Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety, Twenty Years On

2024 marks the twenty-year anniversary of the publication of Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Its five chapters have shaped conversations across anthropology, religious studies, political science, philosophy, and beyond. Through an ethnography of a women’s piety movement in Cairo, Mahmood offered an analysis of Islamist cultural politics, where “politics” has less to do with the state form than the embodied infrastructure of everyday ethical practices. In addition to its account of this under-studied aspect of the Islamic revival, Politics of Piety developed a rigorous theoretical critique of the secular-liberal assumptions that dominate/d academic and public discussions on religion and politics. This roundtable brings together six junior scholars in conversation, taking it as an occasion to revisit these chapters: not to offer an account of their reception or to contextualize their arguments but to reread them in view of our own disparate projects today.