Saba Mahmood

For more than a decade, criticisms levied against Muslims and Islam in Western European countries such as France and the Netherlands have been shielded under the auspices of a call for increased security and a desire to protect liberal secularism. An example of this can be found in the recent move by the Dutch cabinet to implement legislation to ban the burqa in public places such as schools, hospitals, government buildings, and public transportation. The proposed Dutch ban follows the French parliament who implemented similar legislation in 2011 restricting the presence of discernible religious symbols such as burqas and niqabs from the public sphere. In a statement to the press, Prime Minister Mark Rutte, explains the proposed ban " had nothing to do with religion, " but rather it is intended to help facilitate " recognizable communication " (qtd. in " Netherlands Plans "). He clarifies " In a free country like the Netherlands, everyone has the right to dress how they choose, no matter what others think. That freedom is only limited in situations when it is essential for people to look at each other " (qtd. in " Netherlands Plans "). In this statement the restrictions placed on full face-veils are steeped in concerns of contemporary cultural conflict, inflamed by language that claims that Muslim immigrants to the Netherlands need to be better integrated. In France and the Netherlands, full face-veils have become symbols of " religious extremism " that are actively legislated against. As such they are tied to a series of judgments and evaluations that situate them as objectionable cultural objects and indicative of problematic immigrant groups. Defined as " extremist " or " politically dangerous " this vision of full face-veils is based on normative conceptions of the subject. When considered in relation to the secular, violence is done to those who are visibly different, marked by religious symbols that are understood through binaries such as objectionable/unobjectionable, Western/Eastern, Islamic/Christian, religious/secular further problematizing them. These schisms have intensified in the aftermath of 9/11 and the global war on terror creating a rift between secular and religious worldviews. There is no greater symbolic target of this schism between the secular and the religious than the burqa. The polarization of these two groups, secular and religious has gained further strength when they are posited in relation to the nation state. Within this context secularism is invoked as that which protects the state, defines it, and transforms practices related to public and private life via institutions. This paper explores the invocation of normative dispositions of secularism and security in light of the increasing restrictions placed against Muslim women in the public sphere in France and the Netherlands within dominant discourse. Drawing from the draw work of Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Talal Asad I explore how bodies are marked as " different " within public spaces, through a discussion of the schism between the secular/religious. Such an examination is significant as these legislations are some of the most prohibitive in the West.

Some numbers on religiosity in the U.S.  We are far more religious than our narrative of secularity would suggest.  Religion and politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Saba Mahmood, and Pierre Bourdieu's Doxa and Habitus.  Mahmood suggests:  what about a conservative, religious-orthodox feminism?  Teaching about women's empowerment / agency and the women's veiling movement in MENA.

For source links in blog pieces, go to blog link:

https://www.e-ir.info/2016/12/09/inhabiting-orthodoxy-discussing-islam-and-feminism-continued/

Saba Mahmood begins Politics of Piety with a question: [H]ow should issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and the politics of any feminist project?' She notes that while many forms of 'difference' have been integrated within feminist theory, 'religious difference' has received comparatively little emphasis. She attributes this to the 'vexing relationship between feminism and religion,' arising from feminism's firm situation within 'secular-liberal politics.' In this essay, I explore how Mahmood's insights might enrich the study of premodern Christianity. My particular focus will be a central, yet highly contested, aspect of medieval women's piety: the practice of nuns taking the veil during consecration, marking them as 'brides of Christ'. I hope, with Mahmood, to consider how an analysis of 'the particular form that the body takes might transform our conceptual understanding of the act itself', offering new possibilities for the practice of feminist historiography.

