Saba Mahmood

In *Politics of Piety* (2005), based on fieldwork with a women's mosque movement in Cairo, Mahmood challenged liberal feminist assumptions that agency inherently means resistance to patriarchal norms. She showed that the Egyptian women she studied deliberately embraced pious practices and submission as forms of ethical self-cultivation, complicating Western frameworks for understanding women's empowerment.

Mahmood argued that liberal feminism's equation of freedom with autonomy and resistance was itself a culturally specific framework, not a universal standard for evaluating women's lives. Her work suggested that feminist theory needed to account for subjects whose desires and ethical projects do not necessarily align with ideals of individual self-determination.

Mahmood conducted fieldwork in Cairo, Egypt, focusing on women's participation in the Islamic revival (da'wa) movement through mosque study groups. Her research took place in the 1990s, during a period when Islamic activism was a central feature of Egyptian public life, and she later expanded her work to examine Coptic Christian and Bahá'í minorities.

In *Religious Difference in a Secular Age* (2016), Mahmood examined how secular governance in Egypt shaped the experience of religious minorities, particularly Coptic Christians and Bahá'ís. She argued that secularism did not simply separate religion from politics but actively restructured religious identity and intercommunal relations.