Policy of piety. Islamic revival and feminist subject. Mahmud S.

The book of Saba Mahmud (1962-2018), an anthropologist and professor of the University of California in Berkeley, is an innovative analysis of Islamic cultural policy. It is based on an ethnographic study of the lower female movement of piety in the mosques of Cairo, aimed not at the seizure or transformation of the state, but at the reform of morality. Considering the traditional Islamic practices on which its participants focused, Saba Mahmoud shows how much this movement was important for the political landscape of Egypt and how ethical and political is inextricably linked in its context.

Her work is devoted to the search for answers to three central questions: how do the movements of the moral of the formation help us rethink the normative liberal approach to politics? How is women's commitment to the patriarchal standards that underlie such movements problematizes the key provisions of the feminist theory of freedom, agency and power? And how is the analysis of the debate about religious practices among IS Lamists and their secular critics helps to understand the conceptual connection between bodily and political imagination?