Saba Mahmood
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Saba Mahmood is an anthropologist at UC Berkeley and the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005). In this book she theorizes the concept of habitus from a genealogy that begins with Aristotle and extends into the Islamic tradition. She thinks of ethics as a type of armature that a female subject forms by submitting to body practices. Through these body practices, such as weeping, praying five times a day, attending mosque, women internalize ethical systems. Mahmood notes that their submittion is not quietude; rather, Female subjects of the Islamic Mosque Movement in Egypt "act out" their criticisms and amendments to Islamic law and liturgy. Mahmood emphasizes that practice, and not simply ideology, is to be noted when examining non-western modes of human agency.