Talal Asad has developed his famous “idea of an anthropology of Islam” (1986) based on Alasdair MacIntyre’s understanding of tradition and virtue and on Michel Foucault’s definition of power and discourse. Through Taha Abderrahmane’s “Trusteeship Philosophy” which is rooted in the Qurʾanic idea of trust (amāna) that bonds the divine, I intend to reread Asad’s anthropology of Islam and analyse anthropological works categorised as belonging to the “ethical turn” (Fassin 2014), particularly Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005). The objective is to show how neglecting Islam at the level of analysis can downplay important and crucial aspects of the reality of faith—particularly the modalities of Muslim-God relationship. After depicting some of the similarities between the two intellectual projects, I will scrutinize the concept of “discursive tradition” that has produced an “ethical turn” in—and beyond—the discipline of anthropology in the sense of focusing on ethical self-making. I will question Asad and Mahmood’s use of MacIntyre’s Aristotelian philosophy by unpacking the notion of the “correct model” or “apt performance” that Asad uses in his conceptualisation as a way to explain what Muslims seek to achieve in order to have ethical coherence. Finally, I will discuss the importance of the trusteeship paradigm’s principles for the anthropological study of Muslims: the principle of requisition, i.e. returning deposits (mabdaʾ al-īdāʿiyya), the principle of signification (mabdaʾ al-āyātiyya), the principle of innateness (mabdaʾ al-fiṭriyya), the principle of wholeness (mabdaʾ al-jamʿiyya), and the principle of testimony or witnessing (mabdaʾ al-shāhidiyya). This article acts as an introduction to a philosophical discussion that is sorely lacking within the ethnographic debate between the proponents of the “ethical turn” and those calling to focus on the “everyday.”

This essay analyzes Saba Mahmood's intellectual career through a close reading of her key texts and signature interventions in anthropology, Religious Studies, and Critical Secularism Studies, while also engaging and responding to major critiques of her thought. This chapter was published in Sarah Bloesch and Meredith Minister's "Cultural Approaches to the Study of Religion: An Introduction to Theories and Methods." (Bloomsbury, 2018).

I am grateful to a range of people who helped me, supported me, or discussed aspects of my work in formal or informal settings. I am thankful to my supervisor, Jon Hellesnes, for his flexibility, patience, friendliness and qualified academic support. I am also indebted to colleagues and friends at the philosophy department, The Artic University of Tromsø, in particular members of the research group Pluralism, Democracy, and Justice:

What is the relationship between Mizrahi feminism and Israeli ultranationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to the 2014 Gaza War and Israel’s foreign policy?

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.

The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.

The liberal influence within feminist theory has led to an emphasis on the theoretical category of agency because it has been typically understood to demonstrate freedom. Thus, the feminist theoretical concept of agency has been debated for years.  In order to work through some of the problematics of the feminist theoretical category of agency when applied to the lives of traditional religious women, I conducted an ethnographic study of American women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Latter-day Saint women offer an interesting framework in which to examine agency because they adhere to an unapologetically patriarchal religion and they use the category as an indigenous concept, although there are some key differences between the LDS view of agency and the way in which the term is generally used in feminist writings. Since a majority of traditional women’s behaviors are grounded in sustaining, not resisting, religious prescriptions, the feminist theoretical use of agency needs to be reconceptualized.

This article reconsiders a question, ‘Is Critique Secular?’, which ostensibly polarised Saba Mahmood and Stathis Gourgouris in the 2008 exchange forum of Public Culture. After positing that Mahmood and Gourgouris are mutually invested in challenging and overcoming the intransigence of epistemic secularism, the article canvasses Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's deconstruction of the Kantian ‘universal secular intellectual’. The article suggests that Spivak's reading of Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone constitutes a vital exercise in democratic criticism that sets into relief an important convergence between Mahmood and Gourgouris as interlocutors. Delineating imbrications among Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Judgment and Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, the article synthesises Jacques Derrida's work on Kantian aesthetics and Spivak's recalibration of the Kantian intellectual as a means to unsettle the recalcitrance of epistemic secularism in academic debate and public culture.

