The book by Saba Mahmoud (1962–2018), an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a pioneering analysis of Islamist cultural politics. It is based on an ethnographic study of a grassroots women's piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, aimed not at capturing or transforming the state, but at reforming morality. By examining the traditional Islamic practices that its participants focused on, Saba Mahmoud shows how the movement was significant to Egypt's political landscape and how the ethical and the political are inextricably linked in its context. Her work seeks answers to three central questions: How do moral reform movements help us rethink the normative liberal approach to politics? How does women's adherence to the patriarchal norms underlying such movements problematize key tenets of feminist theory about freedom, agency, and power? And how does an analysis of debates about religious practice among Islamists and their secular critics help to understand the conceptual relationship between physicality and political imagination?