Patience, Paratext, and the Heteronomy of Critique: An Introduction to Reading <i>Politics of Piety</i> at 20 Years

POLITICS OF PIETY: THE ISLAMIC REVIVAL AND THE FEMINIST SUBJECT. By Saba Mahmood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. The commentaries in this book symposium are drawn from a panel on Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety I convened at the 2024 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. In introducing the panel, I noted that it was something of a traveling road show, as it was the fourth such panel in which some combination of friends and I gathered at a conference to read together in public. These included panels on Talal Asad’s 1993 Genealogies of Religion (at AAR 2018); on Katherine Ewing’s 1997 Arguing Sainthood and Stefania Pandolfo’s 1997 Impasse of the Angels (at AAR 2022), and Talal Asad’s 2003 Formations of the Secular (at AAA 2023). A traveling antique road show, even, because the occasions of our reading were the twenty- to twenty-five-year anniversary of these texts’ publication, long enough for them to stand outside the churn of the publishing frenzy, long enough for these texts to gather a life of their own and for the dust to settle. And yet they continue to shape our thinking, our questions, our lines of flight. To be clear, the aim has not been to give a reception history of these texts, or merely repeat their key turns of argument, or to celebrate the author (all too easy, especially because these authors are our teachers), but rather to reread them in public: despite its appearance, this task is not simple, not least because it asks patience and demands that we not assume we already know what Politics of Piety says, despite all the ways it has become a fundamental intervention into multiple fields of debate; it is, of course, also not simple, as we know well, because the author of the book did not suffer fools gladly. Instead, the task requires some patience. As with the earlier panels, we assigned each chapter to one panelist, who makes of it what they will. My own comments reflect on the disjuncture between politics and the work of analysis as laid out in the preface to Politics of Piety, which is consonant with her delimitation elsewhere of the ambitions of secular critique. I said earlier that the task of reading requires patience. The book itself provides an instructive account of a certain patience, in Chapter Five—the chapter to which I myself have been returning in my work, in anthropologically approaching theological questions about fate and tribulation. In this chapter, famously, Mahmood stages an ethnographic argument about patience in order to work toward the analytic question of whether to endure is to enact. How should one live—how should one suffer injustice? Her interlocutor Nadia is clear about “the predicament of women in Egyptian society: a situation created and regulated by social norms for which women were in turn [unjustly] blamed” (171). In its face, she advocated a certain patience and fortitude, the cultivation of the virtue of sabr, “to persevere in the face of difficulty without complaint.” Another interlocutor, Sana, was horrified at this prospect: like many secular feminists, she understood sabr as enacting the passive acceptance of one’s fate. Mahmood goes on to explain that this opposition between passivity and activity is untenable, and that Nadia’s conception of fate did not “absolve humans from responsibility … while God determines one’s fate (for example, whether someone is poor or wealthy), human beings still choose how to deal with their situations” (173). In a sentence elaborated further by Brent Eng in his commentary in this symposium, Mahmood writes, “what we have here is a notion of human agency, defined in terms of individual responsibility, that is bounded by both an eschatological structure and a social one.” Mahmood explains that while for secular critics sabr appears to be “an inadequacy of action, a failure to act under the inertia of tradition,” for Nadia and others sabr is not “a reluctance to act. Rather, it is integral to a constructive project” (174). This argument has been essential for parsing different understandings of embodiment, virtue, agency, critique, and more. But I would like to emphasize something else: for both Nadia and Hajja Asma’, one of Mahmood’s interlocutors who appears later in the chapter, patience only makes sense as a response to certain conditions within a broader form of life. As Nadia says, to Mahmood’s surprise, patience isn’t only for suffering: “To practice patience in moments of your life when you are happy is to be mindful of [God’s] rights upon you at all times” (171). Hajja Asma’ is even more direct, arguing, in Mahmood’s paraphrase, that “to practice forbearance in a situation where God’s claims over her were being compromised, was to place her own interests … above her commitment to God” (186). If patience with injustice can verge into a kind of injustice itself, if it rests also on the perhaps undecidable division between the claims of God and the claims of man, at the very least it is clear that patience is not a rule; these social situations place “contradictory demands” on Mahmood’s interlocutors. “As a result, women were called upon to make complex judgments that entailed an interpretation