Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (New Texts Out Now)

Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (New Texts Out Now)

Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality (New Texts Out Now)

By : Shenila Khoja-Moolji

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

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? 

Shenila Khoja-Moolji (SKM): This project was inspired by my grandmother. In 1971, she, along with my mother who was twelve years old at the time, had to flee East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) due to civil war. A widow and already ultra-poor, she was working at a restaurant to take care of her five young children and extended family. As could be expected, the war exacerbated their already precarious position.

But when they arrived in Karachi, members of the Shia Ismaili Muslim community formed a web of care around them. They were first taken to a refugee camp at a jamatkhana (an Ismaili space of worship and gathering), where they were given clothing and food. An ad hoc volunteer committee—composed of displaced Ismaili people themselves—came together to help other displaced families, like my grandmother’s, find housing. They even subsidized her rent for over a year and helped enroll my mother in a boarding school. Another Ismaili woman helped my grandmother find work as a housekeeper. 

I grew up with these stories of how Ismaili women have cared for their community. But we do not often read about such forms of ordinary care in national or religious histories. It was this potential loss of Ismaili Muslim women’s history—recognizing that these women’s lives and community-building efforts would disappear unrecorded and unarchived—that motivated me to write this book.

Placemaking after displacement then becomes a scenario for me to theorize what an Ismaili everyday ethics of care looks like.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

SKM: The book 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. So, it is a study about their placemaking. However, while most investigations of refugee placemaking focus on how displaced people transform their built environments, particularly public spaces, to reflect their needs and aspirations, I extend the concept of placemaking beyond the construction of physical infrastructure to include the ordinary acts of care that sustain connection among people and to ideas—such as what it means to be an Ismaili Muslim or part of the Ismaili community. 

I argue that it is through everyday actions—cooking for a lost traveler, telling a miracle story, passing on heritage food recipes, helping a young widow set up a shop—that my interlocutors stitched together communities, operationalized their understanding of the Shia Ismaili Imam’s guidance on unity and care, and gave themselves (and others) a long cultural memory. Placemaking after displacement then becomes a scenario for me to theorize what an Ismaili everyday ethics of care looks like.

In that vein, I also look at my interlocutors’ practices to illuminate lived Ismaili faith. Since the women I interviewed trace their ancestors to the Sindh-Gujarat corridor, they share language and ethnicity; it is therefore easy to default to ethnicity as the primary frame of analysis. But I wanted to track the role religion plays in their relationship to each other so that we are able to see how Ismailis strive to transcend ethnicity in their aspiration for producing a spiritualized sociality.

In this endeavor, I have been inspired by Amira Mittermaier’s call to scholars to keep God in the picture. The book thus attends to how women’s everyday actions are dynamically linked with divine direction, which in the case of Ismailis, often arrives via the Imam.

In fact, the Ismaili sociality that I describe in the book has a strong collectivist impetus due in part to the central authority of the Shia Imam. Obedience to the Imam is a key tenet of Shia Ismaili spirituality as he is divinely designated and has the knowledge of both the apparent and the hidden dimensions of re­ality. I therefore read my interlocutors’ practices as expressing an ethic of care for community that is uniquely Ismaili in its motivations, if not necessarily in the service tasks it motivates. 

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work? 

SKM: All of my books are concerned with questions of gender and power in Muslim societies. In my first book, Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, I examined the politics of educational reform campaigns to uncover notions of ideal and failed girlhood; in my second book, Sovereign Attachments, I looked at how gender is a constitutive element in articulations of sovereignty; and in this third book, I write women into modern Ismaili history and draw on their experiences to theorize Muslim ethics of care and community-making. So, each text, in its own way, is my effort to think about the politics of gender in relation to Muslim societies. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

SKM: Shia Ismaili Muslims are a minority within a minority: about fifteen percent of the world’s Muslim population is Shia and Ismailis are a marginal presence within that group. Spread globally across twenty-five countries, they are also a numerical minority in the countries where they reside. In “Introduction to Islam” courses, we often do not hear much about Ismailis. I have written the book in a manner that I believe will be engaging for undergraduates in the hope that it is included in syllabi on Islam and Muslim societies.

In addition, my hope is to reclaim care work. As we know, certain forms of care—particularly those linked to biological reproduction such as cleaning or cooking—are often hidden and stigmatized. Africana studies scholar Judith Casselberry insists that women’s labor is frequently not even considered labor because gender influences which labor becomes legible as such. And so, in the book I call for a different valuation for women’s care work.

I emphasize how care work (and care in general) has a reparative dimension, particularly in the context of displacement. We also notice the centrality of care in creating and sustaining religious communities. Care work can further have a deeply spiritual dimension. In recognizing the value of women’s care work, we need not ignore the ways in which power (patriarchy, for instance) is exercised through its allocation and distribu­tion, as Sandy Grande has observed. Our task instead is to highlight the multiple social lives of care and the messy effects that its varying legibility produces.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

SKM: I am currently working on a short book, entitled Muslim Boyhood, which is slated to be published by the University of Minnesota Press next year.

