WOMEN Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, by Saba Mahmood Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2004 xvi + 199 pages Gloss, to p 203 Refs to p 223 Index to p 233 $55 cloth; $1795 paper This book explores "the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular and to secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of the urban women's mosque movement that is part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt" (p 2) However, Saba Mahmood promises more than an ethnography based on two years of fieldwork (1995-1997) She embarks on an intellectual journey of selfreflection in which she has come "to believe that a certain amount of self-scrutiny and skepticism is essential regarding the certainty of my own political commitments, when trying to understand the lives of others who do not necessarily share these commitments" (p xi) By refusing to take her own political stance as the necessary lens through which the analysis proceeds, the author opens up the possibility that "my analysis may come to complicate the vision of human flourishing that I hold most dear and which has provided the bedrock of my personal existence" (p xii) It is necessary, the author cautions as she embarks upon her inquiry, not to assume that the political position we uphold will necessarily be vindicated or provide the ground for our theoretical analysis As readers, we are invited to join her in "parochializing our assumptions, about the constitutive relationship between action and embodiment, resistance and agency, self and authority - that inform most feminist judgments from across a broad range of the political spectrum about non-liberal movements such as the women's mosque movement" (p 38) It is within that spirit that I have critiqued this book The five chapters are a running argument with and against key analytic concepts in liberal thought as these concepts have come to inform various strands of feminist theory through which non-liberal movements, such as the women's mosque movement, are analyzed Through each chapter Mahmood makes her ethnographic talk back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable "The Subject of Freedom" illustrates the different ways in which the activism of the mosque movement challenges the liberal conception of politics Mahmood analyzes the conception of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this non-liberal movement in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it The pious subjects of the mosque movement occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded in a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status "Topography of the Piety Movement" provides a brief sketch of the historical development against which the contemporary mosque movement has emerged and critically engages with themes within scholarship of Islamic modernism regarding such movements We sense the broad-based character of the women's mosque movement through the author's description and analysis of three of six mosques where she concentrated her fieldwork Despite the differences among the mosque groups - ranging from the poorest to the upper-middle income neighborhoods of Cairo - they all shared a concern for the increased secularization of Egyptian society and illustrate the increasing respect accorded to the da 'iya preacher/religious teacher (who undertakes da'waliterally call, summons or appeal that in the 20th century came to be associated with proselytization activity) "Women and the Da'wa" (pp 64-72) is particularly insightful, as the author juxtaposes the emergence of secular liberalism with the da'wa movement and concludes that "the modernist project of the regulation of religious sensibilities, undertaken by a range of postcolonial states (and not simply Muslim states), has elicited in its wake a variety of resistances, responses and challenges …

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

The politics of the veil

Is there a gender asset gap? This article examines the evidence available on the distribution of wealth by gender around the world and asks why we do not know more. One of the contributions of feminist economics has been to demonstrate that household and individual welfare are not necessarily the same. However, relatively little work has been done that disaggregates the ownership of assets within the household to determine how asset distribution affects the gendered pattern of wealth ownership overall or how it impacts household decisions and women's well-being. As an initial step in this project, a number of factors are examined that affect women's ability to accumulate wealth, with emphasis on marital and inheritance regimes. Finally, the myriad ways in which the gender distribution of wealth is important are discussed.

The gender asset gap: what do we know and why does it matter?

Payments between families at the time of marriage existed during the history of most developed countries and are currently pervasive in many areas of the developing world. These payments can be substantial enough to affect the welfare of women and a society's distribution of wealth. Recent estimates document transfers per marriage amounting to six times the annual household income in South Asia (Rao, 1993), and four times in sub-Saharan Africa (Dekker and Hoogeveen, 2002). This paper first establishes some basic facts about the prevalence and magnitude of marriage payments. It then discusses how such patterns vary across countries depending upon economic conditions, societal structures, institutions, and family characteristics. Such payments have also evolved within societies over time. For example, in some periods such payments have risen sharply. In some cases, payments have shifted from the grooms' sides to the brides', and vice versa. Also, property rights over such payments have sometimes shifted between marrying partners and parental generations. Economists, who have only recently begun to work on the topic, have focused on explaining these facts. The second part of the paper addresses this economic literature. Though considerable insight into many of the facts has been gained, many of the existing economic explanations are weakly convincing, and many puzzles remain. One crucial difficulty is that solid data in this field have been extremely rare. The descriptions of marriage payments in this paper are synthesized from a patchwork of studies across periods, places, and even epochs, and there are doubtless numerous cases which remain undocumented. Thus, the paper

