Perhaps the only area where Dr. Motti Inbari and I disagree regarding my book is on the question of women's agency in the socially conservative, patriarchal, religious-political movements that I study. It is not a surprise that there is disagreement. This question of agency has been hotly debated for more than a decade now and there seems to be little consensus about it. In 2005, Saba Mahmood's Politics of Piety made an important intervention into this debate. She argued that liberal feminist conceptions of agency, which are predicated on a liberal and western understanding of autonomy and the autonomous subject, often lead us to view women in patriarchal contexts as either lacking all agency or suffering from false consciousness and the internalization of their own oppression. She argued that because we have come to associate agency with resistance, when we see women who are not resisting but rather adhering to patriarchal norms, we assume that they lack agency. We think that they were forced into these positions because they had no choice, and that they have been made to rationalize their oppression for themselves. As I have written elsewhere (“Women, Freedom, and Agency in Religious Political Movements Reflections from Women Activists in Shas and the Islamic Movement in Israel.” Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 9:81–107), I agree with Mahmood's urging to take a more nuanced approach to the question of agency, while I disagree with her about her identification of resistance and the idea of the autonomous subject as being inherently western and inapplicable to other cultural contexts.

What I argue in the book is that the women activists in all the patriarchal religious movements that I study, but in particular in the southern Islamic Movement in Israel and in Shas, are resisting individuals with a strong sense of the importance of autonomy and choice. Even though the substantive choices that they make are not liberal ones — they choose to follow religious interpretations that stress female modesty, and they participate in movements whose gender ideology is clearly inegalitarian — they describe these choices as resistance. Submission to God and His demands, as the women activists understand them, often puts them in conflict with their surroundings, with social and cultural norms in their societies that their choice to follow God violate. It is true that in the case of the rabbanit from Shas that I present in Chapter 5, who switched from wearing a wig to wearing a head-cover, the impetus for the stricter modesty practice came from a male authority. (It was a demand by Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, the spiritual guide of Shas movement, and the rabbanit's husband told her she must follow Rabbi Yossef's religious opinion.) However, her decision to follow Rabbi Yossef and her husband came from her belief in these men's religious authority. Yet this put her in conflict with her surroundings. People told her she looked old and sick and unattractive with the head-cover. It also instigated an internal struggle, because it clashed with what she understood as her own vanity and her desire to give in to these external pressures to appear beautiful and attractive. Her choice to follow God instigated a conflict with social norms and with internal conflicting desires within her. In my book, she describes this struggle in detail, and she elaborates on what she considers her triumph when her internal conviction was strengthened to such an extent that even others started to see her as beautiful with the head-cover.

Similarly, in the case of the two Islamic Movement sister activists I explore in Chapter 5, after learning more about Islam, they decided to wear a hijab and put on long skirts. This was at a time when almost no woman in their town covered, and they suffered the ridicule of their Muslim classmates. Even their mother was embarrassed by their appearance and asked them not to walk with her in public, and everyone told them they would never find husbands because they had made themselves unattractive. Again in this case, they describe their choice as a struggle and resistance against convention, not as surrender and submission to social pressure. What I have tried to do in Chapter 5 is also to demonstrate how the discourse of rabbaniyot and daiyat, Jewish and Muslim women who teach religious classes in the movements I study, stresses autonomy and choice. They present God's requirements as straightforward but explain that following these just because everyone else might follow them, or because of family or social pressure, or because of customs and traditions, is qualitatively different from following them out of personal conviction and choice. The recompense from God, they instruct, is greater for a piety practice that was consciously and freely chosen, than for one that was unthinkingly or blindly accepted due to external pressure.

But to what extent does the adoption of patriarchal religious practices reflect agency or false consciousness? I do not think we can have a definite verdict and so it is understandable that scholars will interpret this issue differently — hence the very different interpretations Dr. Inbari and I subscribe to. For me at least, my normative commitment is to give great weight to what my research interlocutors, the women in these movements, say and how they interpret and understand their own actions. They often speak with pride about struggle, resistance and perseverance. While I am critical of their movements’ religious and political agendas, and as a feminist I disagree with some of the women's choices, I do not feel comfortable dismissing their own accounts and interpretations of their life-worlds as false consciousness. This is doubly so because I have experienced in my research many occasions in which the pious women and men I worked with dismissed my own secular feminist choices as a foreign, western-influenced, and consumerist false consciousness. As I refuse to accept my interlocutors’ understanding of my spiritual and political choices as being a result of unthinking and blind following of social norms or even a result of implicit and explicit coercion and westernized “brain-washing,” I also try to avoid passing such judgments on other women with whom I have profound and fundamental disagreements.