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The case of antagonizing settlers in Israel resonates with the appearance of broader divisions between liberalism and religiosity, in particular with representations of a stark division between Islam and the West. This chapter considers the implications of this study beyond the Israeli context, asking what kinds of questions and challenges it poses for scholarly interventions into contemporary issues of religious/secular conflict. Dalsheim engages with the work of Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Talal Asad, each of whom adresses Western reactions to Muslims or attempts to intervene in their lives, and each of whom is critical of inconsistencies in liberal thought and practice. This chapter argues that applying these theories to the case of Israeli settlers means pondering the implications of a moral imperative to recognize not only currently demonized Muslims but also the implications of recognizing the humanity of currently vilified Jewish settlers.

This chapter discusses how the notions of the subject, individualism, freedom, agency, change, and history have come to cluster around the figure of the Muslim woman for whom the metonym is increasingly the veil. It considers how the Muslim woman is conceived in the fiction of John Le Carre, the theory of Alain Badiou, the scholarship on the veil in France by Joan Scott, and in the work of Saba Mahmood.

This chapter examines the Genealogical-Ideological Method for interrogating the category of religion and unmasking its complicity with capitalist market interests, racial and gender inequities, colonializing practices, and power. With these ideas in hand, the chapter examines representative works by Russell McCutcheon, Timothy Fitzgerald, and Saba Mahmood. In their works, it is argued, the problem of failing to provide justificatory arguments looms large. McCutcheon and Fitzgerald fail to see how the problems they espy in the study of religion apply to their way of thinking. Mahmood conceives of human agency as an outcome of repetitive bodily practices rather than as relying on reasons for action, thus denying her ways to understand human motivation in Islamic pietism and concealing the justificatory dimensions of the practices she describes in Politics of Piety. The chapter shows how problems in these approaches are symptomatic of difficulties surrounding the justificatory status of the study of religion.

Chapter 5 takes up the conception of freedom as belonging in the context of contemporary debates about cultural and religious identities. For Saba Mahmood, the study of the women's piety movement that is part of the Egyptian Islamic revival raises crucial questions about the normative liberal assumptions that underlie feminism: in particular, the feminist allegiance to an unquestioned ideal of individual freedom. I take up this question, to ask whether Mahmood's analysis of the agency of the pietists can contribute to a rethinking of freedom. I argue that Mahmood is unable to address this question because of the limitations of the paradox of subjectivation model within which she locates the question of agency, and because she tends to understand freedom only in terms of the liberal model that she criticizes. I consider the practices of the women in the piety movement in terms of several conceptions of freedom-in-connection: self-creation, positive freedom, communitarian freedom, and critique and resistance.

This chapter presents how the humanistic study of religion deviates from the modern academic template of disinterested inquiry. Humanistic inquiry involves disciplines of experimentation in which individuals reflect on what the lives of others have taught them about themselves. In this sense, humanistic inquiry becomes humanistic criticism; the chapter raises this argument by affirming a perspective of humanistic study based on the idea of responsiveness. It then examines the ethnographic works of social historian Robert Orsi and anthropologists Michael D. Jackson and Saba Mahmood. With their focus on what Orsi calls “lived religion,” these scholars divert their work in a humanistic direction and exemplify the so-called encounter and response procedure.

Draws a sharp distinction between secular criticism and secularism as institutional logic. Criticizes recent tendencies (Taylor, Asad, Mahmood) to confound secularism with rationalism, liberalism, and Western imperialism. Shows how secularist metaphysics are equally in need of critique, as is religion, for secular criticism pursues a non-transcendentalist politics.

This chapter offers a genealogy of secularism as a mobile, many-voiced critical formulation. Surveying a wide archive of scholarship in and around the secularism concept, and offering up seven axioms for the pursuit of post-secular critique, it argues that the salient distinction, under conditions of secularism, is not between religion and the non-religious but, more fundamentally, between good religion and bad belief; that this disciplinary distinction comes to be operationalized as a gendering, racializing biopolitics; and that we can best grasp secularism as the racialized theodicy of hegemonic liberalism.

The central claim of this chapter is that worldviews that embrace traditional dictates, and even ones that take certain traditional dictates to be beyond question, can be genuinely feminist. Feminism is opposition to sexist oppression, and since this form of oppressiveness is a function of the effects of practices rather than their inheritedness, it is possible to oppose sexist oppression on traditionalist grounds. This is good news for anti-imperialist feminist projects, since wanton destruction of the traditions of “others” has often been understood as required for feminist change. The forms of freedom, autonomy, and the secular to which Western feminists appeal when justifying cultural damage is neither necessary for feminism nor central to its status as a normative doctrine. The chapter includes a discussion of the moral epistemologies of Islamic feminisms and a criticism of the normative conclusions of Saba Mahmood’s work.

This chapter examines the role of accounting in shaping time and thus the temporal structuring of life itself, while dwelling in/on the inherent contradictions of entrepreneurial subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant and of Saba Mahmood, it considers the dialectical negation of entrepreneurial subjectivity, the negation on which it depends, that it itself produces but that embodies a contradiction or even entails a crisis—an opportunity for change. It shows how the confusion and manipulation of multiple versions of entrepreneurial subjectivity plays out through temporal contradictions apparent in the dynamics of the “neoliberal homeownership” crisis. It also discusses a variety of minicases, including self-representations offered by participants in a small organization in Tucson, Arizona, for formerly incarcerated women called the Women’s Re-entry Network; media representations of those said to be subjects of the “culture of poverty”; and media representations of subjects of personal and global finance.