Fecha de aceptación definitiva: 29 de junio de 2010 Resumen: El artículo hace una perspicaz y novedosa contribución al actual debate sobre la relación entre las tradiciones occidental y no occidental de reflexión y de crítica teóricas y de práctica política. La autora cuestiona muchos de los conceptos que han constituido durante largo tiempo parte esencial de la ciencia social moderno-liberal y reconsidera críticamente categorías firmemente arraigadas en dichas ciencias como las de sujeto, acción humana, conciencia, opresión, libertad y autonomía individual. En particular, reconsidera la noción de capacidad humana de acción y problematiza la utilidad teórica de la dicotomía convencional entre opresión religiosa y resistencia. Haciendo uso de esta nueva perspectiva teórica, la autora explora la genealogía y explica las prácticas y formas de subjetividad de las mujeres que componen el movimiento de las mezquitas en Egipto.

Ce texte s’intéresse aux embarras qui touchent – ou que suscite – la parole religieuse dans nos sociétés contemporaines, dès lors qu’elle se manifeste en public et tombe dans l’oreille de tiers. Par "parole religieuse", on entend ici tant les voix explicitement articulées à partir d’une tradition religieuse définie que les voix qui se prononcent sur les religions, notamment lors de "problèmes publics" impliquant les religions et leurs adeptes. Pour contraster ces embarras, comprendre le "travail" émotionnel qu’ils réalisent et saisir leur "composante pratique" , on les décompose selon trois axes (énonciation/réception, Christianisme/islam, Fondamentalisme/modernisme), sur deux terrains (les théories post-séculières et des émissions radiophoniques). Le texte montre alors comment le mode de publication de ces embarras participe de l'instauration d'une nouvelle "méthode de fixation des croyances" que nous nommons la "méthode de la sensiblerie" ; une "méthode" qui a l'insigne désavantage d'être résolument opposée à la "méthode de l’enquête" valorisée par Charles S. Peirce et John Dewey.

In her groundbreaking study, Politics of Piety, Saba Mahmood, a professor of social anthropology, offers an alternative reading of a contemporary women’s movement in Islam, the da’wa (piety) movement in Cairo, Egypt, through an ethnographic study which challenges the universalization of the desire for autonomy and hence the notion of agency as propagated by western liberal ideals. The study is comprised of five chapters wherein Mahmood presents an amalgamation of ethnographic material that is about the da’wa movement and a substantial theoretical analysis through which she addresses the broader questions that cut across the division between the Global North and the Global South, as well as the Muslim and the non- Muslim world.

This is a vivid and illuminating ethnographic account of an emerging force in contemporary Gambian social and religious life: the Tablīghī Jamā’at (TJ).  Through the prism of five detailed biographical narratives, Janson evokes the everyday lived experiences of TJ activists embedded in the socio-cultural matrix of the Gambia.  Her central objective is to dissect the ways in which youth, Islam and modernity – as distinct analytical concepts – intersect and coalesce in the lives of young Gambians seeking paths to piety through a contested arena in which tribal and reformist strands of Islam vie for primacy.  Sensitive yet scholarly, Janson’s presentation is laudable for the way in which her micro observations – the raw field data – are consistently sutured to broader theoretical frames and a comprehensive body of scholarship on the phenomenon of resurgent Islam in several international contexts.  What transpires is a multi-layered work of depth and texture that makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ways in which young women and men, inhabiting an ambivalent postcolonial space caught in the orbit of globalisation, appropriate and internalise religious experience.

