Fostering Sacred Spaces

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines women’s efforts to create and sustain Ismaili spaces of worship, the jamatkhana, across generations, first in East Africa and then in North America. It introduces Gulzar Kassam and Roshan Pirani, who created makeshift jamatkhanas at their apartments in Atlanta, Georgia, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. In addition to the material practices of laying down bedsheets so congregants could sit on the floor or trimming down the legs of a coffee table to make it resemble a paat (a table used during rituals), placemaking included reciting collective prayers, burning incense, and sharing ritual foods. Other women conjured the sacred sensorium of the jamatkhana during flight, on steamboats, and at refugee camps through recitation of ginans and sharing food. Women helped suture displaced Ismailis into a sociality through these aesthetic, sensory, and somatic routes.