 | Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject Subjects: Feminism -- Islamic countries; Muslim women -- Egypt -- Cairo -- Religious life -- Case studies; Islamic renewal -- Egypt -- Cairo -- Case studies; Feminism -- Religious aspects -- Islam; Women in Islam; Gender identity -- Islamic countries; 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. Saba Mahmood was born in Quetta, Pakistan on February 3, 1961. She moved to the United States in 1981 to study architecture and urban planning at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received a doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University in 1998. She taught at the University of Chicago before joining the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 2004. She was a scholar of modern Egypt who specialized in sociocultural anthropology. Her work focused on the intersection of Islam and feminist theory. She wrote several books including Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject and Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. She died from pancreatic cancer on March 10, 2018 at the age of 57. (Bowker Author Biography) |
