Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety is an anthropological study, based on fieldwork with women's mosque movements in Cairo, that argues feminist theory has too often assumed agency must mean resistance to religious norms, when the women Mahmood studied cultivated pious virtue and self-discipline as their own form of deliberate agency within, not against, Islamic revivalist practice. The book's authority rests on sustained ethnographic engagement and has been highly influential in anthropology of religion and gender studies. It is also an argument, not a neutral survey, and it has drawn substantial critical response from other feminist scholars who read Mahmood's reframing of agency as underselling the real constraints patriarchal religious structures can impose. Treat it as a major, contested contribution to how scholars think about women's religious agency, not as a consensus account all feminist scholarship now accepts.