Mobilizing Piety

Islam and feminism are often thought of as incompatible. Through a vivid ethnography of Muslim and secular women activists in Jakarta, Indonesia, Rachel Rinaldo shows that this is not always the case. Examining a feminist NGO, Muslim women's organizations, and a Muslim political party, Rinaldo reveals that democratization and the Islamic revival in Indonesia are shaping new forms of personal and political agency for women. These unexpected kinds of agency draw ondifferent approaches to interpreting religious texts and facilitate different repertoires of collective action - one oriented toward rights and equality, the other toward more public moral regulation. As Islam becomes a primary source of meaning and identity in Indonesia, some women activists draw onIslam to argue for women's empowerment and equality, while others use Islam to advocate for a more Islamic nation. Mobilizing Piety demonstrates that religious and feminist agency can coexist and even overlap, often in creative ways. "Rachel Rinaldo gives us a richly documented and path-breaking study of how Muslim women in Indonesia draw on both Islam and feminism to argue and imagine political and social changes. Her findings go against a pervasive view of the incompatibility of Islam and feminism: she finds that these very diverse global discourses can in fact work together towards desirable political outcomes."-Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, and author of A Sociology of Globalization"This original study conducted in the world's largest Muslim-majority country strikes me as one of the most interesting and important works on Islam and women in recent years. Rather than pit secularists against religious-minded activists in debates over women's rights, Rachel Rinaldo shows that the major divide in contemporary Indonesia - as in much of the Muslim world - is more complex, and centers on struggles over what it means to be a Muslim, a woman, and an Indonesian."-Robert Hefner,Professor of Anthropology, Boston University

With her book, Mobilizing Piety, Rachel Rinaldo joins a growing and influential subset of social scientists attempting to theorize the intersection of religion and social movements using the lens of Islamic feminist activists in majority Muslim contexts. Rinaldo's excellent work offers both the theoretical and methodological groundwork for such further inquiry into the compatibilities and limits of Islam and female agency in majority Muslim contexts., Rachel Rinaldo gives us a richly documented and path-breaking study of how Muslim women in Indonesia draw on both Islam and feminism to argue and imagine political and social changes. Her findings go against a pervasive view of the incompatibility of Islam and feminism: she finds that these very diverse global discourses can in fact work together towards desirable political outcomes., This original study conducted in the world's largest Muslim-majority country strikes me as one of the most interesting and important works on Islam and women in recent years. Rather than pit secularists against religious-minded activists in debates over women's rights, Rachel Rinaldo shows that the major divide in contemporary Indonesia - as in much of the Muslim world - is more complex, and centers on struggles over what it means to be a Muslim, a woman, and an Indonesian., In this empirically rich and highly readable ethnography, sociologist Rachel Rinaldo shows how Indonesian women activists in four women's organizations — which she studied between 2002 and 2010 — negotiate religious norms, gender roles, and the influences of globalization... Rinaldo's unique and outstanding study of the values and actions of four women's organizations in contemporary Indonesia enables the reader not only to gain a deeper understanding of gender and Islamic politics in one country, but also to recognize the variations in women's activism across the globe. The book will be of value to scholars of religion and of women's movements, and appropriate for upper-level undergraduate courses in politics, social movements, and women's studies., The book is well written and theoretically sophisticated, and it is necessary reading for anyone who studies feminism, globalization, or religion and politics.

Rachel Rinaldo is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.