TEHRAN – The Persian translation of the book “Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject” written by the Pakistani-American author Saba Mahmood has been released in the Iranian book market.

Tahereh Habibi has translated the book and the Research Center for Islamic Culture and Art has published it in 356 pages, Mehr reported.

“Politics of Piety” is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt's political landscape. 

Saba Mahmood’s compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.

Not only is this book a sensitive ethnography of a critical but largely ignored dimension of the Islamic revival, it is also an unflinching critique of the secular-liberal assumptions by which some people hold such movements to account. 

The book addresses three central questions: How do movements of moral reform help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How does the adherence of women to the patriarchal norms at the core of such movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory about freedom, agency, authority, and the human subject? How does a consideration of debates about embodied religious rituals among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between bodily form and political imaginaries? 

“Politics of Piety” is essential reading for anyone interested in issues at the nexus of ethics and politics, embodiment and gender, and liberalism and postcolonialism.

Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) was a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. 

Mahmood was born in Quetta, Pakistan, where her father was a policeman. In 1981, she moved to Seattle to study at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in anthropology from Stanford University in 1998. She also holds master's degrees in political science, architecture, and urban planning. Prior to joining Berkeley in 2004, she taught at the University of Chicago.

Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of West Asia and South Asia. 

Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.

SS/SAB