Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait by Attiya Ahmad (review)

Religious conversions are often discussed in the context of colonial missionaries proselytizing as part of their claims towards civilization and modernity. This history of colonial conquest has produced bifurcated understandings of religious conversions as either processes of belonging or coercion. Colonialism's either/or simplifications have also tied religious conversions to Western Christianity, marginalizing those that occur in different religious and geographic contexts. But even when they are not attached to the West, public discourse about conversions still remains largely apprehensive. Talal Asad reasons that "religious conversion appears to need explaining in a way that secular conversion into modern ways of being does not" (1996:261). That is, religious conversion still bears an intrinsic association with ideologies of tradition as opposed to modernity and secularism. As Asad shows, religious traditions are not simply ideological—they are regimes of knowledge and power that shape everyday practices in ways irreducible to individual choice or compulsion. Religious conversions are complex phenomena imbued with mobile flows of people and capital that cannot be easily dismissed or neatly categorized.

Narratives of Islamic conversions are even more difficult to disentangle. Enmeshed with histories of Orientalism and Islamophobia, Muslim conversions are considered to be intrinsically non-modern, archaic, and traditional. One such elucidation of these politics is the Islamic conversion of domestic workers who travel from South Asia to the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf. Attiya Ahmad's Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait challenges the dominant perceptions of religious conversion to underscore the ways that religion becomes a central facet in the lives of domestic workers. Ahmad weaves together an intricate account of Islamic conversion with domestic workers' overlapping experiences as transnational migrants. She pays attention to Muslim conversions by focusing on the realm of the everyday, not as a place of coercive transformation into Islam, but as a space where domestic workers unfold into their new identities. Instead of looking at eruptions or sensational events, she focuses on their stories and narratives to index their layered, multidimensional, and expansive experiences as they gradually convert to Islam (194).

What makes Ahmad's book so compelling is her attention to difference and the multiple textures and temporalities of domestic workers' lives, rather than projecting a linear monolithic narrative onto their subsequent conversions to Islam. She shows that South Asian women convert for a myriad of reasons, not simply because they felt compelled to or coerced by the state. Ahmad points out how moments punctuate the lives of domestic workers to account for their conversions. Their experiences with children, their employers, the state, the police, and their families back home become moments, staccato notes amidst a harmonic chord progression, in which their conversions materialize. The everyday—gendered and transnational—is also marked by a particular temporality that happens in a dragged-out present, slow and emergent, while radically refusing the ways that time is organized by neoliberalism and progress. Many scholars have emphasized the importance of focusing on the temporality of the everyday. Lauren Berlant (2011:8) argues that we must think of the everyday as an impasse shaped by crisis, where people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to the pressures of living-on in moments of rupture. Rather then focusing on the ordinary that is infused and organized by capitalism, Berlant insists that the ordinary is disorganized by messy and contradictory forces of capitalism. She imagines the everyday as a zone of convergence of many of these contradictory histories. Ahmad takes up Berlant's reading to show that domestic workers' everyday lives criss-cross with the currents of political economy, citizenship, and gender and have their own temporal impasses.

Key dimensions of domestic workers' experiences map Ahmad's book—each chapter unearthing the layers of migrant workers' precarity in South Asia and Kuwait. The introduction takes on the difficult role of complicating two dichotomous frameworks: the liberal–secular explanation for religious conversion compared...