March 17, 2018
SABA Mahmood, professor of anthropology at the University of
California (UoC) at Berkeley, passed away on March 10, 2018. The cause
was pancreatic cancer.
Prof Mahmood specialised in sociocultural anthropology and was a scholar of modern Egypt.
Born
in Quetta in 1962, she came to the United States in 1981 to study
architecture and urban planning at the University of Washington in
Seattle. She received her PhD in anthropology from Stanford University
in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before coming to UoC in
2004, where she offered her last seminar in fall 2017.
Prof
Mahmood made path-breaking contributions to contemporary debates on
secularism, opening up new ways of understanding religion in public life
and contesting received assumptions about both religion and the
secular.
Against an increasingly shrill scholarship
denouncing Muslim societies, she brought a nuanced and educated
understanding of Islam into discussions of feminist theory, ethics and
politics.
Her publications and presentations have
reverberated throughout the humanities and social sciences, profoundly
shaping the scholarship of a new generation of scholars as they develop a
thoughtful, knowledgeable and critical approach to religion in
modernity.
As a scholar and teacher, she embodied and
followed strong moral and political principles, offered keen analyses of
colonial and capitalist power in her account of secularism’s modernity,
and formulated new ways of understanding the subject of feminism,
relational subjectivity, religious freedom, religious injury, the rights
of religious minorities, and comparative legal analysis of religious
and secular family law and sexual regulations.
Together
with anthropologists Talal Asad and Charles Hirschkind, Prof Mahmood
showed secularism to be a complex political formation that produces
differences among the religious traditions it seeks to regulate. In her
words, “political secularism is the modern state’s sovereign power to
reorganise substantive features of religious life, stipulating what
religion is or ought to be, assigning its proper content, and
disseminating concomitant subjectivities, ethical frameworks, and
quotidian practices”.
Secularism never escapes its own
religious histories, nor does it ever achieve autonomy from the
religious formations it aims to regulate. In fact, the distinction
between public and private life central to secular reason draws its
bearings from a modern Christian emphasis on private worship. This
Christian religious framework, focused on belief, contrasts sharply with
religions such as Islam which foreground strongly the role on embodied
practices within religious life. As a result, she argued, secular
epistemologies cannot grasp the way that Islam articulates religious
values, misconstruing both the Islamic subject and the public meanings
of its religious practices.
Pious Muslim women
Within
feminist theory, Mahmood challenged readers to understand that the
pious Muslim women she studied in Cairo were not mindlessly obedient
subjects, but engaged in distinct hermeneutical approaches to reading
the Quran in schools of their own, cultivating religious practice as a
form of ethical conduct.
Challenging views of subjective
freedom bequeathed by Western moral philosophy, she made a bold and
challenging argument: to understand pious women within Islam one had to
conceive a subject defined in its relation to the textual and imagistic
representations of the divine.
Women who engaged in a
religious practice of this sort, she argued, ought to be understood as
engaging in ethical practices of self-cultivation.
In
her last work, she studied discrimination against Coptic Orthodox
Christians in contemporary Egypt’s secular regime. Against the view that
tribal and religious differences are evidence of the incomplete process
of secularisation, she showed how religious differences, and conflict,
have been exacerbated under secular regimes of power. Far from realising
ideals of civic and political equality, the secular state facilitated
religious inequalities and inter-faith violence.
Prof
Mahmood authored Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority
Report (Princeton University Press, 2015) and Politics of Piety: the
Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press,
2005) which won the Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political
Science Association. She co-authored Is Critique Secular? (Fordham
University Press, 2011) and co-edited Politics of Religious Freedom
(University of Chicago, 2015). Her work has been translated into Arabic,
French, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Polish.
Prof
Mahmood was also the recipient of several honours and awards, including
the Axel Springer Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, and
fellowships at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences
at Stanford University and the University of California Humanities
Research Institute.
Prof Mahmood was a brilliant
scholar, cherished colleague, and dedicated teacher and graduate mentor.
Along with her ceaseless political passions and trenchant analyses, she
keened to the beauty of the wilderness, the poetry of Ghalib, the
delights of cooking and sharing excellent food. She cultivated with
joyous attention her relationships with family and friends.
She
mentored her students with remarkable care and intensity, demanding
their best work, listening, responding with a sharp generosity, coming
alive in thought, and soliciting others to do the same. In her final
months, she affirmed the values of thought and love, leaving now a
vibrant legacy that will persist and flourish among all whose lives were
touched by her life and work. She is survived by her husband, Charles
Hirschkind, her son, Nameer Hirschkind, and her brothers Tariq Mahmood;
and Khalid Mahmood, who lives and works in Pakistan.
Judith
Butler is a philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced
political philosophy, ethics and the fields of third-wave feminist and
literary theory. Since 1993, she has taught at the University of
California, Berkeley, where she is now professor in the Department of
Comparative Literature and the Programme of Critical Theory.
Published in Dawn, March 17th, 2018
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