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The Economics of Dowry and Brideprice

For many Westerners, ours seems to be the era of the \"Islamic threat, \" with radical Muslims everywhere on the rise and on the march, remaking societies and altering the landscape of contemporary politics. In a powerful corrective to this view, the French political philosopher Olivier Roy presents an entirely different verdict: political Islam is a failure. Even if Islamic fundamentalists take power in countries like Algeria, they will be unable to reshape economics and politics and, in the name of \"Islamic universalism, \" will express no more than nationalism or an even narrower agenda. Despite all the rhetoric about an \"Islamic way, \" an \"Islamic economy, \" and an \"Islamic state, \" the realities of the Muslim world remain essentially unchanged. Roy demonstrates that the Islamism of today is still the Third Worldism of the 1960s: populist politics and mixed economies of laissez-faire for the rich and subsidies for the poor. In Roy's striking formulation, those marching today beneath Islam's green banners are same as the \"reds\" of yesterday, with similarly dim prospects of success. Roy has much to say about the sociology of radical Islam, about the set of ideas and assumptions at its core. He explains lucidly why Iran, for all the sound and fury of its revolution, has been unable to launch \"sister republics\" beyond its borders, and why the dream of establishing Islam as a \"third force\" in international relations remains a futile one. Richly informed, powerfully argued, and clearly written, this is a book that no one trying to understand Islamic fundamentalism can afford to overlook.

The Failure of Political Islam. By Olivier Roy. Translated from French by Carol Volk. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. xi, 238 pp. $22.95.

The international conference, jointly hosted by the ISIM and the Research Centre Religion and Society (ASSR), on 'Religion, Media and the Public Sphere' was held from 6 to 8 December 2001 at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The theme of the conference evolved out of three prominent debates in the 1990s: the crisis of the post-colonial nationstate, the increasing global proliferation of electronic media, and the rise of religious movements.

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Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

This article investigates how, within less than a decade, face-veiling has turned from a non-issue into a threat to the Dutch nation-state. With good citizenship increasingly defined in cultural terms, politicians have used a strong affective discourse of dislike that produces a sense of national belonging amongst a wide range of people, but excludes face-veiling women. Not (only) the act of face-covering, but the fact that Muslim women are engaged in these acts causes discomfort, anxiety and resentment, as the very same women who are defined as oppressed, turn out to challenge Dutch normativities about gender and sociality through their corporeal presence.

The Dutch and the face-veil: The politics of discomfort

1. Introduction: women and property Part I. Politics, Economy and Kinship: 2. The lives of four women: introducing property and politics 3. Women and inheritance Part II. The Power: 4. The dower: marriage, gender and social stratification 5. Marriage: the prompt dower 6. Repudiation and widowhood: the deferred dower Part III. Paid Labour and Property: 7. Poverty, wage labour and property 8. Gender and garment production 9. Education, professional work and property 10. Women and property revisited.

Women, Property and Islam: Palestinian Experiences, 1920-1990

Women, property and Islam. Palestinian experiences

Most Sanani women appear in public completely covered in black, often including a face-veil. At first sight, this locates Sana, the capital of Yemen, outside the world of fashion. This article, however, argues that fashion is part and parcel of women's outdoor dressing styles in Sana. While some women link their dressing styles to authentic Sanani customs and traditions and others highlight ideological and religious convictions, all refer in one way or another to matters of style and aesthetics. Not only modernist women are engaged in wearing fashionable outerwear, but also women protagonists of an Islamist position, who may be critical of fashion as an institution, find it hard to avoid fashion altogether. Young women who wear covered dress and face-veils in order to conform to what is common in their social circles are also affected by the globalization of dress and attach much importance to being fashionable. Such sartorial practices are not simply a form of Islamic fashion, but rather are a st...

Annelies Moors

Papers

Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

The Dutch and the face-veil: The politics of discomfort

Women, Property and Islam: Palestinian Experiences, 1920-1990

Women, property and Islam. Palestinian experiences

Fashionable Muslims: Notions of Self, Religion, and Society in Sanà