The American Academy of Religion (AAR), the largest academic organization for religious study, named a book written by a Georgetown professor at the Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU), an internationally recognized program studying the history of Muslim-Christian relations and promoting understanding through dialogue, as a finalist for an award for excellence in the study of religion Nov 1.
Professor Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani chair of Muslim societies and associate professor for the ACMCU, published “Rebuilding Community: Displaced Women and the Making of a Shia Ismaili Muslim Sociality” in July 2023. The book examines change in Muslim communities by turning attention away from institutions and toward the everyday actions of women.
Khoja-Moolji’s research draws inspiration from her grandmother’s journey of survival and resilience, as her grandmother fled Pakistan as a young widow in 1971 amid the turmoil of civil war. Khoja-Moolji’s grandmother found refuge within the Shia Ismaili Muslim community, a minority within a minority, being an ethnic group only holding a marginal presence within the fifteen percent of Shia’s world population of Muslims.
Khoja-Moolji said hearing stories of female solidarity in the Ismaili community from her grandmother and mother inspired her to write the book.
“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,” Khoja-Moolji wrote to The Hoya. “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.”
Khoja-Moolji added that “Rebuilding Community” criticizes modern migration studies’ exclusive focus on resources and formal national intervention.
“I was, however, more interested in recovering the efforts of displaced people themselves to rebuild their communities, and in doing so, also disrupt the conventional articulation of displaced people as dependent subjects,” Khoja-Moolji said.
Khoja-Moolji’s work represents the ACMCU’s continued work in fostering a deeper understanding of Muslim societies.
Nader Hashemi, the Center’s director, said her work contributes to a legacy of excellence.
“Professor Khoja-Moolji continues to bring honor and distinction to the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University,” Hashemi wrote to The Hoya. “Her recognition by the American Academy of Religion for her outstanding book solidifies her emerging reputation as a leading scholar in the field of women and Muslim societies.”
Khoja-Moolji said she challenges the conventional, ethnic-centered analysis of modern studies by examining the profound role of religious identity in fostering cross-cultural bonds.
“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,” Khoja-Moolji said. “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 society.”
In addition to being considered for the AAR book award, “Rebuilding Communities” also won a 2024 Nautilus award for social justice, an award honoring books that contribute to social change and social justice.
John Esposito, former president of AAR and founding director of the ACMCU, said Khoja-Moolji’s award-winning research and selection for the AAR awards mark an achievement for the ACMCU as a whole.
“I am especially delighted that Shenila Khoja, a first-class scholar and member of the Georgetown faculty and the Alwaleed Center, has received the AAR Book Award, an important recognition and acknowledgment in the field of religious studies,” Esposito wrote to The Hoya.
In her work, Khoja-Moolji said her work illuminates how the preservation of identity flows through personal, intimate moments, examining how Ismaili women forge lasting cultural bonds through everyday gestures of care.
“I argue that it is through ordinary acts of care that Ismaili women have iterated community by sustaining connection among people and to ideas (ideas such as what does it mean to be an Ismailis or part of a jamat),” said Khoja-Moolji. “In other words, 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 Ismaili women reproduce community as a site of identity.”
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