Khoja-Moolji, Shenila. 2023. Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality, Oxford University Press

“Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality” by Shenila Khoja-Moolji is a poignant ethnography that aims to understand the lives of Ismaili women in the diaspora. It is an insightful scholarly work that provides a rare, nuanced analysis of the experiences of Ismaili Muslim women who were displaced from East Africa and East Pakistan in the 1970s and settled in West Pakistan, England, Canada, and the United States.

Theoretically, Khoja-Moolji focuses on the ethics of care that these women use to rebuild their communities after displacement. In doing so, she explores how ordinary ethical practices of care are critical to cultivating an Ismaili sociality that enables women to practice their faith in everyday contexts. Throughout the book, ‘spiritualized socialities’ (7) are invoked both as a concept and as a lived and sensorial experience, thus revealing new paths for theorizing care at the intersection of Divine Will. Not to mention, in understanding how care work is intimately tied to spirituality and ‘placemaking,’ (20) it joins a growing body of anthropological scholarship on care that goes beyond its economic and productivist logic.

Further, her ethnography exemplifies a move forward within the anthropology of religion that usually focuses on the gap between religious morality and ordinary ethics; instead, Khoja-Moolji focuses on demonstrating how people enact ethical moral codes between themselves and within communities. With occasional personal touches, the book alternates between ethnography and oral history, literature, memories, and intergenerational stories, making it both ethnographically and theoretically compelling.

The book consists of seven chapters engaging its audience in the wider discussions on religious community formation of diasporic Ismaili women and their placemaking activities. With ethnographic vignettes and historical records of violent displacement, the introduction sets the stage for the rest of the book. It demonstrates how diasporic Ismaili women cultivate kinship relations intergenerationally through voluntary and everyday acts of care in the jamatkhanas (Ismaili houses of gathering and worship). These ordinary practices of care, for example, through cleaning, cooking, and caring for the elderly, Khoja-Moolji argues, are acts of spiritual sociality. Such socialities facilitate a fashioning of ethical relationality between members of the faith community and the Divine (26). In closing, the Introduction discusses the author’s critical positionality as someone deeply familiar with their interlocutors’ religious sensibilities. Khoja-Moolji refers to this as ‘faithful witnessing’ (31) – a hermeneutic tool that enhances the researcher’s engagement with the things they see, especially the rhythms of her interlocutors’ religious beliefs. Khoja-Moolji’s epistemological goal of writing about her interlocutors’ experiences from within builds upon the work of scholars like Kirin Narayan and Amy Moran-Thomas who have theorized a move beyond the concepts of “native” and “non-native” ethnographers.

The second chapter reconstructs the migration of first-generation Ismaili women from India to East Africa and East Pakistan using childhood memories of interlocutors. It’s a feminist story of Ismaili community migration between 1890 and 1970 that celebrates women’s life worlds, their struggles with displacements across continents, educational aspirations, and self-care practices that are often forgotten or obscured into the background of male-centered Ismaili history. Yet, it does not solely aim at uncovering these lost voices, but focuses more on what women’s activities reveal about Ismaili ethical subjectivities (