A reference in the memory of Professor of Anthropology University of California Berkley Saba Mahmood was organised by Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences of Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). The reference was attended by her friends and students. Speaking on this occasion Assistant Professor Lahore School of Economics Rabia Nadir said that Saba Mahmood was a brilliant scholar, cherished colleague, and dedicated teacher and graduate mentor.
She mentored her students with remarkable care and intensity, demanding their best work, listening, responding with a sharp generosity, coming alive in thought, and soliciting others to do the same. The speakers said Mahmood made path-breaking contributions to contemporary debates on secularism, opening up new ways of understanding religion in public life and contesting received assumptions about both religion and the secular. Against an increasingly shrill scholarship denouncing Muslim societies, she brought a nuanced and educated understanding of Islam into discussions of feminist theory, ethics and politics.
They also said her publications and presentations have reverberated throughout the humanities and social sciences, profoundly shaping the scholarship of a new generation of scholars as they develop a thoughtful, knowledgeable, and critical approach to religion in modernity.
As a scholar and teacher, she embodied and followed strong moral and political principles, offered keen analyses of colonial and capitalist power in her account of secularism's modernity. In her last work, she studied the discrimination against Coptic Orthodox Christians in contemporary Egypt's secular regime. Against the view that tribal and religious differences are evidence of the incomplete process of secularization, she showed how religious differences, and conflict, have been exacerbated under secular regimes of power.
Mahmood was the single author of Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton University Press, 2015) and Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005) which won the Victoria Schuck Award from the American Political Science Association.
She co-authored a Is Critique Secular? (Fordham University Press, 2011) and co-edited Politics of Religious Freedom (University of Chicago, 2015). Her work has been translated into Arabic, French, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish, and Polish. She published numerous articles in the fields of anthropology, history, religious studies, political science, critical theory, feminist theory, and art criticism and served on several journal boards and read for many presses.
Professor Mahmood was the recipient of several honours and awards, including the Axel Springer Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, and fellowships at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. She was the recipient of a major grant from the Henry Luce Foundation's Initiative on Religion and International Affairs as well as the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies.
She also received the Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as the Andrew Carnegie Scholars' program as a young scholar. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala in Sweden in 2013.