Saba Mahmood, 57, Dies; Traced Intersection of Feminism and Islam

Saba Mahmood, a professor, theorist and author from Pakistan whose work focused on the intersection of Islam and feminist theory, died on March 10 at her home in Berkeley, California. She was 57.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, her husband, Charles Hirschkind, said.

In her studies, Mahmood, a scholar of modern Egypt who specialized in sociocultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, also challenged entrenched notions about secularism and religion, particularly in Muslim societies. She had been brought up as a Muslim.

In her book “Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject” (2004), Mahmood explored a grass-roots women’s movement focused on moral reform in Cairo in the 1990s.

The movement — one face of a broader Mideast effort to revive Muslim ethical practices — was unique in that these women “came to understand that the rebuilding of a pious Islamic community could not be left to men alone,” said Hirschkind, a fellow scholar of sociocultural anthropology at Berkeley who had sometimes collaborated with his wife.

And so the women in this movement stepped out of traditional female roles to become leaders and educators in the field of Islamic knowledge, he said.

The movement largely took place outside the arena of state politics — though its “intervention into social and ethical life had a profound impact on the political condition of Egyptian society,” Hirschkind said.

In a preface to the 2012 edition of her book, Mahmood described both the praise and criticism she had received from feminists. Her admirers saw it as tackling “feminism’s failure to come to terms with the viewpoints and lives of religious women, except as objects needing reform,” her husband wrote in an email.

“Saba’s work demonstrated that women could be agents within, and not just against, patriarchal religious traditions,” he added.

Her critics, he said, saw Mahmood’s invitation to understand the perspectives of these religious women as “an abandonment of feminism’s emancipatory mandate.”

Mahmood wrote that both these perspectives “ignore the fact that I was not interested in delivering judgments on what counts as a feminist versus an anti-feminist practice.”

She circled back to her point in 2016 at a conference at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan.

“If I was to condemn those movements, that does not mean anyone has understood them any better,” she said. “My task as a scholar is not simply to denounce, but to try to understand what motivates people to be involved in such movements.”

“Politics of Piety” won a Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association.

In her 2015 book, “Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report,” Mahmood confronted conventional ideas that secularism — commonly understood as the absence of religion or the separation of religion from state — would help reduce social and political inequalities and religious tensions in Islamic countries.

Her findings drew on her exhaustive work in Egypt, looking at such religious minorities as Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais.

It is often argued, she said at the 2016 conference, that the solution to religious extremism is more secularism, and that nations like Pakistan suffer from fundamentalism because the state and its people are not adequately secular. But the idea that secularism means the separation of church and state “is an old idea” that has been challenged by scholars for about the last 20 years, she said.

These scholars now argue that the condition of secularism is in fact one in which the state has become “more and more involved in the regulation of religious life and religious institutions,” she said.

Thus, when Islamic movements struggle to make the state their means to Islamicize society, they are in line with this modern conception of secularism, Mahmood maintained.

“Even in America, Protestantism is a very crucial aspect that informs almost all laws and practices,” she said.

Her work has been translated into Arabic, French, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Polish.

Saba Mahmood was born on Feb. 3, 1961, in Quetta, Pakistan, to Mahmood Hussein, a policeman, and Latif Begum, a homemaker.

Mahmood moved to the United States in 1981 to study architecture and urban planning at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received her doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University in 1998 and taught at the University of Chicago before joining the Berkeley faculty in 2004. She had taught through the most recent fall semester.

Mahmood was central in the formation of the Berkeley Pakistan Studies Initiative, which has been called the first academic program in the United States dedicated to the study of Pakistan’s history, politics and culture.

She was also affiliated with the university’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Program in Critical Theory and the Institute for South Asia Studies.

In addition to her husband, whom she married in 2003, she is survived by a son, Nameer Hirschkind, and two brothers, Tariq and Khalid.

Mahmood received many honors and awards, among them the Axel Springer Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin and fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

“Clearly Saba Mahmood has always been too firmly a force in the world to ‘be gone,'” Laurie A. Wilkie, the chair of Berkeley’s anthropology department, wrote on the university’s website. “She endures in her many important contributions within and beyond anthropology. She endures in the lives and careers of her many undergraduate and graduate students.”