An Islam of Her Own Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements By Sherine Hafez (New York: New York University Press, 2011. 208 pages.)

Abstract

An Islam of Her Own is a valuable addition to the growing literature on Muslim
women’s pietistic subjectivities. Unlike others, however, Sherine Hafez
is unsatisfied with the unitary portrayal of the identities of Muslim female activists
as a struggle between secular and religious subjectivities. Locating herself
and 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 secular
spaces. She moves the discussion of religious subjectivities from Saba Mahmood’s
influential study of non-liberal subjectivity in the Egyptian women’s
mosque movements (p. 11) to “the complexity of negotiation” and the “inconsistent
appropriation” of both secular and religious spaces in fashioning
desire among female activists (p. 5).
The articulation between the secular and religious, Hafez explains, is
seamless. Activists move easily in the spaces between “pious self-amelioration
and secular political values” (p. 5). They make “normalised distinctions between
religion and secularism” that are “liberal in principle and secular in
practice,” and yet simultaneously view “Islam as encompassing all aspects of
life” (p. 13). These slippages, she argues, confirm that the subjectivities of activist
Muslim women in Egypt are “varied, heterogeneous and unstable” (p.
13) and not fully understood when packaged as non-liberal ...