of the Islamic corpus as well as their own sense of responsibility in the situation” (187). In this situation, as in so many others, “moral injunctions are not juridically enforced but are self-monitored and entail an entire set of ascetic practices in which the individual engages in an interpretive activity, in accord with shari’a guidelines, to determine how best to live …” (188). I want to emphasize what Mahmood calls “an interpretive activity” in this situation: not to affirm the “agency” of Mahmood’s interlocutors, which would beg the question of the book in its entirety, nor to foolishly conflate the enactment of ascetic practices with the method of ethnographic fieldwork, but merely to underscore the resonance between their activity of discernment and Mahmood’s own. She tells us in the original preface to Politics of Piety that she was brought to this project in the first place by her developing dissatisfaction, “over the last twenty years or so,” with the various at-hand explanations of popular turns to Islamic forms of sociability. Part of this dissatisfaction, she says, stemmed from a recognition of the diversity of “social and political constellations mobilized by Islamic revival movements,” and from the “reductionisms of secular epistemology in translating religious truth as power plays over economic and geopolitical interests” (x-xi). But this dissatisfaction was not an “exercise in generosity” extended, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1991) might say, to those occupying anthropology’s savage slot, nor was it a sublimated valorization of a subaltern subject. Rather, it stemmed from the dawning realization (one more challenging to thought than gestures of generosity or of valorization) that secular forms of life do not exhaust politics or ethics, let alone human flourishing. Mahmood discerned a difference, as she recounts it, between her own political certitude and what an “interpretive activity” demanded in that situation. Hence what we might read as her own commitment to a kind of patience: “to refuse to take my political stance as the necessary lens through which the labor of analysis should proceed” (xii), that is, to allow the latter the time necessary for it to develop, without rushing to a political decision. She insisted on this disjuncture between politics and analysis, between critique and understanding; she did not seek to fill that gap or to overturn that difference. Rather, it came to guide her thinking and her methodology; it came to define her approach to anthropology. She repeated it in later texts and in her seminars. Her critics misunderstood this commitment; they read it moralistically or complained against its terms. They declared that this was not the time (if there ever were a time) to separate politics from analysis—that (as she already put it) the “pace of events … demand[ed] political closure and strategic action,” not “the labor of thought” (xii). Note how in the two sentences here quoted, for her, “analysis” is aligned with “thought” itself and with a certain opening or openness, as positioned against political closure, action, and critique. This is not to refuse politics or critique, of course, but to delimit them (Mahmood herself, after all, was a sharp critic who easily inhabited a political courage we miss dearly). My point is not that the program of ethical self-cultivation pursued by the piety movement is “good” or conducive to establishing relations of gender equality, or that it should be adopted by progressives, liberals, feminists, and others. I argue instead that the disciplines of subjectivity pursued by the pietists profoundly parochialize conceptions of the subject, autonomous reason, and objectivity, through which the pietists are understood to be lacking in faculties of criticism and reason. If academic knowledge production aims to be something more than an exercise in denunciation and judgment, it must surely think beyond its own naturalized conceptions in order to grasp what other notions of criticism, evaluation, and reasoned deliberation operate in the world. This in turn requires opening up a comparative (and dare I say critical?) study of different forms of subjectivity and concomitant disciplines of ethical self-formation. (2012 xii-xiii) In the 2012 prologue, Mahmood repeatedly comments that she is not interested, for purposes of analysis, in deciding on a position: whether on what “counts as a feminist versus an antifeminist practice, to distinguish a subversive act from a nonsubversive one” (x); or on whether the veil is a “divine command” or a “symbolic marker” (xi); or on whether the Qur’an is “the literal word of God” or “a symbolic text whose meaning is historically determined” (xii); or on whether shari‘a is truly “incapable of inhabiting the norms of a modern polity” (xiv); and so on. The legitimacy or veracity of such positions is not what concerned Mahmood for purposes of analysis. Rather, she approached them as “distinct kinds of performative speech acts that enable very different conceptions of power, truth, interpretive schema, critical norms, and the reading/reciting subject,” among other differences (xii). What she called “the labor of analysis” is not a matter of discovering the correct hermeneutics, the right way to develop a critique. In fact, as some of her