Saba Mahmood, Associate Professor

Sociocultural Anthropology

Anthropology of subject formation, liberalism, and secular modernity; feminist and poststructuralist theory; religion and politics; Islam, the Middle East , and South Asia.

Profile

My research interests lie in exploring historically specific articulations of secular modernity in postcolonial societies, with particular attention to issues of subject formation, religiosity, embodiment, and gender. In my book, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005), I addressed some of these issues through an ethnography of a women’s piety movement that is part of the larger Islamist movement in Egypt . My analysis of the Islamist movement in this book is guided by three central questions: In what ways do these movements help us rethink the normative liberal account of politics? How do the politics of gender in these movements parochialize key assumptions within feminist theory? How does a consideration of the debates about embodied practice among Islamists and their secular critics help us understand the conceptual relationship between the specificity of bodily form and the process of subject formation?

My second project focuses on secular-liberal interpretations of Islam in the context of the Middle East and South Asia . Islamic liberal thought has increasingly come to be imagined as a site of hope that has the potential of saving Islam from its more militant and fundamentalist interpreters—a hope that has only mushroomed since the events of September 11, 2001. Yet it seems like we understand very little about what exactly this object called “liberal Islam” is and why it appears to have such salvific qualities. My current project is an exploration of the writings of key Muslim reformers from the early twentieth century, as well as some of their contemporary followers in Pakistan , Egypt , and Lebanon , who have attempted to integrate key precepts of liberal political thought within Islamic modes of reasoning and argumentation. In addition to analyzing how certain secular-liberal principles have been reformulated within discourses of Islam, I am interested in exploring the texture of those ineffable modes of attachments that form the substrate of rational arguments and judgments within this liberal discourse. By incorporating ethnographic fieldwork with historical analysis, I hope to build upon my earlier work on embodied capacities to think through the visceral modes of appraisal that undergird liberal, conservative, and radical political projects alike despite the important differences between them.

Before pursuing a PhD in anthropology, I also studied and practiced architecture with a short lived foray into the study of political science. My involvement in these fields continues to inform my navigations through the anthropological terrain in unexpected ways.

Representative Publications

"Secularism, Hermeneutics, Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation," Public Culture 18(2): 323-247

2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Winner of the 2005 Victoria Schuck Award, American Political Science Association
Honorable Mention, 2005 Albert Hourani Book Award, Middle East Studies Association

2003. “Ethical Formation and Politics of Individual Autonomy in Contemporary Egypt,” Social Research, 70(3):1501-1530.

2003. “Questioning Liberalism, Too: A Response to ‘Islam and the Challenge of Democracy,’” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum April/May 2003. Reprinted as "Is Liberalism Islam's Only Answer?" in Islam and the Challenge to Democracy, J. Cohen and D. Chasman, eds. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2004.
2003. "Anthropology and the Study of Women in Islamic Cultures." Disciplinary entry on anthropology, in The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, 307-14. Leiden : Brill.

2002. “Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency” (with Charles Hirschkind), Anthropological Quarterly, 75(2):339-354.

2001. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology, 6(2):202-236. This essay won the Cultural Horizon Prize from the Society for Cultural Anthropology in 2002.

2001. “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of
Salat,” American Ethnologist, 28(4):827-853.

1996. “Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism: Comments on Stuart Hall’s ‘Culture, Community, Nation,’” Cultural Studies, 10(1) 1-11.