The Subject of Freedom from The Politics of Piety

     In Saba Mahmood’s “The Subject of freedom from the book The Politics of Piety”, Mahmood discusses many points about Islamic women and western women’s differences in culture and politics. Mahmood first talks about the relationship between feminism and religion. When we discuss these two subjects together, we discuss Islam due the importance of the Islamic Movement, the Piety Movement and the Women’s Mosque Movement. What all three of these movements have in common is that they have a part of the Islamic Revival and they also have a history of Islamic women becoming involved and in powered through the work of the movements. This poses a problem according to western feminist because of the overall western feminist theory that "Muslim women need to be saved in a movement that is run by patriarchal rule". Mahmood states that it's not fair to assume that these women have no voice and that although there is patriarchal rule that women have no part in the movement without knowing the history first. For example, one of the main topics about the Women's Mosque Movement and the Piety Movement is how it affected and impacted Egyptian Society. This doesn't just affect men but also empowers women within the movement.

     Within this first chapter, Mahmood also talks about agency and resistance. Mahmood askes the question “How do women contribute to reproducing their own domination and how do they resist or subvert it?” In this case, Mahmood says to focus on women’s agency. Due to the vision that western women and feminist have of Muslim women, discovering women’s agency helps create a voice for Muslim women and also helps feminist make parallels to gender. However, how do we know as a western culture that this always has to mean oppression. Lila Abu-Lughod’s idea of power and resistance challenges this notion that resistance as a Muslim woman doesn’t always mean oppression but can be used as a “diagnostic of power” (P.9). (Refer to Lughod’s example about Bedouin women and sexy lingerie).

     This then leads to the very important question about freedom. What is it and how does it differ from the west and the third world? In this case, there are many different types of freedom. There is positive freedom and negative freedom according to Mahmood. However, there needs to be an understanding that freedom is different and shapes many different lifestyles, practices, brains and bodies. This doesn’t mean that either or is wrong nor right or that one type to freedom is better than the other. Mahmood leaves us with this question about freedom “How do we analyze operations of power that construct different types of bodies, knowledges and subjectivities who’s trajectories do not follow the entelechy of liberatery politics? (P.14)