Agency, Gender, and Embodiment by Saba Mahmood

Saba Mahmood in her chapter, Agency, Gender, and Embodiment explores the ways to think of certain ethical practices in relation to gender inequality. Mahmood has two disavowals one is to research different notion of agency that cannot be recovered with restoring the voices of those who were left out of feminist narrative. Second disavowal is to not to refer to the members of the mosque movement as “Subaltern feminists” or as the “Fundamentalist Others”. Mahmood talks about 4 women who meet before going to mosque lessons to talk about ethical issues and they discuss challenges they face in attempting to live piously. She explains that although all Islamic virtues have different expectation from men and women, shyness and modesty (al-haya) is particularly expected more of women than from men. She describes her discussions with Amal an outspoken woman who had to learn to by shy in order to satisfy the “Islamic standards of reserve, restraint and modesty” (156). Even if Amal is still outspoken after trying to establish (istihya), by doing so isn’t she forcing herself to hide parts of the outspoken part of her because it’s not considered pious? Why aren’t men taught to be shy or force themselves to Istihya? How come that isn’t a “marker of an incomplete learning process" to men? (157). Doesn’t the parallel between the veil and Hayat exemplify that both of those actions are socially constructed and performative behaviors? In what other ways is Istihya performed and practiced by Muslim women? Can we go as far as to say that Female Genital Mutilation is enforced on women by some form of Istihya?

            Mahmood argues that action does not issue forth from natural feelings but creates them. She defends al-Haya against western feminist literature by explaining that al-haya brings alternative representations of the feminine body that are denied by masculinist logic. She also explains how there are two opinions on veiling one by Ashmawi who believes that “modesty is not an attribute of the body as it is a characteristic of the individual’s interiority which is then expressed in bodily form” (160) and the women at the mosque believed that the bodily form of veiling is what causes them to establish interior modesty. Those two contradictions can be paralleled with the Aristotelian model Mahmood explains in her text “an ethical act is felicitous only if it achieves its goals in prescribed behavior form” (161) Ashmawi seems to believe that not until the goal of a certain behavior is achieved that the bodily aspect of it can be achieved as well while the women at the mosque appear to think the opposite. Furthermore, Butler distinguishes between performance as a “bounded act” and performance caused by norms that constrain the person’s will or choice so which one of those is practiced by the women at the mosque when they are practicing Istihya? It almost seems to me as if there is a hierarchy within Muslim women about who is more pious than others and who can perform haya better than the other. It reminds me a lot of the Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pizan and how in the book she also establishes a hierarchy of women by only allowing women who have “virtue and morality” to enter the city of ladies as she herself defines what it means to be virtuous. Mahmood also discusses the concept of Sabr and distinct between the ability to endure the pain versus the manner in which you endure it. Finally, Mahmood discusses how women are responsible for the physical wellbeing of their husband and children while the men are responsible for the moral conduct in addition to the physical wellbeing.