The chapter, “The Subject of Freedom,” taken from Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject deconstructs the notion of agency and freedom that has become the standard within the “secular-liberal” feminist scholarship of the post-911 world (1). In much the same way as Professor Reza Aslan critiques the vague question: “does Islam promote violence?”, Mahmood uses the question of why women would willingly participate in Islamist movements to complicate the ideas of resistance and power. A key point in the chapter is how “Western popular media” and feminist scholarship oversimplifies and limits the ways in which resistance can take form; therefore, locating “agency in the political and moral autonomy of the subject” (7). In his interview with CNN, Professor Aslan calls out the habit of media to “paint [Islam practicing countries] all with the same brush,” and Mahmood uses this same idea to call out the romanticization of Muslim women’s resistance by saying that there does not exist a list of specific acts that constitute resistance for these women (9). Resistance is informed by the context of power, so by seeing only certain acts (in this case, the Muslim women who are apart of Islamist movements not being one of these accepted acts) as resistance “makes it hard for us to see and understand forms of being and action that are not necessarily encapsulated by narrative of subversion and reinscription of norms” (9).
Mahmood connects modes of agency with acts of resistance by citing Michel Foucault’s ideas that the subject is produced through power relations “which form the necessary conditions of its possibility” (17). What this means is that social norms as a form of power are “the necessary ground through which the subject is realized and comes to enact her agency,” and that agency and resistance is possible within these social norms (19). By acknowledging that agency and the subversion of power is not only contextual of, as well as a product of the historical location these Muslim women are in, Mahmood effectively makes visible the alternative modes of resistance which Lila Abu-Lughod also recognizes. Abu-Lughod focuses on the narrative of the veil as a sign of oppression, and like Mahmood, argues that veiling as a cultural or religious practice “must not be confused with, or made to stand for, lack of agency” (Abu-Lughod 786). Yet to understand the agency of Muslim women who chose to veil or who join Islamist movement does not mean to not be critical of these practices within their cultural context as a “symbolic separation of men’s and women’s spheres” (785). Abu-Lughod and Mahmood pinpoint the discomfort and suspicion many feminist feel towards these topics as inability to accept difference. And both find a solution of keeping the “meaning of agency open” (Mahmood 34), and “accepting the possibility of difference” (Abu-Lughod 787), while still being critical and not resorting to cultural relativism.
Mahmood wants us to think of agency, resistance and freedom as intersecting through the manifestation of social norms. These things are not separate from each other, but they inform each other and create the possibility for Muslim women to find power on their own terms. Mahmood calls to delink agency from “the goals of progressive politics,” which has only served to restrict “the notion of agency within the trope of resistance against oppressive and dominating operations of power” (34). That is not to say that agency does not take this form, but it allows for the delegitimization of resistance outside of these forms, which can be seen in the suspicion towards Muslim women who chose to join Islamist movements.
Works Cited
Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. "Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and its Others." American Anthropologist 104, no. 3: 783-790.
Aslan, Reza. Interview. “Does Islam Promote Violence?” CNN Tonight. CNN. 2014.
Mahmood, Saba. 2005."The Subject of Freedom" in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
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