The Subject of Freedom

In Saba Mahmood's work, we explore how ideas and notions about freedom and liberty are used in a Western Liberal framework within the humanist minded literature and hegemonic knowledge productions. She contends then is within this liberal model and presupposition of viewing freedom that feminist scholarships fail to give power to the resistance that women enact in Mahmood's piece, especially in the example about the mosque women's movement. This example is critical to Mahmood's because it exemplifies how Muslim women have been able to practice their own forms of power by learning about the Quran and hadiths within the larger male- dominant discourse that many  Western and liberal-minded feminists want to label as mere resistance. There is agency and power within resisting  and we cannot forget that, just because it looks different in other places we aren't accustomed to viewing as liberated in the hegemonic U.S. mindset.

Mahmood argues that there needs to be room within intellectual inquiry in academia to redefine what the subjects of freedom and liberty and piety all mean when we talk about them in a mainstream outlet. Especially since knowledge production is so vital to understanding how perceptions and ideals about freedom and liberty have been and continue to be constructed through a Western voice of coercive and forceful logic or rationale. It is within this challenge to the dominant discourse of freedom and piety that we as scholars will be able to take out the bias of our social location as U.S. inhabitants that fill our minds with unnecessary critique without accountability. How can we redefine what freedom and liberty mean to us now then?