Searching for Home
Over the course of my relatively short life, I’ve somehow managed live in 12 different homes across four different countries, that averages to one move every two and a half years. And with all those moves and the jobs, routines, and communities that spring up around them, I’ve never quite felt settled: nowhere felt quite like home. And with my previous three moves this year, even the concept of home felt distant, unattainable. But ‘home’ and especially ‘back home’ are sentiments shared by my friends, family, and colleagues. One of my co-workers recently asked me: of all the places you lived, what feels the most like home? And I didn’t have an answer.
When I picked up Experiences of the Jamatkhana: Stories of the East African Jamat, I expected the same thing I expect from any other IIS publication: an in-depth history pulling from primary sources, some archival photos, and footnotes that span half the page. What I found instead was a story about Dr Aliaa Remtilla’s dadimaa and dadabapa (her paternal grandparents) as they made their way through East Africa. I say “through” because the story Dr Remtilla tells isn’t about families coming “to” East Africa from India, nor is it the story that I’ve already heard many times about families leaving Africa to settle in Canada, the US, Australia, or here in the UK. One sentence, early on, stuck out to me: “It was not until the 1970s that researchers would first note that the Ismailis… had no ‘homeland’.” (p 49)
Mwanza Jamatkhana, still considered home for many in my family, even though they left decades ago. Courtesy of Aqil Dhanani
The researcher Dr Remtilla cites is one Bert N Adams and his article in the Journal of Marriage and Family. Adams surveyed South Asian immigrants in Uganda in 1971 and found families ready to move to England and Canada, instead of moving back to India because was no longer considered home. Adams’ survey was taken during a time of political strife, with pressure mounting towards the exclusion of ‘Uganda Asians’ (a distinction Dr Mohamed Keshavjee explains in his recent lecture on Migrations, Refugees, and the New Ismaili Diaspora): staying wasn’t an option but neither, apparently, was ‘going home’. Later in the book, when Dr Remtilla describes Ismaili families being forced to move when their businesses failed and then choosing to move when their businesses succeeded, I began to think that ‘staying put’ was equally not an option.
With these passages (and many others) highlighted and dogeared in my copy of Experiences of the Jamatkhana, I enthusiastically volunteered to interview Dr Remtilla for IIS. In preparation, I reread the book, watched the video of her panel at Upanga Jamatkhana, and even spoke with Dr Shainool Jiwa, the general editor of the Living Ismaili Traditions Series, of which this is the second publication. The book tells a very compelling story of her family and many others and how they established a community where there was none: how they built a jamat and jamatkhana out of scrap metal in a new land. And Dr Remtilla engages with these stories emotionally in the book, but she leaves something out about her own experience. And I was determined to find that.
Kapsabet Jamatkhana, Kenya. An example of a "bando" or "hut" Jamatkhana. Courtesy of Aliaa Remtilla
I’d met Dr Remtilla years ago in Sydney where she was, I would find out later, editing this very book. Although we both spent much of our time in the small industrial park that included the makeshift jamatkhana, her working for ITREB there and me teaching multiple Religious Education Classes just below her office, our paths only crossed a handful of times. I learned during the interview that she has lived in Richmond for most of her life, and that the description of her experiences in the introduction to the book happened in the same long, bright orange jamatkhana where I had my bayah. And many of the locations she visited while researching, places that are photographed in the book, were places I’d also visited in my own search for home.
So, when we sat down for the interview, I wanted to ask Dr Remtilla most about her understanding of home.
“I think there are multiple layers of this,” she said over Zoom, early in the morning for her but past the end of my workday. “There’s one level at which you could make a beautiful argument that the jamatkhana is our home.” She then describes that, as East African migrants, our heritage can often be obscured to the point where we don’t even know where our families come from two or three generations out. “And then we’ve got the first level of migration in Tanzania and there’s a bit of a pilgrimage that we perform to that space,” she continued. Both of our families had recently done this: Dr Remtilla visited Mtwara, where her mom was born, and Mafia Island, where her dad was born. In turn, I visited Mwanza and Eldoret just four years after her.
My dad reliving his childhood behind Eldoret Jamatkhana, Kenya. Courtesy of Aqil Dhanani
Dr Remtilla spoke of another shared experience. For both of us, 9-11 forced us to reconsider what it means to be a Muslim, especially a Muslim living in the United States. A 17-year-old Aliaa had just started at Harvard and took that opportunity to learn as much as she could about her own identity. “It prompted me to take every single class that Ali Asani had to offer,” she notes. “I learned Persian, I learned Urdu, half my classes had something to do with the study of Muslim civilisations.” Suffice it to say, 8-year-old Aqil didn’t take any Harvard courses after 9-11 but started a similar journey in his own way.
Like her university studies, her research for this book also ended up serving a dual purpose. Dr Remtilla’s survey is just a small piece of IIS’ research into prayer spaces around the world. Rizwan Mawani has also documented jamatkhanas, masajid, and khanaqas in his book Beyond the Mosque published in 2019. “The research is very focused on spaces of worship,” Dr Remtilla explained. “Now, my background is as an anthropologist, so for me it’s about the people and how we bring these spaces to life.” And this simple idea is what, in my opinion, makes Experiences of the Jamatkhana stand out on the shelf. The dates, figures, and locations are interesting, including a map IIS scholar Russell Harris drew up specifically for this book (p. 29). “But what I was really passionate about was: how would the Jamat have experienced these spaces?”