Image: Photo taken by author in December 2024.

In 2004, Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety reshaped feminist debates on agency and secularism, challenging entrenched assumptions and sparking sharp critique.[1] Often perceived as overtly anti-Western and critical of dominant feminist paradigms, Mahmood’s work questioned the universal applicability of liberal ideals and the imperialist undertones embedded in the saviour mentality of human rights and feminist endeavours. Twenty years on, the text remains a cornerstone for interrogating secular norms and the intersections of religion, politics, and feminism.

The world after Politics of Piety

But what I have come to ask of myself, and would like to ask the reader, as well, is: Do my political visions ever run up against the responsibility that I incur for the destruction of life forms so that ‘unenlightened’ women may be taught to live more freely? Do I even fully comprehend the forms of life that I want so passionately to remake? Would an intimate knowledge of lifeworlds that are distinct from mine ever question my own certainty about what I prescribe as a superior way of life for others?

(Mahmood, 2006)

Returning to Politics of Piety, I was struck by the historical moment in which this groundbreaking volume emerged. In 2004, the Anglo-American coalition was entrenched in the Global War on Terror—one of the bloodiest and most imperialistic campaigns of recent history—waged under the guise of exporting democracy and imposing it through violence. The invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) were carried out under the rhetoric of women’s and human rights, serving as key justifications for such liberal imperialist military campaigns. Simultaneously, this narrative absorbed and flattened the complexities of the Second Intifada in Palestine (2000–2006), reducing the Palestinian struggle to a racialized trope, especially associated with Islamic movements. Meanwhile in France, 2004 saw the enactment of a law prohibiting the veil in public schools, and in the Netherlands, the murder of Theo Van Gogh intensified anti-Muslim and civilizational debates led by figures such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali. These events marked a critical caesura, reflecting the uncritical adoption of American models of cultural and political discourse in Europe and exposing a deepening fissure in the relationship between secularism, multiculturalism, and the Muslim presence in the West.

Although the work of critical authors such as Lila Abu-Lughod had already begun to challenge dominant narratives, many critical perspectives had yet to be articulated. Mahmood centred the lived experiences of non-liberal “Others,” particularly pious women in non-Western societies, dismantling the reductive view that such individuals act solely out of deference to tradition or lack of choice. Her analysis of the Islamic Revival movement in Cairo, in 1995, provided an important intervention in understanding the dynamics of women’s agency, by challenging secular, liberal Western democratic norms and expectations.  Her analysis critiqued the narrow framing of agency as either a form of liberal autonomy or of resistance, offering instead a far more uncomfortable subject to engage with, one that allowed for a more articulated and nuanced understanding of how norms are enacted, inhabited, and lived. This critical lens extended to secularism itself, which Mahmood interrogated as a framework that presumes the subordination of religiosity and demands its erasure for emancipation. Furthermore, Mahmood sought to reframe these concepts of liberal feminism and western secularism, urging reflection on their dogmatic tendencies and their complicity in enforcing particular visions of ‘freedom’. What is freedom? This is, in fact, the question that her volume clearly addresses, guided by a Foucauldian and Asadian lens.

The heritage of Saba Mahmood

The legacy of Politics of Piety and Saba Mahmood’s work remains highly influential in contemporary debates surrounding secular and feminist norms. Mahmood was central to a scholarly movement that drew extensively from Talal Asad’s work, particularly from his critique of secularism as merely a separation between religious and political spheres. Like Asad, Mahmood questioned the conventional assumption that secularism functions as a neutral framework in relation to religion. Rather than seeing secularism as a neutral backdrop to politics, Mahmood and her intellectual heirs have explored its political and institutional implications, focusing on how secularism operates as a social arrangement that often intersectionally marginalizes religious subjectivities—especially those of women.

Among those continuing and expanding Mahmood’s work on secularism and the feminist subject in several contexts are scholars like Nadia Fadil, Mayanthi L. Fernando, Hussein Ali Agrama, Rachel Rinaldo and Sultan Doughan who have critically expanded on the contradictions of the secular and its imbrications with postcoloniality, migrations and state and memory politics, carrying Mahmood’s insights forward. These scholars, influenced by Mahmood, have focused on the politics of religious subjectivities, the intersection of gender and religion, and the implications of secularism on Muslim women’s lives and rights.

A special issue, published a decade after Politics of Piety, sheds light on the ongoing influence of Mahmood’s scholarship, first and foremost through an interview with Nadia Marzouki, Amélie Le Renard, and Zahra Ali, who critically engage with the inspirations from and limits of Mahmood’s volume. Mahmood’s work led, in part, to the development of a model of ethical learning through the body and everyday practices, in which ethics are understood as “a set of practical activities inherent to a particular way of life.” This approach moved beyond the level of the theoretical and abstract, to include the embodied practices that shape how norms are lived and enacted. In this context, Amélie Le Renard’s work on Saudi Arabia highlights the complexity of feminist self-identification in the region. Le Renard points out that while few women openly identify as feminists due to the association of the term with Western hegemony, religious appropriation is what offers them ways to gain autonomy. This distinction between practices and self-identification further deepens the understanding of how religion and feminism intersect in diverse contexts.  Mahmood’s refusal to use terms like “Islamism” mirrors this approach, recognizing that categories of religious identity and engagement differ significantly across cultures.

In summary, the intellectual heirs of Saba Mahmood keep alive the practice of a more nuanced and contextually sensitive analyses of religion, politics, and gender.

What question are still lingering?

Politics of Piety ventured into territories considered off-limits in leftist politics and taboo within feminist circles. Through her rigorous scholarship, Mahmood posed crucial questions, which remain to be fully addressed: What do we truly mean by gender equality in feminist analysis outside of a narrow Western context? Are we ready to confront the potentially violent consequences of reshaping  attachments to fit liberal ideals? By challenging these certainties, she prompted a reimagining of the feminist project—one that resists becoming rigid, salvific, universal or immune to critique. Two decades later, this work continues to resonate, challenging dominant liberal feminist and secular normative assumptions both within political movements and governance, urging us to reconsider what freedom, autonomy, and resistance mean, and how they are constructed in society.

While re-reading the preface to the second edition of Politics of Piety, which sharply critiques the events and the often distorted media framing of the Arab revolutions of 2011—soon to be met by violent counter-revolutions—I found myself wondering: What would Saba Mahmood say about our world today?

In this historical moment, as we witness the genocidal project of Israel attempting to obliterate lives and rewrite history—echoing how other settler colonial states were founded and their legacies seldom interrogated—what insights would Mahmood offer? What would she say about the paradox of feminist foreign policies that claim to champion justice while defending and enabling genocide? About systems that incarcerate people of colour, police queerness, and uphold a violent global order under the guise of progress?

Mahmood’s critique of liberal secularism and feminist universalism feels more urgent than ever. As she remarked in one of her best-known televised debates, “what is identified as the diagnosis leads to the solution.” Her scholarship challenges us to confront the ways in which these frameworks often perpetuate hierarchies of power and exclusion, urging a rethinking of freedom, justice, and resistance in a deeply fractured world. It offers a profound lesson in pluralism, compelling liberals to question whether their commitments align with genuine inclusivity—or risk slipping, as history shows us, into far darker, despotic lifeworlds.

[1] The Politics of Piety was published in 2004 in some countries and appeared in 2005 in others. We are publishing this blog at the cusp of the twenty year anniversary of the book.