Ethnographies of displacement and migration are challenging to research and craft. They require a great deal of sensitivity and creativity to engage interlocutors across generations, languages, and geographies as well as to weave an ethical narrative that can bring to life their experiences in all their complexity. Khoja-Moolji’s Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality focuses primarily on the displacement, migration and resilience stories of first-generation women of the Ismaili Muslim Community of East Africa to North America in the 1970s and subsequent waves of migration from Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) via Pakistan (formerly West Pakistan) to North America.

Although much has been written about cross-border migration post the 1947 partition of the subcontinent^[1], its gendered implications^[2],^[3], and the subsequent 1971 partition that resulted in Bangladesh^[4], writing about the post-colonial effects on minority communities like the Ismailis is negligible. Rebuilding Community is a migration and community-building story that addresses this significant gap in the literature and traces the implications of colonialism and post-colonialism on the violence, migration and displacement experienced by the Ismaili community across the former colonial British empire, and its effects. Khoja-Moolji documents the contribution of the Ismaili community’s women in healing and community-building through unacknowledged care work, and how this tradition continues through to the next generation of Ismaili women.

Rebuilding Community is also an excellent example of contemporary insider participant-observation ethnography for students and researchers wanting to embark on similar projects and who are looking for guidance. As a second-generation member of the community herself, Khoja-Moolji is able to provide a nuanced understanding of the complexity of the oral histories of the women she interviewed across geographies and generations. Her knowledge of insider practices and languages is valuable in bringing meaning to these experiences and also in curating a narrative that is accessible to multiple audiences. These stories of community-building unfold across multiple spaces, places and the acts women perform, including cleaning jamat khanas; preparing and sharing food; writing cook books; supporting livelihoods and resettlement; escaping violence and feeling your way as an immigrant in a new country; helping new immigrants with language interpretation; and access to legal and health services for newcomers. The author acknowledges, documents and elaborates on the multiple roles women play, which Caroline Moser (1993)^[5] categorised as the triple burden of production, reproduction and community-building.

In addition to documenting the oral histories of women from the Ismaili Shia Muslim community I believe one significant contribution of Khoja-Moolji’s work is in unpacking the concept and practice of care in community building and presenting it through her analysis as a spiritual practice. Although the link between spirituality, faith and community building has been a recurring one within the literature in religious studies, social work, migration studies and community building, what is interesting in Rebuilding Community is the unique contextual approach to how this unfolds. Khoja-Moolji explores some important curiosities such as ‘How care is understood and defined by her interlocutors of a particular generation? How Ismaili women draw on the guidance from their Imam (spiritual leader) on bridging the worldly practices of ‘dunya’ with faith ‘din’? What acts constitute this unique approach to community building and self-healing? And how exhausting and rewarding this form of service or ‘seva’ is for first generation women of the community? Living in the context of Pakistan, my mother (an East African Ismaili immigrant herself) and my mother-in-law still perform these acts of seva as a testament to their spirituality and see it as part of their everyday contribution but also as an embodied experience of their identity and subject-formation. In her telling of this story there is also a clear acknowledgement of how generations of women have reproduced community through diverse acts of care across generations.

Community building is a discipline on its own and a lot has been written on approaches to building community and resilience^[6]. Rebuilding Community does not provide a blueprint for community building per se as Khoja-Moolji is not interested in a practitioner’s perspective on the subject. She is more interested in the organic process of community building and how women have made a central contribution in such challenging contexts. She also highlights the emotional and psychological toll these forms of forced migration and violence have left on the psyche of her interlocutors. But practitioners of community building and community-centered change could probably learn a lot from this case study in terms of migrant community needs, experiences, self-organising mechanisms, and the value of care and spirituality when planning interventions.

From a closer reading of the text, it appears Khoja-Moolji sees the acts of her interlocutors in building resilience and not just as bringing equilibrium or balance to their lives and those of their community members. Instead, their acts of seva are presented as opening up spaces for a recombination of systems and processes and new trajectories in ways of being in new contexts. Here, ‘seva’ is not glorified or presented as a women’s empowerment feel-good story. Khoja-Moolji does not shy away from exploring contradictions in the narrative constructed. She includes the cracks and ruptures as well as power relations in the narratives shared. She reflects on what is considered culturally acceptable behavior and also the ways in which women resist when they experience discrimination and hardship. In addition, what is important to note is the way Khoja-Moolji engages in the nuances of migration – performance – power within the structures of gender, class, race and ethnicity. Intertwined, her analysis does not uphold the myth of community as a coherent whole, but traces the complexities and nuances that make it what it is as it evolves across generations. Through her supplementary interviews with second-generation Ismaili immigrant women, the self-critique of practices within the community that contribute to inequities and multiple forms of discrimination are also highlighted. This internal critique and discussions around diversity and inclusion add to the complexities, contributions and opportunities to contribute to the understanding of how understanding of seva and care have shifted expanding opportunities for leadership and how seva can be interpreted.

As a second-generation Ismaili immigrant and scholar, I connected with the work on a deep personal level – it has the ability to move, to provoke, to question, which I believe is a testament to Khoja-Moolji’s ability as a writer and scholar. This is a story about my community and my family and people like us – but it is also much more and is written for a global audience. It is a story of colonialism and neo-colonialism, of war and forced migration, of class, race and gender relations, it is a narrative of survival, of spirituality, and peace-building. A narrative of hope that is desperately needed in these times of genocide, displacement, violence and conflict.

Footnotes:
^[1] Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. 2007. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. Columbia UP
^[2] Butalia, Urvashi. 1993. Community, State and Gender on Women’s Agency During Partition. Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 28, no. 17, pp. 12–21
^[3] Menon, Ritu. 2004. Do Women Have a Country?. From Gender to Nation, edited by Rada Iveković and Julie Mostov, Kali for Women, pp. 43–62.
^[4] Saika, Yasmin. 2011. Women, War, and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971. Duke University Press.
^[5] Moser, C. 1993. Gender Planning and Development: Theory, Practice and Training (1st ed.). Routledge.
^[6] Doorn, N., Gardoni, P., & Murphy, C. 2019. A Multidisciplinary Definition and Evaluation of Resilience: The Role of Social Justice in Defining Resilience. Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, 4(3), 112-123.

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