What conceptual resources have anthropologists been developing recently – and which ones do we need? – to enable us to make freedom a dimension of anthropological analysis? I shall begin to answer these questions by returning to Charles Hirschkind's and Saba Mahmood's deservedly influential studies of popular Islamic reformist piety in Egypt (discussed briefly in Chapter 2). These studies are in some ways close to the general approach adopted here, in being influenced both by Foucault's later writings and by MacIntyre's version of virtue ethics, although Hirschkind's and Mahmood's reading of both these authors differs to some extent from that set out in the foregoing two chapters; and Mahmood's work in particular addresses the question of freedom in ethics quite directly. My suggestion will be that to pursue the admirable aims of these studies further, it will be necessary to replace their expository opposition to a ‘Western liberal’ concept of freedom with a more developed analytic, and towards that end, and drawing also on a range of other ethnography, I shall distinguish several general ideas of freedom and autonomy. Because the idea of Western liberal freedom plays such a constitutive role in the anthropological literature, Hirschkind's and Mahmood's but also much else besides, my discussion will proceed through dissection of that category. We shall discover richer resources to think with than are implied by the too-common casually dismissive use of the expression. Undoubtedly our thought could be further enriched by systematic consideration of concepts of freedom in other traditions (Taylor 2002), but, despite this limitation, the discussion here will be sufficient, I shall suggest, to provide a more perspicuous description of the dynamics of power and freedom in reformist Islam than is allowed for by the undifferentiated use of the category ‘liberal freedom’ by Hirschkind and Mahmood themselves, and sufficient also to enable us to see that the ethnographic record already contains some rich resources for a comparative analysis of the varying social forms that freedom can take, and to provide a usable framework for such analysis.