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

Shenila Khoja-Moolji, Georgetown University

Discussant: Teren Sevea, Harvard Divinity School

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. Drawing on Ismaili cultural and community-making practices from 1970 to 2025, Shenila Khoja-Moolji argues that repair is best understood not as return or restoration but as refiguration: a spiritual and cultural praxis through which communities reshape relationships to memory, time, and place, making collective life possible amid rupture.