Explanation is Not the Point: Domestic Work, Islamic Dawa and Becoming Muslim in Kuwait

Abstract

Over the past two decades, tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers in Kuwait have developed new-found ‘Islamic piety’.1 Occurring in a much maligned and understudied region—the Arabian Peninsula—this widespread phenomenon has either been elided, cynically dismissed or the motivations for these conversions and their sociohistorical conditions of possibility assumed. Domestic workers’ own articulations focus on ‘house talk’ and suggest a shift in analytic focus, with an emphasis on everyday relationships and activities within households as generative of their new-found Islamic piety. Domestic workers experience becoming Muslim not as a radical break from their previous relationships and religious practices, but as a gradual reworking of them. The domestic workers’ expression of their new-found Islamic faith points to the household as a space of confluence between Islamic ethical practice and the affective and immaterial labour entailed by domestic work, as well as between global Islam and the feminisation of transnational labour migration that marks our contemporary world.