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

There ain't no black in the Union Jack

The politics of the veil

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How much is enough? A risk management approach to computer security

This article examines how EU and NATO enlargement is framed by the dichotomy of Europe versus Eastern Europe, and how the enlargement process simultaneously transforms that dichotomy. I argue that the double enlargement is underpinned by a broadly orientalist discourse that assumes essential difference between Europe and Eastern Europe and frames difference from Western Europe as a distance from and a lack of Europeanness. I suggest that in order to expose and undercut this reinscription of otherness, research on East-Central Europe should engage with postcolonial theory in a more direct and sustained fashion.

Europe's eastern expansion and the reinscription of otherness in East-Central Europe

Imagining the Balkans. Maria Todorova. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xi +257 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Imagining the Balkans

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xv INTRODUCTION In the Shadow of the Balkans,On the Shores of the Mediterranean 1 CHAPTER ONE Mapping the Terrain of Memory 15 PART I.MAKING AND BREAKING STATES CHAPTER TWO Geographies of Violence:Remembering War 49 CHAPTER THREE Constructing the "Trieste Question," Silencing the Exodus 76 CHAPTER FOUR Revisiting the History of World War II 97 PART II.MAKING MEMORY CHAPTER FIVE The Politics of Submersion:The Foibe 129 CHAPTER SIX Narrating Exodus:The Shapes of Memory 168 CHAPTER SEVEN Remaking Memory:The View from Istria 207 CHAPTER EIGHT Balkan Shadows,Balkan Mirrors:Paradoxes of "Authentic Hybridity "245 EPILOGUE "Good-bye,Homeland "266 Notes 275 Glossary 287 Bibliography 288 Index 317

History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans

This article critiques prevalent assumptions about hybridity through analysis of identity in a quintessentially hybrid site, the western borderlands of the former Yugoslavia. Drawing on the case of a contemporary regionalist movement embracing a hybrid identity in the Istrian peninsula, it demonstrates the ways in which the hybridity concept replicates, both conceptually and in everyday life, the logics it ostensibly opposes. It does so by revealing the mutual constitution of discourses of purity and hybridity within the context of historical statebuilding projects in the region. Furthermore, the analysis indicates that understandings of difference and forms of exclusion grounded in both nature and culture have long histories along the eastern Adriatic. The operation of an avowedly culturalist conception of identity that nonetheless naturalizes and territorializes/grounds culture through horticultural and vegetative imagery foreshadows the cultural fundamentalism identified by Stolcke as a feature of cont...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/379633

"Authentic hybrids" in the balkan borderlands

This article reviews three recently published books on Habsburg Trieste, inquiring into the reasons for increased interest in this topic. The author suggests that this represents a type of 'imperial nostalgia' for the world we have lost, in particular for a political experiment in religious and ethnic diversity (as embodied by the flourishing of imperial Trieste's Jewish community) outside of the nation-state form. This nostalgia, in turn, reflects current concerns with identity, including scholarly attempts to theorize the contemporary situation in which the power of the nation state has been transformed. The analysis reveals that certain authors misread the realities of imperial Trieste through the lens of contemporary meanings of cosmopolitanism and tolerance. As an alternative, the article sketches out what the 'actually existing cosmo­politanism' of the Habsburg city consisted in.

Imperial nostalgia: mythologizing Habsburg Trieste

Although Italian colonialism began to claim scholars' attention in a systematic way from the 1970s on, colonialism's epilogue—decolonization—remains largely ignored for the Italian case. What scholarship has been produced on the decolonization process after fascism's defeat tends either to focus on the details of the international treaty debates by which Italy's former possessions received independence or became trusteeships (the domain of diplomatic history), or to consider whether Italy constitutes a “postcolonial” space (the realm of cultural studies). Analyses of the latter variety note the general lack of public consciousness about Italy's colonial past or postcolonial present. Pinkus, for example, describes the cultural consequences of decolonization in terms of a nonevent: “The term nonevent suggests, indeed, that the lack of any traumatic severing of Italy's colonial appendages has contributed to the lack of a full-scale national reevaluation of the country's colonial past.” In an evocative analysis, Pinkus interprets Antonioni's 1962 film L'eclisse (The eclipse) as symptomatic of the eclipsing of the memories of colonialism's end. In the postwar period, she claims, such memories became displaced onto Italy's “conquest” of its urban peripheries (Italy's “deserts”) and their transformation into large-scale residential neighborhoods. Yet Pinkus conflates the recent silence about decolonization with silence about decolonization at the time of events, assuming the “lack of any traumatic severing of Italy's colonial appendages.” One visible (at least at the time, if not subsequently) and little explored aspect of the “trauma” of decolonization was the repatriation of Italian nationals from the ex possedimenti, or former possessions.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0010417507000680

Pamela Ballinger

Papers

Imagining the Balkans

History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans

"Authentic hybrids" in the balkan borderlands

Imperial nostalgia: mythologizing Habsburg Trieste

Borders of the nation, borders of citizenship: Italian repatriation and the redefinition of national identity after world war II