ABSTRACT
Recent trends in religious studies have focused on 'Islam' as a set of discursive practices rather than as a stable religious or cultural signifier. Academic writing surrounding women and Islam—and more particularly feminism and Islam—has expanded rapidly over the last 15 or so years, much of it positioned along similar lines as conversations in contemporary popular political domains. Mahmood lends a focus to 'embodied' practices, in hopes of showing how investments deemed political and ethical are intertwined. Such an emphasis, along with her use of tropes like piety and secularism, nonetheless relies on a particular vision of the so-called social world that is set apart from private practices. Mahmood's study is worth considering as representative of the scholarly trend within postcolonial and religious studies that attempts to take seriously various turns in poststructuralism yet maintain emphases on experiential insider accounts.
