2005 Victoria Schuck Award

For the best book published in 2004 on women and politics.

Award Committee:  Wendy Lynn Brown, Anna L. Harvey, Christina Wolbrecht

Recipient: Saba Mahmood, University of California, Berkeley

Book: Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press)

Citation: This extraordinary first book by a cultural anthropologist is a brilliant and sensitive study of women in Egypt's contemporary mosque movement.   In addition to its ethnographic sparkle, it makes original contributions to three domains of knowledge rarely treated in one book:  feminist theories of agency and embodiment; liberal notions of secularism, personhood, and subjectivity; and understandings of political Islam and Arab nationalisms.  Politics of Piety is a model for the kind of interdisciplinary work, and blend of empirical and theoretical analysis, essential to political analysis that captures and exceeds the issue of gender.