Academic Writing: Issues in Arts Politics

In 2011, I stood under a spotlight in the far-right corner of a black box theater. I was playing the character of “Iraqi woman” from Bonnie Dickenson’s Voices in Conflict, a student play based on letters, interviews and blog posts of soldiers in Iraq. Despite the fact that I was dressed in my own burden of representation, I delivered my monologue behind a black chador – a form of veiling. While there were no instructions on what the Iraqi civilian looked like, the director of the play claimed that it was imperative she wore the veil claiming that it is the artistic way of differentiating between the soldiers and the civilian and capturing the essence of the War on Terror. By establishing a visual binary, the director reduced the voices of conflict to Islam vs. the West. The simplification that the visual establishes and my complicated reluctance to want to wear the veil can be used to demonstrate the relationship that Saba Mahmood contends with between liberalism, feminism, and religion which she asserts is most manifest in discussion of Islam. She writes, “this is due in part to the historically contentious relationship that Islamic societies have had with what has come to be called the West but also due to the challenges that contemporary Islamist movements pose to secular-liberal politics” (Mahmood, 1).  

Mahmood introduces her work by claiming that while issues of historical and cultural specificity have led to serious attempts at integrating issues of sexual, racial, class and national difference within feminist theory, questions regarding religious difference have remained relatively unexplored. Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety is both an ethnographic and academic study that challenges the West’s dominant discourse and claims to what feminism and liberalism is vis-à-vis its relationship to Islam. She does so by seeking to “analyze the conceptions of self, moral agency, and politics” in part because “liberal assumptions about what constitutes human nature and agency have become integral to our humanist intellectual traditions” (Mahmood, 5). It is because such assumptions have informed a universal understanding of liberal, feminist theory, the women’s mosque movement in Egypt serves as Mahmood’s entry into contending assumptions feminist theory has made about freedom, agency, and human nature – “such as the belief that all human beings have an innate desire for freedom, that we all somehow seek to assert our autonomy when allowed to do so, that human agency primarily consists of acts that challenge social norms and not those that uphold them, and so on” (Mahmood, 5).

If one were to hold such assumptions to be true, then the women’s mosque movement serves as the anti-thesis of liberal, feminist conditions: “On the one hand, women are seen to assert their presence in previously male-defined spheres while, on the other hand, the very idioms they use to enter these arenas are grounded in discourses that have historically secured their subordination to male authority” (Mahmood, 6). Mahmood frames her contention by expanding the definition and critiquing feminist theory’s grasp on agency and resistance. Mahmood would say that the study of the women’s mosque movement severs the idea of women’s agency from “resistance to domination, and the concomitant naturalization of freedom as social ideal” by enforcing the crucial need to “detach the notion of agency from the goals of progressive politics” (Mahmood,14). What liberal feminist theory would say, in line with Mahmood’s argument, is that the women’s mosque movement is not doing away with social norms, reinforcing the incompatibility between Islam and feminism. By simple acknowledgement of the ways in which liberal feminist theory dictates the conditions of agency, one might presume that the women of the mosque movement have no agency because they are not resisting. What Mahmood unintentionally does, however, is pit Islamist movements against liberal feminism, even in her pursuit of dismantling the binary between them. She is reinforcing the notion or possibility that such matriarchal structures are only inherent to Islam. What about the patriarchal structures that are inherent in Western politics, culture? How might, for example, the emergence of sororities, in a fraternal dominated space, serve as the same example of the women’s mosque movement?

There are two modules working with and against one another here. First, the assumption that resistance (in liberal feminist discourse) must be a form of resisting social norms. Second, that the women’s mosque movement is or should be resistance. The reason why the women’s mosque movement may even be a subject of comparison to liberal feminist scholarship is important because “Western popular media continues to portray Muslim women as incomparably bound by the unbreakable chains of religious and patriarchal oppression” (Mahmood, 7). This is precisely why Mahmood quotes Boddy saying that “there is a tendency among scholars to look for expressions and moments of resistance that may suggest a challenge to male domination” (Mahmood, 8). The visual binary already established by the veiling of the Iraqi civilian can be used as an example of the challenges encountered between liberal secularist feminism and in a postcolonial context. In other words (and to borrow the question posed on our syllabus): “Rather than exceptionalizing the War on Terror as something beyond the usual, how might we understand it in relation to other practices of warfare along with longer dynamics of colonialism (a key contribution of transnational feminism and postcolonial critique)?”

The image of the Muslim women – captured by the veiled Iraqi civilian in the play – uses the portrayal of women as oppressed to validate the larger political, colonial and imperialist project of the war on terror. The war in Iraq is conflated into the image of the veil and the army uniform. It expands on the narrative of American Exceptionalism that allows for the invasion of a Muslim country that is in need of dismantling the oppressive dictator, the patriarchal structure to free the women – to free the people of Iraq. The perception of the veil, or more broadly the social norms and practices of Islam, in Western popular culture is strategically instrumental in informing Western politics. This begs the question: what is the West’s relationship with Islam historically and politically other than a mechanism for American Exceptionalism? In retrospect, however, is what Mahmood captures in contemporary debates about Islamic virtues and norms: “the resurgence of Islamic forms of sociability (such as veiling…) within a range of Muslim societies is best understood as an expression of resistance against Western politico-cultural domination as well as a form of social protest against the failed modernizing project of postcolonial Muslim regimes” (Mahmood, 24).

