Saba Mahmood

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The agency of women in Islamicate societies is largely anchored in ideas over pious circles and gender-specific rituals. Recent studies attest religious modes of women's presence in the public space a high significance. Taking the case of Iran, the urging question is how and to which extent religious agency within female pious circles-which were formed before the 1978/9 Revolution and fashioned after it-has been able to attain broader civil significance beyond these circles. This study explores the inner dynamics of female pious circles among women as related to structural power relations. It spells out the process of "self-spiritualization" to characterize interactions within the circles that act as a tool for self-elevation and self-authorization and as a mode of spiritually legitimated construction of hierarchies within the circles' spiritual em-powerment. It is argued that a type of pious competition between the women unfolds leading to an affirmation of gender segregation and concomitantly, of submission to in-stitutionalized structures of masculine hierarchy and power. Finally, it pursues the effects of unfolding "self-spiritualization" through elevation, authenticity and self-authorization that might achieve a considerable degree of self-empowerment for negotiating gender roles and political life attitudes.

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:

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.

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.”

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 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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.