The late Saba Mahmood’s 2004 The Politics of Piety is a brilliant example of how to do philosophical ethnography. The book’s one flaw is its dense prose style, but even that may have been necessary in order to persuade its target audience: 2000s-era postmodern feminists, who tended to take six-syllable words as a sign of profundity. And while the typical vocabulary has changed significantly in the decades since she wrote it – from “resistance” and “agency” to “privilege” and “marginalization” – the kinds of views she is critiquing remain very widespread, and her critique has lost none of its power.

Mahmood is studying the da’wah piety movement among Egyptian Muslim women, including practices like wearing the veil. Other feminist scholars had studied such women before. But those scholars had insisted in defining their informants’ actions in the scholars’ terms rather than the informants’:

Some of these studies offer functionalist explanations, citing a variety of reasons why women take on the veil voluntarily (for example, the veil makes it easy for women to avoid sexual harassment on public transportation, lowers the cost of attire for working women, and so on). Other studies identify the veil as a symbol of resistance to the commodification of women’s bodies in the media, and more generally to the hegemony of Western values. While these studies have made important contributions, it is surprising that their authors have paid so little attention to Islamic virtues of female modesty or piety, especially given that many of the women who have taken up the veil frame their decision precisely in these terms. Instead, analysts often explain the motivations of veiled women in terms of standard models of sociological causality (such as social protest, economic necessity, anomie, or utilitarian strategy), while terms like morality, divinity, and virtue are accorded the status of the phantom imaginings of the hegemonized. (16)

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