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

progressives uncomfortable, and to examine the constitutive elements and sensibilities that comprise this discomfort. This task takes on a particular urgency since the events of September 11 , 2001, wherein a rather heterogeneous collection of images and descriptions associ- ated with "Islamic social conservatism" ( key among them, women's subordi- nate status in Muslim societies) are made to stand in for all that liberals and leftists are supposed to fi threatening to their entire edifi of beliefs, values, and political system (see Hirschkind and M ahmood 2002 ). In many ways, this book is an exploration of, to evoke Connolly again, the "visceral modes of ap- praisal" that produce such a reaction among many fellow liberal--left intel.. lectuals and feminists, as much as it is an exploration of the sensibilities that animate such movements. The aim of this book, therefore, is more than ethnographic: its goal is to parochialize those assumptions-about the consti- tutive relationship between action and embodiment, resistance and agency, self and authority-that inform our judgments about nonliberal movements such as the women's mosque movement.
    It is in the course of this encounter between the texture of my own repug- nance and the textures of the lives of the women I worked with that the po- litical and the ethical have converged for me again in a personal sense. In the course of conducting fi ldwork and writing this book, I have come to recog- nize that a politically responsible scholarship entails not simply being faithful to the desires and aspirations of "my informants" and urging my audience to "understand and respect" the diversity of desires that characterizes our world today ( cf. Mahmood 2001a). Nor is it enough to reveal the assumptions of my own or my fellow scholars' biases and ( in)tolerances. As someone who has come to believe, along with a number of other feminists, that the political project of feminism is not predetermined but needs to be continually negoti.. ated within specifi contexts, the questions I have come to ask myself again and again are: What do we mean when we as feminists say that gender equal- ity is the central principle of our analysis and politics? How does my enmesh- ment within the thick texture of my informants' lives affect my openness to this question ? Are we willing to countenance the sometimes violent task of remaking sensibilities, life worlds, and attachments so that women of the kind I worked with may be taught to value the principle of "freedom" ? Further- more, does a commitment to the ideal of equality in our own lives endow us with the capacity to know that this ideal captures what is or should be fulfi .. ing for everyone else? If it does not, as is surely the case, then I think we need to rethink, with far more humility than we are accustomed to, what feminist politics really means. ( Here I want to be clear that my comments are not di- rected at "Western feminists" alone, but also include "Third World" feminists and all those who are located somewhere within this polarized terrain, since
    these questions implicate all of us given the liberatory impetus of the feminist tradition. )
    The fact that I pose these questions does not mean I am advocating that we abandon our critical stance toward what we consider to be unj ust practices in the situated context of our own lives, or that we uncritically embrace and pro.. mote the pious lifestyles of the women I worked with. To do so would be only to mirror the teleological certainty that characterizes some of the versions of progressive liberalism that I criticized earlier. Rather, my suggestion is that we leave open the possibility that our political and analytical certainties might be transformed in the process of exploring nonliberal movements of the kind I studied, that the lives of the women with whom I worked might have some.. thing to teach us beyond what we can learn from the circumscribed social.. scientifi exercise of