Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making Of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality

Author: Shenila Khoja-moolji

Pages: 262

Rebuilding Community tells the story of Shia Ismaili Muslim women who recreated religious community (jamat) in the aftermath of successive displacements over the course of the twentieth century. Khoja-Moolji draws on oral histories, fieldwork, and memory texts to illuminate the placemaking activities through which Ismaili women reproduced bonds of spiritual kinship in North America: from cooking for congregants on feast days and looking after sick coreligionists to engaging in memory work through miracle stories and cookbooks. Theorizing a Shia Ismaili ethics of care, Khoja-Moolji argues that jamat-and religious community more generally is not a given but an ethical relation that must be maintained daily and intergenerationally through everyday acts of care.