Abstract
In this paper we juxtapose the present day Supreme Court battles over the colonial anti-sodomy provisions in the Indian Penal Code (Section 377), with everyday interpretations of carnal intercourse by kotis and jananas in order to visibilize a whole different social world of carnality. The responses to the law coming from the civil society formations (namely the LGBT rights organizations, HIV/AIDS organizations and women’s rights organizations) is the site for the formation of a modern Indian homosexual subject, one who claims her/his rights to love and privacy through the language of human rights and constitutional freedom. We argue the arrival of the modern rights bearing homosexual subject is contested by political and religious formations through discourses of sin, unnaturality and proper sexual conduct. The contestation of religious discourse through discourse of constitutional rights covers over the creative interpretations of religion provided by kotis/jananas. An analysis of the kotis/janana discourse and bodily practices reveals sexual subject formation through creative reinterpretation of notions such as sin and unnaturality. In conclusion we contend the creative interpretations of religious themes by kotis/jananas trouble nationalist religious discourses as well as the constitutional discourses of the LGBT rights movement.

Focuses on three overarching themes in three recent books – the edited volume “Rawls and Religion,” the edited volume “Habermas and Religion,” and Mahmood’s “Religious Difference in a Secular Age” – on challenges of religion: (1) an insistence on some neutral concept intended to theoretically and practically manage the fact of reasonable pluralism, thereby legitimating the use of political power; (2) the possibilities of a postsecular orientation established to strengthen moral and practical motivations in pursuit of stable, well-ordered, and just societies; and (3) the necessity of faith, in a religious and nonreligious sense, to collective public life. Critical scholars increasingly recognize that secularism, in all its varieties, shapes, orients, and remakes the lives of both religious and nonreligious citizens. Secularism deserves consideration as a crucial analytic category alongside the familiar triumvirate of race, class, and gender.

Students at a yoga school in southern India learn physically demanding sequences of āsana (posture, pose) that they conceptualize as tools with which to cultivate inner qualities. In a wide range of contexts, teachers and master practitioners insist that these techniques of the body must be executed in particular ways and accompanied by specific mental states if they are to have their intended ethical effects. Yoga is thus understood to combine out- wardly observable technique with an unobservable yet essential, inner component. One consequence of this to which students and teachers are pervasively oriented is that the techniques become vulnerable to a kind of deethicalization by which they are “bleached” of their spiritual content and reduced to mere physical exercise. The paper begins by com- paring concerns about deethicalization among yoga practitioners with similar ideas about folklorization among participants in a women’s mosque movement described by Mahmood (2012). I then turn to consider three semiotic processes relevant to the specific case: circumscription, performed demonstration and photographically enhanced entextualization. Available open access here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/716433

Draft d'un article proposé à la revue Théorèmes, dans le cadre d'un dossier coordonné par Yann Schmitt et Romain Mollard sur "Pragmatisme et religion".

Résumé : Cet article poursuit deux lignes de discussion : la première regarde la montée en puissance des discours et théories du « post-séculier » ; la seconde concerne la fréquente (et récente) atténuation du caractère tranchant du sécularisme et du naturalisme de John Dewey. S’il m’importe de relever le curieux affadissement du naturalisme et du sécularisme de Dewey chez de nombreux pragmatistes contemporains, c’est afin de mieux répondre aux théories de la « société post-séculière », en opposant à ces théories une critique deweyenne non affadie. Pour faire droit à cette critique non affadie, je reviens sur plusieurs textes de Dewey, trop souvent occultés au seul profit de A Common Faith (Dewey, 1934) – un ouvrage dont la radicalité est d’ailleurs rarement considérée. Ce retour m’autorise, d’une part, à recouvrer la pleine puissance de la critique deweyenne des religions, et donc, par voie de conséquence, à corriger l’affadissement dont cette critique a fait l’objet ces dernières années. D’autre part, ce même retour me permet de montrer combien les positions deweyennes sont difficilement compatibles avec les discours et théories qui réclament l’advenue d’une « société post-séculière » ou d’un « âge post-séculier ».

The mode for nondestructive secularization is translation" -Jürgen Habermas Whereas I doubt that anyone would approach me today in this way, many years ago, a classmate asked me in casual tones if I was "religious." I had just begun my graduate studies and left behind a close-knit community in order to study philosophy, and this unexpected question was both startling and vaguely vexing. Despite my awareness of the perception of others that I was indeed "religious," at the time I did not, and actually would not have wanted to, identify in those terms. Were I pressed to self-identify, it would have been in the terms of belonging to specific communities -in my case, the Anabaptist peace-church tradition and the somewhat ethnically based community of Dutch Canadian neo-Calvinists, or, more generally, Christianity.

