ABSTRACT

At a public lecture on “Faith and Feminism in Pakistan,” held in February 2013 at CUNY,3 Gayatri Spivak and Afiya Shehrbano Zia4 discussed postcolonial feminist discourses on women, Islam, and nationalism and their theoretical pitfalls. According to one report, the talk centered on “the misguided prescription of those academic and developmental projects that advocate the instrumentalisation of Islam as an appropriate and ‘authentic’ approach in Muslim contexts.”5 Zia in particular launched into a scathing analysis of feminist theoretical postulations on Islamist religiosity. Elaborating the implications of demanding reform agendas by secular women activists, she remarked:

As an example, Zia referred to the favorable reception among Euro-American and postcolonial feminist scholars of Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, an ethnographic study on a group of Salafi women from Egypt’s piety movement. Zia argued that they had neither critically examined nor considered the possibility that Mahmood’s thesis on pietous agency could potentially authorize Islamist women to legitimately embrace illiberal and patriarchal religiosity. She maintained that the lack of debate on this matter likely stemmed from the knowledge production of “diasporics … who have the luxury of not on this matter testing or living in the theory they produce in politically relevant ways.” Such works ignored how women, minorities, and lower classes could yield benefits from “modern, liberal, or secular struggles.”7