A powerful reminder of the importance of women to the forging of community.
Khoja-Moolji explores the centrality of women to Ismaili diasporic communities.
As members of a sub-sect of Shia Islam, tightknit Ismaili communities make up part of the diaspora of Muslims throughout Southeast Asia, East Africa, and the West. Indeed, because of the legacies of colonialism—from territorial annexations to the partition of India and Pakistan—displacement has been a central theme of Ismaili life over the past century. A professor of Muslim Studies at Georgetown University, the author was born in Pakistan to an Ismaili family. The book begins with the story of her mother, Farida, who has taken care of fellow Ismaili immigrants to the United States for more than two decades. The book’s analysis focuses on the central role of women in maintaining Ismaili communities throughout the world through the grassroots creation of a “protective web, an infrastructure of care.” Their activities, from cooking during religious festivals and washing ritual objects to taking care of elders and emptying bedpans at refugee camps, the book convincingly argues, sustain Ismaili culture and communities by “producing sociability, repairing past trauma, and furnishing continuity from one generation to the next.” While traditional Ismaili histories focus on top-down narratives, “[w]e still know little, however, about the lives of ordinary Ismailis,” Khoja-Moolji notes. Though the book’s impressive inclusion of more than 570 endnotes and a 16-page bibliography speaks to the author’s solid grasp of printed primary sources and academic work on Ismailis, this book’s most striking feature is its centering of “more hidden and sometimes intangible practices of placemaking.” Various sources of information, including oral history interviews conducted by the author, family cookbooks, and unpublished journals, take readers into the kitchens, community centers, and clinic waiting rooms where Ismaili women share stories, recipes, and family photographs. The author of two previous academic books on Muslim women from Southeast Asia, Khoja-Moolji is an expert on the topic, but she’s careful to avoid academic jargon, embracing an accessible writing style that is supported by a wealth of photographs and maps.
A powerful reminder of the importance of women to the forging of community.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 978-0197642023
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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