Rebuilding Community

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.