Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait

by Attiya Ahmad

Overview

Why are domestic workers converting to Islam in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region? In Everyday Conversions Attiya Ahmad presents us with an original analysis of this phenomenon. Using extensive fieldwork conducted among South Asian migrant women in Kuwait, Ahmad argues domestic workers’ Muslim belonging emerges from their work in Kuwaiti households as they develop Islamic piety in relation—but not opposition—to their existing religious practices, family ties, and ethnic and national belonging. Their conversion is less a clean break from their preexisting lives than it is a refashioning in response to their everyday experiences. In examining the connections between migration, labor, gender, and Islam, Ahmad complicates conventional understandings of the dynamics of religious conversion and the feminization of transnational labor migration while proposing the concept of everyday conversion as a way to think more broadly about emergent forms of subjectivity, affinity, and belonging.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822373223
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/09/2017
Series:	Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	668 KB

About the Author

Attiya Ahmad is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The George Washington University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Everyday Conversions  1
1. Temporariness  37
2. Suspension  67
3. Naram  101
4. Housetalk  124
5. Fitra  157
Epilogue. Ongoing Conversions  191
Appendix 1. Notes on Fieldwork  201
Appendix 2. Interlocutors' Names and Connections to One Another  207
Glossary  211
Notes  219
References  245
Index  265

What People are Saying About This

Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms - Inderpal Grewal

"In this brilliant book Attiya Ahmad captures the stories of her informants with great subtlety and sympathy while rendering the complexities of domestic work, showing the domestic space as riven with power, hierarchy, and precarity. Beautifully written and argued, with persistent focus on the dynamics of conversion as everyday practice, Ahmad’s work illuminates this important contemporary phenomenon, outlining the ways in which power operates to make these migrant women domestic workers into subjects of new Islamic pieties."

Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East - Lara Deeb

"Everyday Conversions is an excellent and nuanced portrayal of conversion to Islam among migrant domestic workers in Kuwait. Interweaving multiple theoretical strands, Attiya Ahmad analyzes these conversions in the context of gendered domestic and reproductive labor, discourses about South Asian female malleability, and social relationships in spaces of transnational migrant labor."

Editorial Reviews

"Everyday Conversions is a poignant and patient engagement with the gendered spaces and relations that are easy to overlook but are vital to state formation, social reproduction and religious life in multiple countries."

Contemporary South Asia - Leya Mathew

Everyday Conversions is not only a valuable addition to the growing literature on Gulf identities, but also to the wider literature on religion, belonging and identity.

Ethnic and Racial Studies - Idil Akinci

"This beautifully written book . . . skillfully weaves together women’s stories, which are contextualized within the history of the Indian Ocean trade, the feminization of Kuwait’s labour market, and the Islamic revival movement. A
significant addition to scholarship on foreign workers in the Gulf, Attiya Ahmad’s volume adds ethnographic material that is missing from other studies: details of private religious lives."

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute - Mara A. Leichtman

An enormous contribution. Everyday Conversions will be of interest to a variety of people—those interested in Islam, migrant experiences, the Indian Ocean world, and gender studies, especially.

Reading Religion - Keely Sutton

"Beautifully written . . . Attiya Ahmad’s groundbreaking research sheds light on the complex process of conversion and the ways that South Asian migrant women domestic workers in Kuwait rework their lives and reshape their sense of self and belonging."

Journal of Middle East Women's Studies - Claire Beaugrand

"Everyday Conversions was very enjoyable to read; it was very thoughtful and thought-provoking in making sure that these women spoke their own truth. . . . The book expresses the intricacies of navigating one’s conditions between doing what one must do with meeting one’s basic human needs."

Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World - Mirna Lattouf

"[T]his study offers new insights into the inner-workings of migration and breaks from static readings of religious conversions. . . . Bridging the gap between religion and migration is an important direction in scholarship on transnationalism, and Ahmad’s work markedly joins other projects on this urgent venture."

Anthropological Quarterly - Sasha Sabherwal

"Everyday Conversions is an excellent and nuanced portrayal of conversion to Islam among migrant domestic workers in Kuwait. Interweaving multiple theoretical strands, Attiya Ahmad analyzes these conversions in the context of gendered domestic and reproductive labor, discourses about South Asian female malleability, and social relationships in spaces of transnational migrant labor."

Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East - Lara Deeb

"In this brilliant book Attiya Ahmad captures the stories of her informants with great subtlety and sympathy while rendering the complexities of domestic work, showing the domestic space as riven with power, hierarchy, and precarity. Beautifully written and argued, with persistent focus on the dynamics of conversion as everyday practice, Ahmad’s work illuminates this important contemporary phenomenon, outlining the ways in which power operates to make these migrant women domestic workers into subjects of new Islamic pieties."

Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms - Inderpal Grewal