Scholars of early modern toleration are divided about Hobbes's role in the development of modern secularism. Much of this debate focuses on whether we should see Hobbes as a modest defender or enemy of toleration, while often neglecting an engagement with critical secularism studies inaugurated by Talal Asad's work. Bringing the insights provided by these new perspectives on secular power to bear upon the analysis of Hobbes's position, this article argues that Hobbes's work in fact includes a poignant early theorization of secular power that anticipates the operations and tensions of political secularism more accurately than more normatively-inclined early modern theories of toleration. Hobbes's arguments on this topic are developed in the course of the evolution of his thinking on military duties from Leviathan to Behemoth, culminating in a distinct model of religious reconstruction. Situating this model at the center of Hobbes's contributions to the development of political secularism, the article thus makes a case for the value of cultivating more robust disciplinary interactions between histories of political thought and critical analysis of secular power.

At stake in the political project of feminism is the relationship of agency to power and, more specifically, the reductive account of agency that emerges when power is simply understood as a repressive force. It is to this notion of power as repression that the chapter first turns before considering accounts of Muslim women’s piety, which challenge such a notion. The first section asks what power is and considers the risks of overemphasizing freedom and resistance as the characteristics of agency in its relationship to power. The discussion then examines how the concept of agency is important to feminist understandings of the role of Muslim women. This section engages with a more sophisticated understanding of power, in which agency is understood solely as a product of subjective power that creates the conditions that shape individuals and give rise to the relations between them. With this in mind, the third section examines how feminist scholars of Islam who examine the specificity of the lived contexts of Muslim women propose a different reading of agency that offers a logic missed by liberal frameworks, one that does not claim to stand outside power in order to resist it. The fourth section sharpens this discussion with an examination of the relationship between agency and subjectivity in the ethical formation of pious Muslim women. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the different intersections between the pious practices of Muslim women and other aspects of their life raise additional issues for the consideration of their agency.
A chapter published in the textbook: Gender: God
Sîan Melvill Hawthorne. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2017. 414 pp

La mise en scène des formes de la masculinité se configure comme l’un des champs privilégiés pour l’observation du pouvoir des normes corporelles. Dans cette communication je souhaite décrire comment le rapport à différents modèles normatifs de la masculinité forge et oriente la construction de l’identité masculine chez une population de jeunes immigrés marocains (20-30 ans) en Europe (en France et en Italie). Plus particulièrement, je proposerai un parcours de réflexion autour de l’idéal normatif masculin hétérosexuel en précisant la manière dont ces jeunes le performent pendant la période de la transition vers l’âge adulte. Dans ce cadre, le corps représente un lieu de réélaboration et de mise en scène des normes qui régissent et structurent l’ordre de genre et l’identification à des modèles hégémoniques de la masculinité.
A travers l’analyse des données recueillies pendant un travail d’observation ethnographique qui se poursuit depuis trois ans, accompagné également d’un vaste corpus d’entretiens approfondis, j’essaierai de décrire les représentations de la masculinité hégémonique chez ces jeunes hommes et les différentes trajectoires par lesquelles ils « habitent » et mettent en scène leurs traits (hétéro)normatifs.

Saba Mahmood’s work on the Muhammed cartoons and on Azazeel underscores how secularity takes form in European and Egyptian debates. I want to take up her reference to Serrano’s Piss Christ as an invitation to consider secularity in the US context and to rethink how we narrate public debates over art and religion that have become constitutive of what historians and sociologists call the US “culture wars.” Mahmood’s attention to cultural production helps us to think through the US culture wars debates over “provocative” works of art, especially artistic work by feminist and queer artists, that have come under fire from leaders of the religious and political right. She provides a model for unpacking the work of secularity in these debates, for understanding alignments of religious freedom versus sexual and gender expression that have taken root during the age of cultures wars. Along with Sedgwick’s work on reparative reading, she also offers a model for opening these debates to other possible readings in our efforts to understand the entanglements of religion, politics, and representation in the historical present.

