority need not be motivated by resistance to it
• Prayer ideally becomes an unreflective bodily necessity like eating
• Private male tutors for exams make gaze-lowering socially awkward for pious young women
• Progressive leftists explained Islamic revival as ignorance or foreign imposition
• Progressive Muslim scholarship can coexist with patriarchal premises about female modesty.
• Progressive scholars’ visceral repugnance toward piety movements blocks understanding
• Quranic recitation mastery precedes women’s entry into religious teaching
• Reading all resistance as heroic obscures how power actually works
• Reclassifying moral duty as individual obligation opened religious speech to women
• Redefining daewa as an individual obligation opened space for women’s religious authority
• Religious accounts of partial human agency enable survival under patriarchal inequality
• Religious arguments transform as they travel across class and status divisions.
• Religious subject formation operates through micropractices of persuasion rather than indoctrination
• Religious weeping is intentional devotion, not involuntary personal suffering.
• Repeated bodily practices form the self rather than merely express it
• Resistance acts often reinscribe capitalist and bourgeois power rather than escape it
• Resistance practices should be read diagnostically rather than as heroic defiance.
• Restricted moral choices can still constitute real agency through self-cultivation.
• Rida and Abduh’s commentary founded the Salafi movement
• Ritual worship in Egypt has become folkloric custom detached from piety
• Romanticizing resistance collapses meaningful distinctions between its forms
• Sacred-text authority derives from practical power contexts, not scholarship alone
• Scriptural rulings on gender segregation admit flexibility where absolute prohibition creates hardship
• Secular leftists attributed the Islamic revival to ignorance, Saudi money, and Western conspiracy.
• Secular liberals read public religion reductively as power, not meaning
• Secular-liberal discomfort is a datum to interrogate, not a ground for judgment
• Secularists reject the veil while preserving modesty as a feminine virtue
• Sincere religious emotion must arise from inner feeling, not public performance
• Skepticism toward political norms is essential to intellectual inquiry
• Social prescriptions can constitute the self rather than constrain it.
• Socially prescribed behavior forms the conditions of self-emergence, not its obstacle.
• Socially prescribed conduct can serve as scaffolding for self-realization rather than constraint
• Solidarity must emerge from uncomfortable encounters, not shared liberal presuppositions
• Some social movements aim at ethical self-formation rather than rights and recognition politics
• State absorption of daily life makes any world-making project inherently political
• State Islamization forced feminist politics into a resolutely secular oppositional stance
• State regulation makes every world-making project necessarily political
• State repression drove women’s religious teaching underground into private homes
• Subordination to tradition can itself enable transgressive agency.
• Subversive acts resist predictable or predetermined emancipatory meaning
• Subverting norms requires retraining bodies, not resignifying signs.
• Suffering and survival under patriarchy can themselves be modalities of agency.
• Sunni law bars women from leading men in mixed prayer
• Suppressing anger as religious duty diminishes the provocateur’s power
• Taylor defines freedom as critical self-reflection, not merely acting as one wants
• The anthropologist projected her own liberal assumptions onto piety practitioners
• The Arabic term fitna links female appeal to civil strife and rebellion.
• The body is deliberately cultivated toward habits that bypass conscious choice
• The constative claim is always to some degree performative
• The da’iya’s religious authority is not fixed by social location
• The daewa pedagogical space is defined by debate and disagreement as much as consensus
• The duty of lowered gaze presumes rather than forbids mixed-sex interaction
• The idea that all of woman is ‘awra postdates the Quran as later doctrine
• The Islamic umma is a theological space of discipline, not an imagined political community
• The mosque movement arose against religiosity reduced to abstract belief detached from daily practice
• The Muslim Brotherhood grafted modern political-organizational strategies onto Islamic da’wa
• The popular manuals repurpose jurisprudence as practical worship rules, not legal scholarship
• The question is what produces individuality, not how society acts on individuals
• The resisting subject is itself produced by the norms it opposes.
• The secular state’s regulatory ambition makes all social activity inherently political
• The sexual act is a learned technique added to desire from outside
• The state reduces Islam to ceremonies detached from conduct
• The veil provokes strong reactions across dissimilar liberal states
• Theoretical formulations are constitutively stained by the particular examples they arise from.
• Tradition links practitioners across past, present, and future through embodied pedagogy.
• US backing for Zia’s Islamist dictatorship crushed Pakistani opposition capacity
• US-backed military Islamization drove Pakistani feminists into secular absolutism
• Veiling debates resist simple liberal-conservative categorization
• Virtue ethics requires ongoing vigilance even after habits become automatic
• Virtues that militate against autonomy can still constitute agency
• Virtuous fear is internal to pious acts, not merely their motivation.
• Western feminist outrage over the burka served imperial war aims
• Women cultivate religious desire through deliberate training embedded in mundane daily tasks.
• Women justify religious leadership through juristic disagreement, not gender equality
• Women’s agency can operate through subordination, not against it
• Women’s mosque teaching is historically unprecedented in Egypt and reshaped male-centered Islamic pedagogy.
• Working-class mosque lessons are informal and interactive, unlike elite ones.