Faithful Transformations
Islamic Self-Help in Contemporary Singapore
Malay Muslim women’s aspirational becoming
Cloth – $110
978-0-252-04661-2
Paper – $30
978-0-252-08872-8
eBook – $19.95
978-0-252-04792-3
Publication Date
Paperback: 07/08/2025
Series: Dissident Feminisms
About the Book
Malay Muslim women’s aspirational becomingMalay Muslim women in Singapore cultivate piety by attending popular Islamic self-help classes. Nurhaizatul Jamil’s ethnographic study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of this phenomenon.
The Islamic self-help classes discussed in this book exist at the nexus of sacred texts, aphorisms, and social media engagements, scaffolded by the neoliberal economy that shapes idealized Muslim subjectivities. Within a context whereby the Singapore state discursively frames Malayness in terms of cultural deficiency, Malay Muslim women’s inward focus on transformative ethics rather than societal change underscores the appeal of gendered pious self-help discourses. At the same time, Jamil’s referencing of Black, Indigenous, and Ethnic studies offers a compelling analytical frame that places affective transformation within the context of racial capitalism, historical trauma, and embodied healing.
A provocative and rich ethnography, Faithful Transformations tells the stories of Malay Muslim women desiring piety and self-improvement as minoritized subjects in contemporary Singapore while exploring the limitations of self-care.
* Publication of this book was supported in part by the University of Illinois Press Fund for Anthropology.
About the Author
Nurhaizatul Jamil is an assistant professor of global south studies at Pratt Institute.Reviews
"A sophisticated study of the pious subjectivity of Malay Muslims in Singapore. Jamil deftly illustrates how the internal worlds and pathways of racialized Muslims’ aspirational becoming are shaped by statecraft, racial capitalism, the neoliberal economy, and embodied healing. Superb."—Inaash Islam, author of A Global Racial Enemy: Muslims and 21st Century Racism
"Jamil . . . provides a fascinating glimpse into a relatively new practice of Malay women in Singapore who attend popular Islamic self-help classes . . . . Specialists will find the information reported in the case studies especially valuable."--Choice Connect
"Faithful Transformations is a deft, theoretically ambitious ethnography of piety under racial capitalism. It shines in its multi-scalar weaving of history, affect, gender, and media, and in its insistence that 'discursive tradition' is never static but always entextualized, mediated, and lived."--Reading Religion
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