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At the Crossroads of Care Work and Conversion: How Female Migrant 
Domestic Workers are Reworking Islam in the Arab Gulf 
 
Review by Schuyler Marquez, New York University 
 
Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait.  

By: Attiya Ahmad 

Duke University Press 2017 

 

In recent decades, the Arab Gulf has emerged as a site of spectacle, marked by the extravagant 

architecture and capitalist development projects financed by the region’s oil wealth. Attiya 

Ahmad’s ethnography “Everyday Conversions,” however, beckons readers to focus on what may 

seem to be a far more banal locale as a site of emergence and transformation in the region: the 

household.  

 

Ahmad’s book centers on the tens of thousands of female domestic workers who come from 

South and Southeast Asia to work for Kuwaiti citizens’ families. According to Ahmad, domestic 

workers make up one in six of the population and work in ninety percent of Kuwaiti households 

(27). However, the numbers alone do not convey the complex hierarchies that these workers 

navigate. Domestic workers, like other foreign workers, enter the Gulf through the kafeel system, 

a sponsorship program in which citizens of good legal standing can act as sponsors for migrant 

workers. Scholars of the Gulf have demonstrated how the kafeel system has produced a complex 

scenario in which the majority of the population is in fact composed of non-citizen foreign 

workers. Although they are in the majority, these workers are mostly excluded from the 

protections of the state, benefits that are reserved for Kuwaiti citizens. Such a situation has left 

many workers in situations of high vulnerability and exploitability. However, Ahmad is keen to 



tell the story from a more intimate view—through the narratives of the domestic workers who 

help reproduce citizens’ households. Ahmad highlights that such work cannot only be read 

through a lens of precarity, and while subject to hierarchies and exclusion, domestic workers also 

in many ways traverse these boundaries as they perform affective labor for citizens’ families. 

Through this work they become critical to the reproduction of the household and therefore of 

Kuwaiti society. Through her ethnographic fieldwork among domestic workers, Ahmad 

illustrates how their work is a generative site for new transnational subjectivities and affinities. 

 

Ahmad characterizes domestic workers as “dual agents of reproduction,” highlighting how their 

work is integral to both their sponsors’ and their households in their home countries. In Ahmad’s 

analysis, domestic workers prove to be adaptable, as they wield new power in their home 

countries by sending capital to their families back home and through negotiating their positions 

as workers inside households in Kuwait. Through a discussion of these women’s narratives, 

Ahmad emphasizes that these women are not mere victims, but agents as they reconfigure new 

transnational subjectivities. Such subjectivities crosscut traditional ideas of family and market, 

nation and religion. For example, as women provide capital for their households back home, 

their relations with their own families become more mediated by the market, whereas their 

relations to their work households come to be mediated by rules typically reserved for kin. 

 

Ahmad also investigates why many domestic workers have begun converting to Islam. Rejecting 

two popular explanations for conversion, a secular liberal explanation that posits workers convert 

to receive better treatment and an explanation that emphasizes the influence of Islamic reform, 

Ahmad contends that domestic workers’ conversions must be understood as taking place within 

the everyday rhythms and routines of their work. Conversion for these women is not a one-time 

event, but a gradual process that takes place over time as they attune to their lives and work in 

Kuwait. Through their conversions, women can make sense of and deliberate on tough decisions 

they find themselves in as they seek to relate to their families, find partners in marriage, and 

navigate their workplaces. Ahmad emphasizes that women’s participation in this new religious 

movement is cosmopolitan, stressing the emergent and novel ways these women bring Islam into 

their everyday lives. While women engage with the Al-Huda movement that originated in 

Pakistan, Ahmad contends that this movement takes on its own character in the Gulf, as workers 



from South Asia and Africa mingle and make sense of their transnational experiences through 

Islamic precepts and practices. A key idea is that women do not leave behind their old religions 

and practices, but reinterpret them in their new trajectories. 

 

What emerges throughout the book is that domestic workers do not form a mere diasporic 

relation to their homeland, but navigate a complex picture involving crosscutting vectors and 

asymmetries. In some ways, workers relate more to their sponsors than their own homeland, an 

affinity that demonstrates their reconfiguring of national and religious imaginaries. A particularly 

useful concept in the book is the Hindi concept of naram, referring to the malleability and 

adaptability that women must demonstrate in new contexts, most typically applied to adapting to 

marriage. While people back home may see workers as engaging in nefarious work, women 

characterize their ability to adapt as naram, emphasizing their cosmopolitan agency they exercise 

in navigating their lives in the Gulf. Other key themes are Ahmad’s concepts of suspension and 

temporariness to describe the ways of domestic workers are both apart from and in between 

worlds.  

 

While the book is extremely detailed in its storytelling, more discussion of Ahmad’s 

relationships with her interlocutors would make for an even richer experience. While she makes 

it clear that she is a Muslim woman that has navigated Muslim networks in South Asia, Middle 

East, and Canada, the book would benefit from more discussion of what challenges she may 

have faced in making connections with these women as an academic researcher. In a similar 

vein, the ethnography could also benefit from more discussion on the dynamics between women 

in the movement. For example, in one part of the book she mentions how Filipina women are 

seen as the most prized domestic workers and how women were critical of one another’s 

clothing. More attention to these kinds of hierarchies would be a fascinating contribution to 

understanding the power dynamics at stake in this area of work. 

 

Overall “Everyday Conversions” is an excellent ethnography for scholars interested in 

examining how work, Islam, gender, and kinship are recast in transnational arenas. The book is 

an outstanding demonstration of how household activities are in fact embedded in transnational 



dynamics, as gendered, racialized, and religious subjectivities are reworked in this surprisingly 

turbulent space. 

 

Schuyler Marquez is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at NYU. Her research 

examines the rise of industrial halal meat production in Brazil, examining the implications that 

this industry has for how Muslims imagine and materially produce understandings about a global 

and modern Islam. In addition to her work in Brazil, she has conducted research on Muslim 

communities in the United States and Denmark. 

 

 

 

© 2019 Schuyler Marquez 


