About the Book
Over the course of the twentieth century, Shia Ismaili Muslim communities were repeatedly displaced. How, in the aftermath of these displacements, did they remake their communities? Shenila Khoja-Moolji highlights women's critical role in this rebuilding process and breaks new ground by writing women into modern Ismaili history.
Rebuilding Community tells the story of how Ismaili Muslim women who fled East Pakistan and East Africa in the 1970s recreated religious community (jamat) in North America. Drawing on oral histories, fieldwork, and memory texts, Khoja-Moolji illuminates the placemaking activities through which Ismaili women reproduce bonds of spiritual kinship: from cooking for congregants on feast days and looking after sick coreligionists to engaging in memory work through miracle stories and cookbooks. Khoja-Moolji situates these activities within the framework of ethical norms that more broadly define and sustain the Ismaili sociality. Jamat--and religious community more generally--is not a given, but an ethical relation that is maintained daily and intergenerationally through everyday acts of care. By emphasizing women's care work in producing relationality and repairing trauma, Khoja-Moolji disrupts the conventional articulation of displaced people as dependent subjects.
Table of Contents:
Note on Translation
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Re-Assembling Community
2. Ismaili Women's Lifeworlds, 1890-1970
Interlude: Fleeing, 1971-1972
3. Fostering Sacred Spaces
4. Storying Divine Intervention
5. Culinary Placemaking
6. Placemaking in the Second Generation
7. Conclusion: Spiritual Intimacies
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Shenila Khoja-Moolji is the Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani Associate Professor of Muslim Societies at Georgetown University. She is the author of two award-winning books, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl: The Production of Desirable Subjects in Muslim South Asia and Sovereign Attachments: Masculinity, Muslimness, and Affective Politics in Pakistan.
Review :
With this monograph, Khoja Moolji fills a gap in the existing literature and moves the trajectory of her own work in compelling directions. It constitutes appropriate reading for graduate level or advanced undergraduate courses, and selections would enhance syllabi in a range of introductory level courses. The book will, no doubt, garner an enthusiastic audience among Ismailis who see their histories reflected with such care and precision. For all its academic and theoretical value, the most enduring impact may be the service, the seva, that Khoja Moolji performs in capturing so keenly and tenderly an era in Ismaili women's history.
A Landmark study. Exploring the lives of Shia Ismaili Muslim women in the North American diaspora, Rebuilding Community illuminates many themes of our day - displacement, flight, migration (sometimes repeatedly from one country to another) followed by the work of recreating home and community in new spaces. Documenting the minutiae of their experience with brilliance and exquisite sensitivity, Khoja-Moolji also compellingly develops a theory of the ethics of care pertinent to any community of faith.
In this brilliantly conceptualized work, Khoja-Moolji argues for how the deeply ingrained ethic of care among migrant Ismaili women illustrates the critical role played by women in creating a vibrant symbolic, imagined, and living community, turning displacement into emplacement. Her careful research destabilizes understandings of migratory and refugee populations as solely victimized and traumatized, pointing instead to how the placemaking practices of such women draw upon shared spiritualities, ritual practices, traumatizing dislocations, and cultural traditions to forge connections across generations and geographical locations. We are drawn into a richly textured world in which mundane activities take on much greater significance when seen as threads in an intergenerational tapestry that tell the stories of loss, relocation, resilience, and regeneration.
A pioneering study that sensitively explores the experiences of migrant Ismaili women in North America and the crucial role they have played in community formation through the ethic of care that is so central to their religious and spiritual lives. This compelling book will be of great interest to scholars in many intersecting fields, including religious studies, Islamic studies, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, migration and refugee studies.
A book of rare power. Theoretically sophisticated and historically imaginative. The life stories and voices of Muslim women we encounter in this book offer new ways of thinking about and making visible the vital role of feminist ethics of care inside religious communities, and about the enduring power that practices of placemaking by women have in shaping and preserving religious identities. The book is written with an exemplary ethics of care and will itself become a cherished 'place' for honouring and celebrating the remarkable journeys of contemporary Ismaili Muslim communities.
An insightful scholarly work that provides a rare, nuanced analysis of the experiences of Ismaili Muslim women...here is no doubt that [Khoja-Moolji's] book is a decolonial intervention within anthropology of religion that aims to engage with what is beyond the gaze of the ethnographer.
A powerful reminder of the importance of women to the forging of community.
The sharp theorisation of sacred spaces (jamatkhanas), the consideration of how care work informs religiosity, the focus on Muslim women's stories and the ethnographic methodology combine to render this book a worthy intervention into the fields of religious and Islamic studies.
Shenila Khoja-Moolji's eloquent and accessible book is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on lived Islam, and is written with special attention to the role of migrant women's ordinary ethical pursuits in cultivating spiritual intimacies in new spaces. Her book makes an especially important contribution to the anthropology of Islam, moving beyond paradigms of ethical self-cultivation to properly account for divine presence in an innovative and creative manner.
Rebuilding Community is, in the end, a powerful work of scholarship and love. It beautifully recuperates and centers the narratives of South Asian Ismaili women who, for generations, have engaged in diverse acts of care, service, and ethical action to reproduce the bonds of community in diverse spaces and at different times.
More than an academic achievement, this scholarly contribution serves as a socially responsible intervention, giving voice to the often-invisible labor of religiously pious women in migrant communities, particularly in Pakistan and East Africa.
This book makes a much-needed contribution to the field of the history of Ismaili women's placemaking and care work. Khoja-Moolji's sensitive writing style, light use of theory, successful performance of ethnographic research under challenging circumstances, and admirable command of an extensive (and diverse) archive make this book accessible to graduate students, faculty, and undergraduate students, as well as community members. Rebuilding Community will be of interest to scholars in Islamic studies, Shii studies, women and gender studies, anthropology, and history.
