Politics of Piety The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

In the first chapter of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Saba Mahmood explores the revival of Muslim women and some of the challenges Muslim women face in Cairo, Egypt in 1995. The women's mosque movement provided their own lessons and teachings of the scriptures, social practices, and the refinement of the "ideal virtuous self." The adoption of the hijab and the autonomous piety in the mosque movement sets the subjects in a transcendental liberal theory in a presupposed religion where women are subordinate. Mahmood describes the two common freedoms in the liberal theory that are both infused in the concept of individual autonomy, negative freedom, and positive freedom. Negative freedom refers to the "absence of external obstacles to self-guided choice and action", while positive freedom is understood by the "capacity to realize an autonomous will...self-mastery and self-government." (Mahmood pg.11)  The liberal theory of freedom brings to light resistance and the "westernization" idea of Muslim women's oppression. However, Mahmood critiques the idea of resistance by redirecting the issue to subject and power. She builds on Judith Butler's Poststructuralist Feminist Theory of sex/gender dichotomy, which expands into a much greater depth of societal norms and aspirations in piety. Also tied into Butler's analysis, Michel Foucault draws an insight to the subject of Power and it's relation to the subordination of women in the Muslim religion. Rather than the domination of others, power is a mere product of operations to subdue discourses of oppression within the mosque movement.

Mahmood's approach is internal, rather than the common "outside view." On one hand, we hear about the oppression and subordination of women within the Muslim religion. Yet, on the other hand, we rarely hear about the advances and modernity of pious Muslim women. It is a movement that we can all admire as these women operate on their own view of freedom. The freedom to believe, read, teach, and exercise a religion that is predisposed to men.