Saba mahmood biography samples

In her relatively short but highly accomplished academic career, anthropologist Saba Mahmood established herself as a scholar who challenged the liberatory, progressive assumptions of feminism and the often-misunderstood logics of Islam. She was born in , in Quetta Pakistan. She came to the United States in to study at the University of Washington.

Her oeuvre covers an astonishing number of topics, including Islam, secularism, political theory, semiotics, feminism, and philosophy. She explored how notions of agency most invoked by feminist scholars, one that locates agency in the political and moral autonomy of the subject, has been brought to bear upon the study of women in patriarchal religious traditions like Islam.

Moreover, some of her most prominent interlocutors and colleagues — Judith Butler and Wendy Brown — are themselves at the forefront of feminist and queer theory. She was able to deploy analytic principles often foreign to Islamic sensibilities and epistemologies to reveal why those principles were inadequate in understanding the ways in which women were able to realize their subjectivity by submitting themselves to the will of Allah.

Her later work engaged controversies about blasphemy and the limits of political secularism.

The complicated role European feminism played in legitimating and extend- ing colonial rule in vast regions of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East has been.

In Is Critique Secular? This conception, strongly Protestant in its entailments, is the standard against which other faiths are measured. She interrogates why people found it shocking that Muslims were willing to engage in widespread protest and violence over the caricaturization of a holy figure. She writes:. Those who profess love for the Prophet do not simply follow his advice and admonitions… but also try to emulate how he dressed; what he ate; how he spoke to his friends and adversaries; how he slept, walked, and so on… Muhammad, in this understanding, is not simply a proper noun referring to a particular historical figure, but the mark of a relation of similitude.

Mahmood, Saba, Politics of piety: the Islamic revival and the feminist subject / Saba Mahmood.

In this economy of signification, he is a figure of immanence in his constant exemplariness and is therefore not a referential sign that stands apart from an essence that it denotes. In her second solo manuscript, Religious Difference in a Secular Age she argued that instead of creating a more equitable and peaceable society, secularism in Egypt actually had the opposite effect: they agitated and exacerbated interconfessional strife.

She refused to make differences between Islam and the West palatable to liberal aspirations, and she deserves our thanks for that. In March , Mahmood died after fighting pancreatic cancer, having inspired many students and colleagues in her field to defy their sensibilities, assumptions, and deeply held convictions about religion, gender, and politics.