Isma'ili Modern: Globalization and Identity in a Muslim Community

Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks

by Jonah Steinberg

The Isma'ili Muslims, a major sect of Shi'i Islam, form a community that is intriguing in its deterritorialized social organization. Informed by the richness of Isma'ili history, theories of transnationalism and globalization, and firsthand ethnographic fieldwork in the Himalayan regions of Tajikistan and Pakistan as well as in Europe, Jonah Steinberg investigates Isma'ili Muslims and the development of their remarkable and expansive twenty-first-century global structures.

Led by a charismatic European-based hereditary Imam, Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, global Isma'ili organizations make available an astonishing array of services--social, economic, political, and religious--to some three to five million subjects stretching from Afghanistan to England, from Pakistan to Tanzania. Steinberg argues that this intricate and highly integrated network enables a new kind of shared identity and citizenship, one that goes well beyond the sense of community maintained by other diasporic populations. Of note in this process is the rapid assimilation in the postcolonial period of once-isolated societies into the intensively centralized Isma'ili structure. Also remarkable is the Isma'ilis' self-presentation, contrary to common characterizations of Islam in the mass media, as a Muslim society that is broadly sympathetic to capitalist systems, opposed to fundamentalism, and distinctly modern in orientation. Steinberg's unique journey into remote mountain regions highlights today's rapidly shifting meanings of citizenship, faith, and identity and reveals their global scale.

Genres: Islam, India, History

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2010

Reviews

[Rickey McKown]

An interesting but ultimately unsatisfying study. The strongest parts of the book are where Steinberg, building on his fieldwork, takes us into the nitty-gritty of the interplay of the Isma'ili communities in Badakhshan and their history as post-Soviet societies, on the one hand, and the global institutions of the Isma'ili imamate on the other. The weakest parts relate to Steinberg's theorising about the global Isma'ili community, where he overstates its supposed "uniqueness", failing to recognise that parallels exist in other transnational religious communities that provide members with an identity beyond both the territorial state and the ethnic group, demand loyalty and obedience, impose discipline, or provide at least some community support services in localities where the secular state cannot or will not do so (Steinberg seems to assume the "naturalness" of the state providing such services, which itself is a very "modern" development). As others have noted, Steinberg does rather tediously repeat the term "Khoja elite" in a formulaic way that he applies uniformly to all Khojas involved in AKDN activities in Central Asia, even though he does acknowledge (p 199) that there exist hierarchies within the Khoja community, implying recognition that not all Khoja Isma'ilis are "elite". I would also note Steinberg's fondness for using academic jargon and his penchant for repetitively stringing terms together three or more at a time, e.g., on p 195: "modernity, rational individualism, liberal humanism, political participation, and capitalist accumulation"; "personhood and citizenship, political participation, and corporate entrepreneurialism"; "consolidation, incorporation, and induction".

[Junnade]

Steinberg's text is an insightful and well-articulated excursus into a community at the juncture of regional commitment and a transnational identity.

This text is particularly pertinent in its illustration of the performance-politics and hegemonies that permeate the community's spaces. This work is seminal in its deconstruction of the Ismaili community's South Asian hegemony and orientalisation of "frontier" Ismailis. Ismaili Modern empowers the voices of Ismaili communities around the Pamir, Himalaya and Karakoram mountain ranges. This is a refreshing shift from the dominant South-Asian-in-the-West voice that so often speaks for the global Ismaili community. The empowerment of disenfranchised voices is vital in dismantling the hegemonies present in any community.

[Sam]

A great book on a religious group few know about, and what they know is usually fairly wrong. Its also a great look into transnational group identity, and how this could be the future of what societies begin to look like.
Strongly recommended for those interested in Religion, Central Asia, or society changing. Also interesting for those interested in Afghanistan Pakistan problems.
It is a bit academic, but you can gloss over parts and still get the basic idea.

[Hamidullah]

I would like to read about ismaili muslem because I am aslo ismaili and want to know more about my relegion

[Beth Ann Locke]

Very interesting overview of Ismailis and the trans-national concept of their faith.