Thinking Past Crisis : Ismaili Muslims and the Work of Repair in North America

Offers a new theory of repair as refiguration through Shia Ismaili Muslim life in North America

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. Thinking Past Crisis 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.

Rather than treating repair as return or restoration, Shenila Khoja-Moolji draws on Ismaili cultural and community-making practices from 1970 to 2025 to conceptualize repair as refiguration: a spiritual and cultural praxis through which communities reorganize memory, time, and place so that life remains possible amid rupture. Through the work of itinerant preachers, singer-songwriters, educators, novelists, and archivists, Ismailis create new ways of remembering the past and imagining the future. They multiply historical timelines, pluralize religious aesthetics, build solidarity with other minoritized communities, retell the past to confront trauma, and sustain connections across transnational circuits.

At the center of these practices are Ismaili understandings of the nur (light) of Imamat, a source of continuity amid upheaval, along with an ethic of tawhid (oneness), justice, and one jamat (community). By tracing these practices, Thinking Past Crisis reframes repair as a form of ethical obligation, communal care, and place-based responsibility.

Centering a minority Muslim community often left at the margins of scholarship on Islam, the book reorients debates on crisis, migration, memory, and repair in Islamic studies, migration studies, and American religious history.