later essays explicitly take up the question of hermeneutics and critique, it becomes clear that such speech acts bear an internal limit. Mahmood’s (2006) article “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire” famously observed the hermeneutics underwriting the US RAND Corporation’s political theology. According to its infamous report on moderate Muslim networks, some Muslims “stick to the letter of the law” (reading carnally, not being released into the spirit); they are “more willing to accept authority” (being born into bondage). Emancipatory ideological reform would rather instruct Muslims that their scripture is properly historical, their Prophet properly a product of his time, and their juristic tradition properly superseded (333–334). This pedagogical project is “echoed” by liberal Muslim intellectuals whose politics may well diverge from those of the US State Department but whose hermeneutics generally align with it, namely those who “agree with them in their diagnosis that the central problem haunting Muslim societies lies in their inability to achieve critical distance between the divine text and the world, and a concomitant overvaluation of received authority” (344). For Mahmood, what unites the liberal Muslim reformers (who seek the symbolic truths of Islam apart from its phenomenal forms) and operatives like the Rand Corporation is the “secular genealogy” of “a particularly singular relationship between subject and text.” Hermeneutics, here, is not reducible to politics, in that it does not correspond to a single political agenda or set of priorities; nor is it essentially historical, in that the relationship between subject and text does not correspond to any one historical period. In engaging (if even polemically) the impersonal time of tradition, hermeneutics participates in both politics and history without finally belonging to either.1 A similar delimitation of critique unfolds in Mahmood’s chapter on the Azazeel controversy in Egypt. Here again, ostensibly opposed positions are shown to be each “inflected—albeit in different ways—by a secular episteme” (Mahmood 2016, 182). Both the novelist Youssef Ziedan and his Coptic critics posit “a distinction between the factuality of events as they ‘really happened’ and their narrative meaning”—a distinction that is “part of the history of the secularization of religion” (195). That is not to say that the argument hinges simply on the proper interpretation of a historical event. Rather, “their disagreement entails two incommensurable understandings of literature and religion” (197)—a conceptual difference whose parties are both grounded in the modern concept of history, whereby their citations of christological debates take on new functions (encrypting their prior forms). In contrast to the earlier case, where traditional Islamic interpretations provided the contemporaneous threat against which the unnatural allies (Muslim reformers and US imperial functionaries) met, in this debate, there is no hermeneutical practice visible outside the modern concept of history. In each case, however, hermeneutical projects are underwritten by modern concepts of religion, belief, history, and so on, but what they set into play is finally determined neither by the origin of the interpretations nor the context into which they are deployed. Understanding these performative speech acts cannot take the guise of a judgment upon them (approving or condemning). Rather, they require a different “labor of analysis.” Taken together, these two texts by Saba Mahmood on secular critique demonstrate that the relationship between subject and world cannot be singular, despite whatever claims of the “structures of normative secularity”; nor, we might extrapolate, is there immunity from the world to be gained through recourse to secular criticism. Paul de Man’s 1970 essay “Literary History and Literary Modernity” famously articulates “modernity” as a desire: “to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure” (de De Man 1983, 148). But this desire only takes its place among similar past literary gestures. Thus, there is nothing particularly ‘modern’ about the concept of modernity (144). Just as for de Man there is no stable division between literary history and literary modernity, we might understand that there is no stable division between heteronomy and autonomy to be found through the proper deployment of secular critique.2 Instead of constantly attempting and failing to purge critique of its own heteronomous tendencies,3 then, the observer might seek other ways of factoring the relationship between subject and world. “One is soon forced to resort to paradoxical formulations,” de Man writes, “such as defining the modernity of a literary period as the manner in which it discovers the impossibility of being modern” (144). Mahmood’s commitment to the complex disjuncture between the labor of analysis and political action consistently works to delimit critique, whether in the preface of the first edition of Politics of Piety, its 2012 prologue, or through such later essays. Her keen attention to the heteronomy of critique (though she would not put it that way) is one reason why she might recommend, again, the “interpretive activity” demanded in each situation.

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