Positive and Negative Freedom

Freedom, in all sense, should be a positive occurrence, or so I thought, before reading Saba Mahmoud's book, Politic of Piety: the Islamic revival and the feminist subject. In her book, Mahmood presents two ideologies of freedom which I had not read of before: the theories of positive and negative freedom.

Negative freedom, according to Mahmood, is the "absence of external [forces or] obstacles that would prevent one from acting the way the person desires, whereas positive freedom is a person's ability to develop his/her "self-mastery or self-government" with the influence of "self-interest" or a "universal reason" (Mahmood, 11). I do agree with Mahmood that the idea of positive freedom could be applied to  or used to explain the islamic revival in Egypt. She explains that the women in the islamic world, who were also involved in the movement, established gatherings in the mosque led by women and other teachings done by women to their fellow women, on how to be more submissive to authorities (most likely male authorities) and how to perform their duties as women in their families.

Just as Mahmood commented on such an agenda of the revival, I also found it difficult to understand why such a large movement that gave women freedom to gather and teach themselves, which was entirely not the case before, could be used by these women to learn how to become more tied and bonded to the rules of tradition and religion. Mahmood further gives examples of the different definitions of freedom other feminists have fought for. For some their freedom meant release from domestic duties or stringent expectations to perform them. However, in the 1970s, others, such as Native and African American women, saw their freedom as their ability to have a family and become wives and mothers since the "long history of slavery, genocide and racism" had worked to break up their families.

Such contradictions in the ideologies of freedom can mean that whether or not freedom will be considered positive or negative depends on the historical and cultural context with which the desire for autonomy stems from and not necessarily a central dogma of what freedom should be.