 

Except from the book (from Chapter 5, Culinary Placemaking, pp. 141-143)

When I visited my nani in Karachi during summer vacations, she made me bhel puri. Ten-year-old me did not particularly like bhel puri because I was not allowed to have the tangy and spicy tamarind and cilantro-based chutneys that usually go with it. But even at that age I knew that there was something about cooking and eating with my grandmother that deserved re­spect. So when she told me to sift chickpea flour for the sev, I sifted. When she said to wash the potatoes, I washed. When it was time to measure and mix the puffed rice with onions, I mixed. I would say her bhel puri was delicious, unparalleled, like nothing I could eat at home in Hyderabad. She would smile— not a full beaming smile but a half-clouded, coy one. She insisted, “Write it down, beta.” For nani, cooking was an everyday practice, its knowl­edge passed down orally. She did not have any formal schooling. “Write it down” was not something she could do, but something she asked of me, “so that you don’t forget.” 

Nani passed away as I was drafting this chapter in the spring of 2021. COVID travel restrictions meant I could not attend her funeral services. I ate bhel puri every day for months afterward. I wasn’t actually planning to eat it; I just ate it, every evening, as if following a Divine plan. Weeks later, as I rewrote the chapter, I could intellectualize my actions. Perhaps this was my way of mourning her? But my body did not await such intellection be­fore plunging into action, before remembering her, before aligning with her through bhel puri. My body has its own memory; it knew how to honor the passing of an ancestor thousands of miles away, how to conjure her into being again through the sensory memory of food, and how to keep returning to her by making and eating again the dishes we had once prepared together. 

Bhel puri was first prepared in Gujarat in India but traveled with Khoja Ismailis as they migrated within India and on to East Africa, fleeing famines and wars. It fed my nani and her family through multiple displacements and a life of poverty. When her husband died young, she supported her five children by preparing bhel puri at a restaurant in Dhaka. Bhel puri— typically eaten as a snack by the middle-class customers of the restaurants where she worked— was often the only meal that she and her children could afford for days on end. When the 1971 war between East and West Pakistan uprooted her family, she began making bhel puri in Karachi for a small canteen at the local jamatkhana, run by and for Ismaili Muslims. When nani and I made bhel puri together, she would tell me stories of her past work as a cook, her tin-roofed home in Dhaka, and how she had sneaked her way into Karachi in the early 1970s. 

I knew that there was something different about nani, about bhel puriBhel puri is still a popular street food in India, but street vendors did not sell it in Hyderabad, Pakistan, where I grew up. I could only eat it in nani’s kitchen or at the jamatkhana canteen in Karachi where many migrant and refugee women from Gujarat (like nani) worked. As a child, I did not understand why nani spoke Gujarati and not Sindhi, my “mother tongue”— or, in this case, my father’s tongue. I did not recognize all the ways that her life was marked by displacement and dispossession, or how her body and her care practices carried remnants of other places. But I took in some of that knowl­edge along with the bhel puri that back then I was only pretending to like. Much later, as I remembered her life, I remembered it through this dish. 

Food, of course, is not only about nourishment. It tells a tale about where, how, and when it was created and about the people who consumed it. It is tied to political economy and social class. Its modifications and fusions reveal encounters between people and places in the diaspora. Its preparation is both an expression of care and subject to exploitation. When I look back on the hours I spent with nani making and consuming bhel puri and writing down recipes of the foods she prepared, I understand those moments as drawing me closer to her then and bringing me closer to her memory now. My re­cent bhel puri craving, and the time I spent ransacking my suitcases to see if I could find her recipe, are evidence of how food memories get embedded into one’s body at a cellular level. My nani’s bhel puri showed me that food is an archive: it records individual and communal pasts; it transfers memories of women past... 

…In this chapter, I consider cookbooks written by three displaced Ismaili women to discover how certain foods crystalize the memory of diasporic encounters and how through food fusions women created bridges with new communities as well as future generations of Ismailis. I am also attentive to how food— its aroma in particular— has been used to mark ethnic and ra­cial differences. Specifically, I examine Lella Umedaly’s Mamajee’s Kitchen (2005), Noorbanu Nimji’s A Spicy Touch (editions published in 1986, 1992, 2007, and 2020), and Yasmin Alibhai- Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook (2009). In the hands of Ismaili women, the cookbook becomes a memoir, an ad­vice manual, a testimony, and a wish. Through it, they introduce readers to histories of community encounters from East Africa to Canada, memori­alize their past lives, pass on heritage food practices, share their Imam’s ad­vice on nutrition, and imagine familial and communal futures. They reframe the trauma of displacement by crafting new forms of emplacement through food: food enables them to return “home” but also to recreate home in the diaspora through fusions and interactions with other foodways. The cookbook, then, is simultaneously mnemonic and aspirational. Like the moujza stories in the previous chapter, it is at once didactic (how to cook) and narrative (cookbooks often tell stories about their authors’ journeys), acting to emplace the younger members within the community’s historic and geographical ex­perience through the habits of cooking and flavors of heritage foods.

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.