It is no exaggeration to say that the religious diversity that characterized the Middle East for centuries is in precipitous…
Saba Mahmood
Saba Mahmood(1962-2018) was associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, which received the 2005 Victoria Schuck award from the American Association of Political Science. Most recently she is the co-author of Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (2009), published by the University of California Press. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals including Critical Inquiry, Cultural Anthropology, Boston Review, Social Research, American Ethnologist, Public Culture, and Cultural Studies. Mahmood is the recipient of the Carnegie Corporation’s scholar of Islam award (2007), and the Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (2009-10). She was also a Co-PI on a three-year project, funded by the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs, that focuses on a comparative study of the right to religious liberty in western and non-western political contexts. Her broader work centers on issues of secularism, religion, gender, and postcoloniality in the Middle East.
Latest posts
Religious freedom, minority rights, and geopolitics
March 5, 2012
Conventional wisdom has it that religious liberty is a universally valid principle, enshrined in national constitutions and international charters and…
Religious liberty, minorities, and Islam: An interview with Saba Mahmood
August 17, 2011
Saba Mahmood is an anthropologist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and whose work raises challenging questions about…
Secular imperatives?
May 7, 2008
Calls for the embrace (or for that matter rejection) of secularism are premised on a putative opposition between secular and…
Is critique secular?
March 30, 2008
One of the most cherished definitions of critique is the incessant subjection of all norms to unyielding critique. Or is…