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Informationen zum Autor Attiya Ahmad is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The George Washington University. Klappentext 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. Zusammenfassung Attiya Ahmad examines the practice of conversion to Islam by South Asian migrant domestic workers in the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf region and how these women's conversions stem from an ongoing process rooted in their everyday experiences as migrant workers rather than a clean break from their preexisting lives. Inhaltsverzeichnis 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
