Saba Mahmood

In The Politics of Piety, Saba Mahmoud offers a critique of the Western secular feminist project, and its representation of women who support Islamist movements. Interestingly, her discussion immediately reminded me of the unthinkable history of the Haitian Revolution. I think Saba’s text is useful when approached from this perspective because she too is grappling with why and how certain historical occurrences become unthinkable – especially when they blatantly refuse to fit into our conceptual frameworks, and our naturalized categories. The feminist discomfort with women that support Islamist movements is precisely because of the unthinkablity of religion opening up possibilities for emancipation – religion has to, and must be, universally, and a priori excluded from all discussion of female liberation. Rather than treating this feminist assumption as a product of a historically contingent positionality, a “singularity of vision” guides how they treat the Other. I think Saba rightfully points out that because feminism is an overtly political project, its prescriptive aspect further complicates matters. Basically, we decide what it means for a woman to truly exercise her agency, and outside of that, all action is ultimately treated as passive subjugation, and not truly free. I think Saba makes an important contribution when she argues that agency does not exist outside of power, but within it. Hence, agency will take different forms depending on the social structures within which it operates – in short, there are different modalities of agency.  In this much, her text is useful. However, I find this whole business of focusing solely on the religious realm to demonstrate the different modalities of agency problematic because it too contains within it a binary logic in which the Eastern woman seems to be almost irrationality prone to the mysterious forces of religion. I get the sense that we cannot simply discuss the treatment of the other as an academic problem, it implies a necessary shift in our everyday attitude because of the direct implication it has for those who are dehumanized by our present quote-on-quote humanist projects. I am left to wonder, how and in what fashion can the feminist project continue to prescribe without engaging in this singularization of vision?