Taken from the work of David Scott (2004), the concept of the “problem-space” is the material and ideal contexts of the arguments going around at a certain time in history. It is a kind of conceptual and discursive condition of possibility, that while not determining a response, solicits a certain type of answer. What I call the Islamic Feminist problem-space is constituted by a series of double-binds between “colonial feminism” and Islamic fundamentalism. One horn sees tradition as antithetical to feminism and Muslim women as essentially oppressed and passive. The other sees any change to Islamic practice toward gender equality, even if compatible with scripture, as inauthentic (Bucar 2010; Abu-Lughod 2002). According to colonial feminism, as pre-Modern, primitive, backward, and uncivilized, Islam has nothing to teach feminism (Abu-Lughod 1998). Relatedly, all deviation from pre-colonial Islam is seen as colonial and imperialist by fundamentalists. Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety (2005) emerges from this Islamic feminist problem-space as a potential third way out of these double-binds.

            But, I argue, there is a fundamental tension in the Politics of Piety that pulls the work in both directions of these binds. On the first horn, Mahmood wants to push back on Judith Butler’s feminist work on norms as well as Western feminists’ “romance of resistance” (Abu-Lughod 1990). Mahmood contrasts her metaphor of inhabiting a norm with Butler’s argument that every citation and iteration subverts a norm. While Butler reads this failure as constitutive of norms themselves, Mahmood reads failures to live up to and inhabit norms as a problem of pedagogy. Mahmood’s more embodied account (Clare 2009) of inhabiting the norm is that as the individual goes from novice to virtuoso through practice and self-transformation, the person is more able to live up to the norm. Rather than subverting the norm, the skilled practitioner shores it up. Indeed, for Mahmood, the norms of Islam are further sedimented by each iteration and so in these parts of the book, Mahmood cannot help but depict the norms of Islam as fixed standards.

            On the other horn of this tension is a pushback against both secularist and Islamic fundamentalist assumptions that religion is static and irrational based on particular readings of Talal Asad and Alisdair MacIntyre. Here tradition is both circumscribed and expansive. Through some ethnographic incidents, Mahmood is able to show that traditions can accommodate great disagreement, rupture, recuperation, reorientation and yet still be thought of as continuous.

            Nowhere is this tension more apparent than Mahmood’s famous ethnographic story about Abir, who through pious virtuosity is able to change her husband Jamal’s character. More controversially she does this by seemingly opposing his authority on religious matters. Serene Khader argues that Mahmood’s reading of Abir’s story, “instead of disputing the idea that traditions are patriarchal, she ends up being skeptical about whether patriarchy is really bad” (2019, 86). Meanwhile Allison Weir has the opposite reading of Abir’s story. To her it’s obvious that Abir is resisting patriarchal authority for the sake of her obligations toward God (Weir 2013, 144).

In this paper I look to find a Mahmoodian solution to this tension by deepening her account by showing that there can be social change while still inhabiting the norm. I do this in four ways. Firstly, I take seriously Mahmood’s exhortation that we think of the women of the dawa movement as working toward expertise in piety by looking at contemporary work on expertise and how experts change norms. Secondly, I then look to show how experts can change norms yet still remain within a tradition by looking at Wittgenstein’s famous account of “going on in the same way” (2009). Thirdly, I turn to contemporary Chinese virtue ethics to briefly explore and expand our Western conceptual vocabulary on how an expert can change norms yet still be seen as within the same tradition (Lai and Chiu 2019; Lai 2006). Fourthly, since much of Mahmood’s arguments about inhabiting the norm center on virtue ethics, I look at the Islamic akhlaq [virtue ethics] tradition and its connection to interpretations and changes in Islamic law. I conclude this part of the argument by taking what we’ve learned from the first four parts and looking again at Mahmood’s famous ethnographic story of Abir. Against Weir and Khader’s account, I show that it is a case of social change that still inhabits the norm.

The stakes of this are not just solving a scholarly puzzle but it is that this provides one answer to the Islamic feminist problem-space. This is important since a new generation of Islamic feminists such as Aysha Hidayatullah (2014) and Fatema Amijee (2022) have criticized that after forty years, that Islamic feminism currently still remains on the edges and margins of Islam. This is because the first generation of Islamic feminists’ interpretations have not been recognized as within the tradition. Their practices and interpretations are not seen as “going on in the same way”. Here inhabiting the norm while still changing the norm becomes a third way that Muslim women can exert authority over their lives, change norms yet still be considered within Islamic tradition.

            But I put forward this third way with a warning. As I have written elsewhere, this is a non-teleological and contingent way of thinking about social change. There is no guarantee that the social change brought through inhabiting the norm will fit the contours of what we, as Western feminists, consider to be normatively feminist. But I think it was always Mahmood’s goal to push the bounds of what feminism could be.