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Explanation is Not the Point: Domestic Work, Islamic Dawa and Becoming Muslim in Kuwait

Explanation is Not the Point: Domestic Work, Islamic Dawa and Becoming Muslim in Kuwait Over the past two decades, tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers in Kuwait have developed new-found ‘Islamic piety’.1 Occurring in a much maligned and understudied region—the Arabian Peninsula—this widespread phenomenon has either been elided, cynically dismissed or the motivations for these conversions and their sociohistorical conditions of possibility assumed. Domestic workers’ own articulations focus on ‘house talk’ and suggest a shift in analytic focus, with an emphasis on everyday relationships and activities within households as generative of their new-found Islamic piety. Domestic workers experience becoming Muslim not as a radical break from their previous relationships and religious practices, but as a gradual reworking of them. The domestic workers’ expression of their new-found Islamic faith points to the household as a space of confluence between Islamic ethical practice and the affective and immaterial labour entailed by domestic work, as well as between global Islam and the feminisation of transnational labour migration that marks our contemporary world. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology Taylor & Francis

Explanation is Not the Point: Domestic Work, Islamic Dawa and Becoming Muslim in Kuwait

Ahmad, Attiya
The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology , Volume 11 (3-4): 18 – Sep 1, 2010
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18 pages

Explanation is Not the Point: Domestic Work, Islamic Dawa and Becoming Muslim in Kuwait

Abstract

Over the past two decades, tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers in Kuwait have developed new-found ‘Islamic piety’.1 Occurring in a much maligned and understudied region—the Arabian Peninsula—this widespread phenomenon has either been elided, cynically dismissed or the motivations for these conversions and their sociohistorical conditions of possibility assumed. Domestic workers’ own articulations focus on ‘house talk’ and suggest a shift in...
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
Copyright The Australian National University
ISSN
1740-9314
eISSN
1444-2213
DOI
10.1080/14442213.2010.516009
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Over the past two decades, tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers in Kuwait have developed new-found ‘Islamic piety’.1 Occurring in a much maligned and understudied region—the Arabian Peninsula—this widespread phenomenon has either been elided, cynically dismissed or the motivations for these conversions and their sociohistorical conditions of possibility assumed. Domestic workers’ own articulations focus on ‘house talk’ and suggest a shift in analytic focus, with an emphasis on everyday relationships and activities within households as generative of their new-found Islamic piety. Domestic workers experience becoming Muslim not as a radical break from their previous relationships and religious practices, but as a gradual reworking of them. The domestic workers’ expression of their new-found Islamic faith points to the household as a space of confluence between Islamic ethical practice and the affective and immaterial labour entailed by domestic work, as well as between global Islam and the feminisation of transnational labour migration that marks our contemporary world.

Journal

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology – Taylor & Francis

Published: Sep 1, 2010

Keywords: Domestic Work; Household; Kuwait; South Asian Migrant Labour; Islamic Movements; Transnationalism; Globalisation; Ethics; Immaterial Labour; Affective Labour

References

  • ‘Comments on conversion’
  • ‘Public order and authority: Policing Kuwait’
  • ‘Conversion to Islam: The Qur'anic paradigm’
  • ‘Between belief and unbelief lies the performance of Salat: Meaning and efficacy of a Muslim Ritual’
  • ‘Global care chains and economic surplus value’
  • ‘Female conversion to Islam: The Sufi paradigm’
  • ‘Keeping migrant workers in check: The Kafala system in the Gulf’
  • ‘Asian Women Workers in Kuwait’
  • ‘Foreign domestic workers in Kuwait: Who employs how many’
  • ‘Islam is your birthright: Conversion, reversion and alteration: The case of new Muslimas in the West’