Longue discussion de l’ouvrage de Florence Bergeaud-Blackler (Le Marché halal ou l’invention d’une tradition, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 2017), pour la rubrique "Grand Résumé" de la revue SociologieS.
Mon texte est accessible à l'adresse : https://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/8233
Tandis que le "Grand résumé" de Florence Bergeaud-Blackler est accessible à l’adresse : https://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/8230 et son autre discussion, par Nedjib Sidi Moussa, à l’adresse : https://journals.openedition.org/sociologies/8232

À travers le cas du pentecôtisme suédois, j’interroge les modalités du dialogue entre christianisme et sécularité. La Suède est reconnue comme « l’un des pays les plus sécularisés » de la planète. Même si cette perspective comparatiste qui procède par nivellement des différences n’en dit que peu de la singularité de chaque modèle de sécularisation, il est intéressant d’étudier le travail d’évangélisation sur un territoire où le religieux semble avoir perdu la bataille politique et historique qui vise à le contenir dans la sphère privée, pour mieux le domestiquer, au sens littéral du terme, et exclure ses supposés penchants « irrationnels » des processus de décisions collectives, qui selon la logique séculière ne devraient être fondés que sur la « rationalité » sous peine d’être corrompus. Il en résulte aujourd’hui un religieux discret pour ainsi dire, qui a donné lieu à l’émergence d’un « pentecôtisme docile », dont les efforts d’évangélisation sont presque invisibles. Ils n’ont en tout cas rien de commun avec la dimension spectaculaire des « croisades » que l’on peut observer ailleurs.
Comment le « prosélytisme » des pentecôtistes suédois en est-il venu à offrir le visage qu’il donne à voir aujourd’hui ? Doit-on y voir l’influence du séculier si prégnant dans ces contrées ? Et si oui, quelles leçons le pentecôtisme a-t-il tiré de sa conversation avec le génie séculier ? Que nous enseigne ce cas sur l’analyse du « prosélytisme » au plan théorique ? En partant d’un récit de conversion d’un pentecôtiste suédois, et en le situant dans son contexte et son ancrage historique, je propose ici une analyse des transformations qu’ont connues les techniques prosélytes en Suède dans les trois dernières décennies. Conjointement, je tente d’interroger ce qui est à l’œuvre dans l’action « prosélyte » au plan anthropologique. Je propose ainsi une réflexion sur la catégorie de « prosélytisme » elle-même, qui ne fait sens que dans le dialogue entre le "séculier" et le "religieux", dans le cadre de pensée séculariste aujourd’hui hégémonique en Europe du Nord.

