Call to Prayer · Call to Prayer: Romani People and the Islamic Mission

The project Call to Prayer explores Muslim missionary activity (dawah) in Romani-majority neighborhoods in Amman, Jordan. Until relatively recently insulated communities without significant participation in public religious life, the various Romani groups in Jordan are increasingly inculcated in praying in mosques, attending Friday sermons, and, only now attaining literacy, are for the first time being introduced to Islams textual tradition. Long distinguished from wider Jordanian society by an identifiable heritage that includes peculiar dress, caste-like occupations, unconventional dowry and marriage rites, and use of non-Arabic languages, the entry of Romani peoples into organized religious life poses a novel situation in the social trajectory of these groups. How do missionaries who recruit from already Muslim but ostensibly not actively religious populations find success among Romani groups? This is particularly poignant for Romani peoples because dawah has a tendency to minimize national, ethnic, and linguistic difference, fostering instead a pan-Islamic identity that transcends particularities as such. I will use the fellowship period to complete several writing projects, including a book manuscript, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted as a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Center of Research in Jordan for ten months during the 2022-2023 academic year, as well as during earlier visits. My work is a close-up ethnographic look that engages philosophical questions about how dawah helps shape working-class religious sensibilities in lieu of an orthodoxy that has remade Muslim ethics in recent decades, the capacity of religious doctrine to accommodate alterity, and the relationship between folk religion and orthodoxy in the contemporary world.