Saba Mahmood (1962-2018)
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley

Axel Springer Fellow - Class of Spring 2013

Saba Mahmood was an 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, and the co-author of Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (2009), published by the University of California Press. Her work appeared in a variety of journals, including Critical Inquiry, Cultural Anthropology, Boston Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Social Research, American Ethnologist, Public Culture, and Cultural Studies. Mahmood was 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 a Co-Principal Investigator on a three-year project, funded by the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs, which focuses on a comparative study of the right to religious liberty in Western and non-Western political contexts. Her broader work centered on issues of secularism, religion, gender, and post-colonialism in the Middle East.

Project Description

Religious Freedom, Minority Rights, and Geopolitics: A Middle Eastern Genealogy

During her time at the Academy, Mahmood completed a book about the promise and limits of the right to religious liberty in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Egypt. While linked to the civic virtue of tolerance, the right to religious liberty is distinct in that it is enshrined in national constitutions and international treaties and charters. Conventional wisdom has it that religious liberty is a universally valid secular-liberal principle whose proper implementation continues to be thwarted by intransigent forces in society (such as illiberal governments, religious fundamentalists, and traditional norms). Mahmood’s book challenges such an account by showing that religious liberty is not simply a neutral principle for accommodating religious difference but, as a key mechanism of modern statecraft, it also defines and constitutes differences at the heart of the identity of religious minority and majority populations alike. Far from being a singular stable principle, its meaning and practice tend to vary widely in response to the modern state’s shifting regulation of religious and political life, local regimes of religious inequality, and geopolitical developments. Taking this as a point of departure, Mahmood’s book is organized around three key issues: (1) How is the exercise of religious liberty tied to questions of state sovereignty, geopolitics, and national security? (2) How does the institutionalization of this principle affect religious minorities and majorities differently in a national polity? (3) What are the main fault-lines along which conflicts over religious liberty occur?

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