Em 28 e 29 de março de 2017, acadêmicos de diversas parte do mundo se reuniram no Departamento de Antropologia da Universidade da Califórnia, Berkeley, para refletir sobre alguns conceitos-chave dos escritos de Saba Mahmood. O objetivo não era simplesmente responder ao seu trabalho, mas engajar-se e pensar através dele, e assim conectar diferentes gerações de estudantes que aprenderam com Saba ao longo de seus anos de pesquisa e docência. De Politics of Piety a Religious Difference in a Secular Age, Saba forjou métodos que tocaram o nervo da análise da política, da história, da religião, do gênero, e da sexualidade. Ela produziu modelosem sua produção acadêmica, assim como em seu ensino -comprometidos com questões candentes para as sensibilidades políticas de nosso tempo e demonstrou a importância profunda do conhecimento histórico, cultural e linguístico. Em seus escritos, conceito teóricos emergiram da análise crítica de disciplinas e práticas situadas no tempo e no espaço, sejam eles os movimentos sociais do Egito dos anos 1990 ou as tradições jurídicas Otomanas. O amplo apelo de seus seminários derivava de sua atenção a campos contemporâneos de investigação e da abordagem crítica que ela Those were very fortunate people, Who considered Love an obligation, Or they just loved their task, I remained busy all my life, Loved a little, worked a little, Sometimes love was a snag in the way of my work, While sometimes duty didn't allow me to love with passion, Ultimately I got upset of the situation, And left both my love and my work incomplete. Aquelas eram pessoas bem afortunadas, Que consideravam o Amor uma obrigação, Ou eles apenas amavam a sua missão, Já eu, permaneci ocupado por toda minha vida, Amei um pouco, trabalhei um pouco, Algumas vezes o amor foi um obstáculo para o meu trabalho, Enquanto em outras, o dever não me deixou amar com paixão, Por fim, eu me cansei daquela situação, E deixei tanto meu amor quanto meu trabalho incompletos. Nascida em Quetta, Paquistão, em 1962, Saba Mahmood imigrou para os Estados Unidos em 1981 para estudar arquitetura e planejamento urbano na Universidade de Washington, em Seattle. Ela recebeu seu Ph.D. em antropologia da Universidade de Stanford, em 1998, e ensinou na Universidade de Chicago antes de se transferir para a Universidade da Califórnia, Berkeley, em 2004, onde ofereceu seu último seminário em 2017.

Certains anthropologues ont critiqué la dimension eurocentrique et coloniale des concepts de religion, de symbole et de croyance. Une analyse comparée des religions comme systèmes de croyance définirait ainsi comme constante universelle un concept hérité d'une tradition chrétienne occidentale. Dès lors, quels sont les concepts comparatifs à mêmes de se substituer aux concepts de religion et de croyance ? L'article répond à cette question en analysant le concept de tradition discursive proposé par Talal Asad pour analyser l'islam en tant qu'ob-jet d'une anthropologie. Il propose une relecture critique et philoso-phique de cette anthropologie en insistant sur la dimension discursive, celle du sens et de la rationalité, des incorporations traditionnelles.

Some anthropologists criticize the Eurocentric and colonial dimension of the concepts of religion, symbol and belief. A comparative analysis of religions as systems of belief, it is argued, defines a concept inherited from a Western Christian tradition as a universal constant. What, then, are the comparative concepts that can be substituted for the concepts of religion and belief? The article answers this question by analysing the concept of discursive tradition put forward by Talal Asad to analyse Islam as an object of anthropology. He proposes a critical and philosophical re-reading of this anthropology by emphasizing the discursive dimension, that of meaning and rationality, of tradition.

La ‘agencia’ o la capacidad de decisión y acción ha constituido un tema central en el seno de los estudios y el activismo feminista. Tomando como punto de partida la propuesta de Saba Mahmood este artículo tiene como objetivo, por un lado, mostrar la modalidad de acción pía en varias mujeres españolas conversas al islam y, por otro, valorar en términos feministas la agencia de estas mujeres que conciben su libertad a partir del sometimiento a Dios. Se argüirá que existe la necesidad de deconstruir el sesgo liberal y secular del concepto de agencia que el feminismo hegemónico ha naturalizado, así como de entender la capacidad de acción más allá del binarismo de reproducción patriarcal versus resistencia. Así, se esbozarán las principales características epistemológicas y corporales de la modalidad de acción pía, en las que el cuerpo constituye mucho más que un signo. La conclusión apuntará que si bien el marco en el que se gestan los discursos de género píos son patriarcales, su capacidad de acción tiene una dimensión empoderadora que lleva a estas mujeres a rechazar y negociar ciertas premisas y situaciones de desigualdad en las relaciones de género.

