An Islam of Her Own

Abstract

An Islam of Her Own is a valuable addition to the growing literature on Muslimwomen’s pietistic subjectivities. Unlike others, however, Sherine Hafezis unsatisfied with the unitary portrayal of the identities of Muslim female activistsas a struggle between secular and religious subjectivities. Locating herselfand the women she studies at the permeable boundaries of these tropes,her study problematizes the neatly bordered parameters of each and argues, instead, for movement, mobility, and transition between religious and secularspaces. She moves the discussion of religious subjectivities from Saba Mahmood’sinfluential study of non-liberal subjectivity in the Egyptian women’smosque movements (p. 11) to “the complexity of negotiation” and the “inconsistentappropriation” of both secular and religious spaces in fashioningdesire among female activists (p. 5).The articulation between the secular and religious, Hafez explains, isseamless. Activists move easily in the spaces between “pious self-ameliorationand secular political values” (p. 5). They make “normalised distinctions betweenreligion and secularism” that are “liberal in principle and secular inpractice,” and yet simultaneously view “Islam as encompassing all aspects oflife” (p. 13). These slippages, she argues, confirm that the subjectivities of activistMuslim women in Egypt are “varied, heterogeneous and unstable” (p.13) and not fully understood when packaged as non-liberal ...