Thinking Past Crisis: Ismaili Muslims and the Work of Repair in North America, (Paperback)

<p><b>Offers a new theory of repair as refiguration through Shia Ismaili Muslim life in North America</b> </p><p>Wars and forced migration disrupt people's sense of continuity in time and place, leaving them out of sync with dominant histories and imagined futures. <i>Thinking Past Crisis </i>examines how Shia Ismaili Muslims in North America have navigated such dislocations across the decades following migrations from East Africa, Central and South Asia, and other sites of Ismaili memory. </p><p>Drawing on Ismaili cultural and community-making practices from 1970 to 2025, Shenila Khoja-Moolji argues that repair is best understood not as return or restoration but as refiguration: a spiritual and cultural praxis through which communities reshape relationships to memory, time, and place, making collective life possible amid rupture. Through the work of itinerant preachers, singer-songwriters, educators, novelists, and archivists, Ismailis multiply historical timelines, pluralize religious aesthetics, build solidarity with other minoritized communities, revisit the past to confront trauma, and sustain connections across transnational circuits. </p><p>These practices are grounded in Ismaili understandings of the <i>nur </i>(light) of Imamat as a source of continuity and in an ethic of <i>tawhid</i> (oneness), justice, and one <i>jamat </i>(community). Through this account, <i>Thinking Past Crisis</i> challenges frameworks that position minoritized communities as perpetual victims or flawlessly assimilated "model minorities," and reveals repair as a shared, ethical obligation that unfolds within crisis itself. </p><p>Centering a minority Muslim community often overlooked in scholarship on Islam, the book reframes debates on crisis, migration, memory, and repair in Islamic studies, migration studies, and American religious history.</p>

• Thinking Past Crisis: Ismaili Muslims and the Work of Repair in North America, (Paperback)
• Author: Shenila Khoja-Moolji
• ISBN: 9781479839506
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2027-02-23
• Page Count: 336