Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall
Saba Mahmood (Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley)
POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
The right to religious freedom is widely regarded as a crowning achievement of secular-liberal democracies, one that secures the peaceful co-existence of religiously diverse populations. In this lecture, Saba Mahmood analyzes the legal, conceptual, and practical problems religious minorities face in their exercise of the right to religious freedom. Through an examination of current struggles in the Middle East and Europe, she discusses how this foundational right might be re-thought in light of the rise of religious identity in the last century and the new challenges posed to secular liberal democracies.
Saba Mahmood is 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 (Princeton 2005), and has published numerous articles on the topic of religion, secularism, gender, postcoloniality, ethics, and Islam. She was a Carnegie Fellow in 2008 and is currently working on a new book mansucript at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
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