Limits of Conversion: Islamic Dawa, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait

Abstract

Tens of thousands of migrant domestic workers, women working and residing within Kuwaiti households, have taken shehadeh, the Islamic testament of faith over the past decade. Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kuwait, and 2 months of research in Nepal, this dissertation analyzes the processes through which South Asian domestic workers develop newfound Islamic pieties, processes that underscore the importance of the household as a site of intersection between transnational migration and globalizing Islamic movements, and that point to the limitation of conventional understandings of wage labour and religious conversion.