Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report
ISBN: 9781400873531
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Princeton University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Religious minorities -- Egypt; Freedom of religion -- Egypt; Secularism -- Egypt;

Mahmood (Politics of Piety) explores secularism by considering the situation of religious minorities in Egypt. For Mahmood, secularism contains an intense irony, in that the supposed inability of the state to dictate religion leaves few avenues for minorities to redress grievances. Looking at the situation of Coptic Christians and Bahais, she persuasively argues that religious conflict in Egypt is not a result of too little secularization but a clear consequence of secularity. Perhaps the strongest chapter covers family law, where she shows how secularism's relegating religion to the private sphere intensifies religion's control over the other key elements of private life-especially gender and sexuality. Her work contains enough history of Egyptian politics to show how secularism is both an imposed norm of European colonialism and a development internal to Islam. In crisp prose, Mahmood convincingly shows that secularism's promise for equal protection under the law for all religious believers has deeply shaped the modern world, despite the ways in which secularism itself thwarts this hope. This book challenges Western perceptions of the Middle East while deeply questioning the ability of secularism to live up to its promises. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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)


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