To circle back to Mahmood’s contention with liberal feminist theory on agency and resistance, citing Abu-Loghod and Butler, is that “agency is conceptualized on the binary model of subordination and subversion” and reducing agency to the undoing of social norms “runs the risk of Orientalizing Arab and Muslim women all over again” (Mahmood, 15). It is specifically that orientalization that creates the gap between Islam, liberalism and feminism and captures my reluctance and confrontation with the play director of forcing the veil onto the character of the Iraqi civilian. On the opposite spectrum, but similarly, the women of the mosque movement are not doing away with social norms. As mentioned before, the intent of these women “may be analyzed in terms of their role in reinforcing or undermining structures of male domination” but this continues to perpetuate liberal feminist discourse as dominant.

If my resistance was successful against wearing the veil to portray an Iraqi woman, adopting the framework of which Mahmood writes from, a liberal feminist scholar may look at my actions as a way to reinforce dominant feminist liberal assumptions and claims: my agency was grounded in resisting social norms. However, what is deeply problematic is the misreading of resistance and conflating it to ways of critiquing Islam and enforcing the perception and stereotypes present in Western popular culture. This is not limited to my experience: how would Mahmood use Muslim feminists who oppose the wearing of the veil (as one example of social norms) juxtaposed with the women’s mosque movement? Additionally, in my questioning, I question myself to answer: “What Muslim women? What kind of Muslim women? The ethnographic study that Mahmood delves into is deeply specific in culture, history and politics. How might pre-1970 Egypt challenge her main argument? How might the argument look like in Iran pre-Islamic Revolution?

One of the ways in which Mahmood tries to assert agency for Muslim women of the mosque movement is that the wearing of the veil is a choice – a form of modesty, piety. However, what is missing from the academic study is the role of the veil in judicial and religious text: “The practices of these movements presuppose the existence of a divine plan for human life – embodied in the Quran – that each individual is responsible for following” (Mahmood, 30). She continues to write that “participants in the mosque movement are summoned to recognize their moral obligations through invocations of divine texts and edificatory literature. This form of morality, however, is not strictly juridical. There are no centralized authorities that enforce the moral code” (Mahmood, 30). How would the jurisprudence of Sharia’a law and Mahmood’s earlier claim that the women’s mosque movement’s infiltration into the public space enabled state intervention find resolve with what she’s claiming now? How do other Muslim women movements into the public space intervene with asserting that the “mosque movement has a strong individualizing impetus” rather than being state politics and authoritative regulation of the conduct of life? Further, the historicity of Islam, specifically the doctrine (Qur’an) which the women’s movement uses and follows, rendering them agency in their choosing to reinforce social norms, is a doctrine that is a result of patriarchal structures.

The public space that the women started to infiltrate is not so much a form of resistance (especially considering that for the extent of this chapter there is no qualitative account of their intentions and motivations) but a form of survival and performativity. Women and men, in Islamic religious practice, are not able to share these mosques. It’s not so much out of agency (as liberal feminist would define) but living in the context that the women exist in. By reducing resistance or looking for resistance vis-à-vis the undoing of norms, “we collapse distinctions between forms of resistance and foreclose certain questions about the workings of power” (Mahmood, 8). How, then, does this differ from patriarchal structures that liberal feminist theory contends with? In what ways does my resistance to wearing the veil form a distinction between resistance to the veil and resistance to the workings of hegemonic Western power?

The workings of power is a point of tension I find with Mahmood. The women’s mosque movement is isolated from the workings of power and structures that existed in Egypt that may actually challenge Mahmood’s argument of contending with liberal feminist assumptions of agency. Mahmood is choosing specific cultural contexts that she argues is essential to agency but has ignored the greater contextual culture and politics that the women’s movement has emerged from and in response to in Egypt. This is not to say that the women of the mosque movement cannot be deemed as agents but to preface the mosque movement as an isolated form of ethical and moral commitment, a doing of norms, is somewhat problematic. It may be successful at challenging dominant feminist liberal discourse and the ways in which that itself is problematic, the example of the women’s mosque movement doesn’t serve as a strong contention as it stands in this chapter. What she leaves unanswered is why Mahmood chose to study the women’s mosque movement in the 1970s as the anti-thesis to liberal feminist dominance in discourse as opposed to other movements – especially post 9/11 which is what Mahmood opens her chapter with and frames the basis of her argument between the perception of Islam in the West post 9/11 and its relationship to feminism and liberalism.