Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.
Career
Mahmood was born on February 3, 1961, in Quetta, Pakistan, where her father was a policeman. In 1981, she moved to Seattle to study at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in anthropology from Stanford University in 1998. She also held master's degrees in Political Science, Architecture, and Urban Planning. She married Charles Hirschkind, an anthropology professor at UC Berkeley, in 2003. Prior to joining Berkeley in 2004, she taught at the University of Chicago.
Prior to studying anthropology, Mahmood spent four years studying architecture, during which she was also involved in movements against US foreign policy in Central America and the Middle East. After the first Gulf War, she showed interest in Islamic politics and the challenge it brought against secular nationalism in the Muslim societies, which eventually led her to anthropology.
Mahmood held visiting appointments at the American Academy in Berlin, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and Leiden University. She taught at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University, the Venice School of Human Rights, and the Institute of Global Law and Policy. She was a co-convener of the Summer Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine. Mahmood served on the editorial boards of Representations, Anthropology Today, L'Homme, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
Mahmood was the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, the Carnegie Corporation's scholar of Islam award, the Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. Her book Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject received the 2005 Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association and was an honorable mention for the 2005 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association. Her book Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report received the 2016 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her work has been translated into Arabic, French, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Polish.
Overview of work
Mahmood's work has carried profound implications for the philosophical and empirical study of sovereignty, subjectivity and feminist agency, and has led many scholars to reconsider dominant approaches to the law and the modern state, particularly with respect to how religious subjects and groups are governed and defined. Crossing disciplinary boundaries in the humanities and social sciences, her work has shaped theoretical and ethnographic inquiry into religion and freedom in modernity, as well as the legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and secularism in contemporary conflicts in the Middle East.