Recent publications draw on critical race theory and Black studies, with potentially transformative possibilities for thinking through the gendered and racialized politics of “being Muslim” in the context of Euro-American secular modernity (Gibson and Karim 2014; Hammer 2012; Muhammad 2020; Taylor 2017). Rather than take up questions of agency, as Saba Mahmood’s seminal work Politics of Piety did, Sylvia Chan-Malik’s Being Muslim charts an “insurgent genealogy” of Islamic commitments in the face of colonial racisms, as protest or liberation theology. In so doing, her work moves beyond questions of pious Muslim women’s agency and toward what Black studies scholar Dylan Rodríguez (2014: 38–39) calls “a creative, liberation-focused, and generally radical political-intellectual practice” that is also spiritual and affective.
In Politics of Piety Saba Mahmood draws largely on theoretical arguments developed by Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Kant, and Isaiah Berlin, as well as a...