Agency has constituted a key concept within feminist studies and activism. Building on Saba Mahmood’s suggestion, this article seeks to show the pious modality of action in several Spanish new Muslim women, on the one hand, and to assess the agency of these women who conceive their freedom in the act of submission to God from a feminist standpoint, on the other. I will hold that the liberal and secular biases that the concept of agency that hegemonic feminism has naturalized need to be deconstructed, and that agency needs to be acknowledged beyond the dichotomy of patriarchal reproduction via-à-vis resistance. I will thus outline the main epistemological as well as corporal features of the pious modality of action, in which the body functions as much more than a mere sign. The conclusion will suggest that even though the framework in which the pious gender discourses are produced is indeed patriarchal, these women’s agency has an empowering dimension that leads them to reject and negotiate certain premises and situations in which gender inequalities (may) take place.

This contribution responds to Saba Mahmood's critique of secularism and uses it for theory development in liberal political philosophy. Building on the work of Rahel Jaeg-gi I reconstruct selected parts of Mahmood's works as an immanent critique of secular-ism as a form of life. I argue that liberal egalitarian political philosophical approaches to religious difference should broaden the focus of social critique. Beyond-but not instead of-formal regulations such as constitutional law and religious accommodation , political philosophy needs to address what Mahmood calls "ethical sensibilities", and informal social practices and conventions. My considerations are informed by an exploration of the refusal of some pious Muslims to shake hands with someone of the opposite sex, and controversies about this issue in Western-European countries. Keywords form of life-immanent critique-political philosophy-religious difference-secularism Saba Mahmood's contributions to scholarly debates about, for instance, religious difference, secularism, and freedom of religion have been influential well beyond her own discipline, and political philosophy is one of the fields in which her voice was and continues to be heard. Mahmood painstakingly analysed the conceptual tools and normative principles of liberalism and political secularism, and examined their effects under conditions of religious difference both in Egypt, and Europe. Her conclusions are clear: political secularism and the liberal state respectively, she argues, fail to deliver on the promise to please contact the author if you don't have access to the full version.

In this article, Blijdenstein introduces recent reflections on secular liberalism’s treatment of religion and critically discusses those genealogical approaches that centre on uncovering the hidden theological roots of the liberal framework. The claim that contemporary liberal ideas on, for example, religion, secularity and tolerance are in fact ‘Christian’ or ‘Protestant’ comes with its own set of problems, as it hides from view the importance of the different political and historical contexts in which these categories have played, and continue to play, a role. Blijdenstein formulates three caveats on critiques that focus on the persistence of theological categories.

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency.

This article is concerned with thinking transformations of the secular, and does so in relation to two theoretical terrains, while empirically grounded in ethnographies of Christian and Islamic pious women in the Netherlands. A first theoretical terrain under consideration is that of how the relation between modernity and religion is elaborated, notably in secularization theories, and how these established frameworks are challenged by a different kind of articulation between modernity and religion that I observed in narratives and practices of young Evangelical and Islamic women in the Netherlands. The article traces the contours of a 'pious modern', showing how from a faith-centred perspective the modern can be incorporated and indeed produced. In this context, I argue that the way in which notions of modernization and secularization have been theoretically hinged on each other needs to be further revisited, and I propose to consider the 'post-secular' as a new disarticulation between the modern and the secular. A second theoretical terrain concerns questions of agency and subjectivity. Here I trace how situating religious agency in its own grammar makes secular assumptions in social, critical and feminist theory visible, and generates different understandings not only of agency but also of notions such as autonomy, and the capacity to act and shape the world.

To listen for the whisper is to be welcomed into the cacophony of enunciations and the seduction of possible meanings: waswasa. Caught between hearing and mishearing, the whisper is only partially spoken, partially disclosed, and only visible as a trace of the enunciating lips. An embodied utterance exceeding linguistic sense, the whisper emerges as a faint figuration of postlingualism—it is both in and of language, but it pushes us to listen and learn anew.