Spiritual Placemaking: Shia Ismaili Muslim Women's Seva in the Aftermath of Displacement

The South Asian Studies Unit at The Institute of Ismaili Studies launched a lecture series entitled Unexplored Sources and Uncharted Territories in 2023. Under this series, we invite scholars who have identified manuscripts that have hitherto remained unexplored or used unconventional sources (e.g. family recipe books) to reconstruct the history or explore the territories that have not been studied before. Once the research is presented, we engage the author in conversation to explore the topic and the research further. The series aims to initiate conversations about lesser-known sources and topics.
Professor Shenila Khoja-Moolji, in her talk “Spiritual Placemaking: Shia Ismaili Muslim Women’s Seva in the Aftermath of Displacement”, reconstructs the lesser-known history of displaced Ismaili women (those who fled East Pakistan and East Africa in the 1970s), and their crucial role in recreating religious communities (jamat) in North America. The lecture focuses on one of the chapters from her pathbreaking study, Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality placing. The work helps these women get their place in the modern Ismaili history. Using the hitherto marginalised voices, she captures the experience of the repeatedly displaced. She uses oral histories, fieldwork, and memory texts to provide a nuanced understanding of the “placemaking activities through which Ismaili women reproduce bonds of spiritual kinship”.