For week’s seven reading I found it personally challenging
but nonetheless a good challenge to digest. In
Saba Mahmood, Politics Of Piety is
an analysis of Islamist cultural politics through her ethnographic study of the
women’s piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. She carefully examines this non-liberal
movement and is essentially arguing that their are alternatives ways through
which we may understand the women’s movement in Egypt which challenges Western
liberalism thinking. The author is speaking out against and critiquing
normative liberal assumption about what constitutes human nature and agency and
how liberalism thought on this subject has become the common shared belief.
One of the ways
through which she examines this movement is her emphasis on agency (the
humanist desire for autonomy and self-expression). She looks at other forms of
analysis of agency by looking at Janice Boddy’s study of agency of the women in
northern Sudan on women’s zar cult.
Janice argues that the zar possession (a widely practiced healing cult that
uses Islamic Idioms and spirit mediums which is mostly practiced by female) serves
as “a kind of counter-hegemonic process where the “officially ideology “ of
Islam is dominated and controlled by men (pg.7). The relevance of this is Mahmood
is pointing out that there are different ways of performing autonomy through
resistance where women assert their presence in predominate patriarchal society
that otherwise Western Liberalism thought would not take into consideration as
forms of self-expression that are opposing the “official ideology” of Islam. Similar to Mohanty’s claim in “Under Western
Eyes”, that there are different meanings of what the veil means, that there
isn’t just a universal oppression of women through sexual segregation, that you
need to look at the local, cultural, and historical context to understand the
significance of a cultural movement.
She also examines freedom by critiquing liberal
assumptions of freedom that have become universal. She is arguing that there
are different forms of resistance and what it means to be “free” depends on
where you stand in the world. The author gives an example of two different perspectives
of feminist views on freedom depending on the individual. For Native- and
African American feminist argued that freedom, for them, consisted in being
able to form families due to the long history of slavery and racism and white
middle-class feminist want to get rid of the nuclear family, which was
predicated upon women’s oppression. She
really emphasis how feminist need to re-valuate their thinking about freedom and
is dependent upon the individual’s autonomy and where they stand in the
world-race,class, ethnicity and historically.
This is also Similar to “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” and the authors
claim when she asserts, “ Can we only free Afghan women to be like us or might
we have to recognize that even after “liberation” from the Taliban, they might
want different things than we would want fro them?”(pg.787, Abu-Lughod). Both
authors are critiquing and questioning white centric liberalism assumptions of
liberation and that it is assuming it knows a better way when you “save”
someone from something or that agency and freedom are fixed meanings.
What is crucial in their standpoints is both
authors have similar messages: To rethink our conventional understandings. To
not just look at the veil as a sign of oppression or that Afghan women need saving,
that the mosque movement is just a sign of resistance and that their is a fixed
meaning of agency. They are both proclaiming
that we need to recognize and respect differences— that there are different
ideas on what it means to be a human or what justice and freedom means to the individual
as products of different histories, as expression of different circumstance’s
and as manifestations of differently structured desires( Abu-Lughad,pg. 787 “Do
Muslim Women Really Need Saving?”).
This kinda reminded me of weeks 7 readings..how these women perform their agency during the Arab Spring
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