ABSTRACT
Saba Mahmood’s 2005 Politics of Piety is an excellent example of evaluation in action.
Mahmood’s book is a study of women’s participation in the Islamic revival across the Middle East. Mahmood – a feminist social anthropologist with left-wing, secular political values – wanted to understand why women should become such active participants in a movement that seemingly promoted their subjugation. As Mahmood observed, women’s active participation in the conservative Islamic revival presented (and presents) a difficult question for Western feminists: how to balance cultural sensitivity and promotion of religious freedom and pluralism with the feminist project of women’s liberation? Mahmood’s response was to conduct a detailed evaluation of the arguments made by both sides, examining, in particular, the reasoning of female Muslims themselves. In a key moment of evaluation, Mahmood suggests that Western feminist notions of agency are inadequate to arguments about female Muslim piety. Where Western feminists often restrict definitions of women’s agency to acts that undermine the normal, male-dominated order of things, Mahmood suggests, instead, that agency can encompass female acts that uphold apparently patriarchal values.
Ultimately the Western feminist framework is, in her evaluation, inadequate and insufficient for discussing women’s groups in the Islamic revival.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
module |5 pages
Ways In To The Text
section 1|19 pages
Influences
module 1|4 pages
The Author and The Historical Context
module 2|5 pages
Academic Context
module 3|5 pages
The Problem
module 4|4 pages
The Author’s Contribution
section 2|19 pages
Ideas
module 5|5 pages
Main Ideas
module 6|5 pages
Secondary Ideas
module 7|4 pages
Achievement
module 8|4 pages
Place In the Author’s Work
section 3|21 pages
Impact
module 9|5 pages
The First Responses
module 10|5 pages
The Evolving Debate
module 11|5 pages
Impact and Influence Today
module 12|5 pages
Where Next?