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Several years ago, Nourah was called into the principal’s office at her daughter’s school in their small city near Madinah in Saudi Arabia. Earlier in the day her daughter, Rana, had marched into the office to lodge a complaint. I imagined her long slender bangle-clad arms click-clacking as she strode until she stopped, poised and defiant, in the principal’s doorway. Rana had told the principal that another girl had, with derision, called her a “Shiʿa.” When they arrived home that afternoon, Nourah sat down with her daughter. “Do you know what Shiʿa means?” she asked. “No, but I could tell it was a bad word by the way she said it.” Amused and impressed with her daughter, who was never one to be cowed by a bully, Nourah smiled but dropped the topic. While this episode was rendered unique by Rana’s fiery personality, the general experience is a remarkably common one. Among the Ismaʿilis of Saudi Arabia, of whom Rana’s family are members, belated awareness of one’s own religious background is commonly reported. Nourah herself explained to me that—even with noticeable differences in religious practice between her family and her peers, and despite the widespread anti-Shiʿa discourse promoted by the Ṣaḥwa (Islamic Awakening) movement during her youth—she did not know she was Ismaʿili until she was fourteen.
This organization of knowledge is tied to the practice of concealment and dissimulation known in Arabic as taqiyya. In Islamic history, taqiyya emerged as a pragmatic response to persecution, allowing Muslims to conceal their religious affiliation and dissimulate among the majority, as was the case of crypto-Muslims during the Inquisition. But for Ismaʿilis, taqiyya is not merely a precautionary measure; rather, it is woven into the very fabric of how knowledge is structured and accessed within the community. This epistemology operates across a wide spectrum, ranging from the esoteric teachings accessible only to the initiated to more subtle and often unconscious forms of unknowing that exist at the level of everyday practice. The Saudi Ismaʿilis are not merely adept secret-keepers. Rather, the community draws on resources—habits, ethical comportments, and interactional styles—to prevent risky topics from rising to the level of discursive consciousness. The Ismaʿili system manages the community’s (in the Rumsfeldian taxonomy) “unknown unknowns”, things one doesn’t know that one doesn’t know. At the level of the individual, religious concealment is very often an epiphenomenal achievement, a byproduct of some other interactional goal. Following the community’s usage of the term, I invoke taqiyya to describe both the intentional and habituated practices which relate to the mitigation of knowledge. Taqiyya, while popularly conceived as a type of secrecy, does not fit neatly into anthropology’s intentionality-focused theorizing of the latter. It is rather a social project which is distributed unevenly across individuals who exert varying degrees of awareness and agency over its expression. In what follows, I use my observations of Nourah and Rana’s family to illuminate how the concept of taqiyya manifests as a pervasive component of Ismaʿili sociality at the same time it is rendered invisible.
In the early 1990s, Nourah’s family moved from the Ismaʿili core region of Najran to the Sunni-majority Hijaz. Their relocation coincided with a period of rising sectarianism in Saudi Arabia, fueled by the growing influence of the Islamic Awakening movement. Her husband, Ali, had begun his initiation into the Ismaʿili esoteric learning until a brief conflict between Najran’s tribespeople and the governor of Najran resulted in a moratorium in 2000. Her children were raised mostly in the Hijaz and were thus socialized primarily among Sunni peers at school. As a child, Nourah’s daughter Rana—like her mother before her—did not know that her family was Ismaʿili. She observed her mother dissimulating through prayer: folding her hands over her waist in public (following the Sunni Ḥanbali prayer posture), but resting them at her sides at home (following the Ismaʿili prayer posture). Rana interpreted this as private-versus-public variations in practice, not markers of sectarian identity. Since Rana, at her young age, had not begun obligatory religious practice, religion had not yet coalesced into a meaningful social category. Her older sister, Fatimah, had a similar experience, though she was older than Rana—in middle school—when she first encountered sectarian discrimination.
What is especially interesting is how knowledge is distributed, how their identities as Isma‘ilis become visible to younger members of the group, and how they then learn to cultivate practices of concealment. Ali, Nourah, Fatimah, and Rana each had access to different levels of knowledge. Ali, having been initiated into the esoteric teachings, deliberately withheld this knowledge from uninitiated family members. Nourah, grounded in Ismaʿili jurisprudence, concealed information about the family’s Ismaʿili traditions from her youngest daughter, Rana, but shared it with her older daughter, Fatimah, who at that age was seen as capable of carrying the responsibility of keeping this information concealed, both from her younger sister and from others in public. Like many parents in the community, Nourah believed that Rana’s age made secrets a liability; she might speak innocently or unthinkingly, revealing what was meant to remain concealed.
One of the most potent societal resources for concealment is the broader Saudi and Gulf ethic of asrar al-bayt (“secrets of the house”). In these societies, children are socialized from an early age to understand that domestic matters—ranging from seemingly trivial incidents like a broken glass to more significant events such as a family member’s travel—are not to be shared beyond the household. Such public/private distinctions are reproduced and managed through language practices of indirection. For example, certain questions about the domestic sphere are taught to be answered with indirection, often using common phrases like ma adri (“I don’t know”) or Allah yaʿlam (“God knows”). This phenomenon is widespread and naturalized in the region, to the point of being an object of comedy on social media (see, for example, this parodic video in which a man-on-the-street interview between a reporter and a young boy is stymied by the boy’s complete refusal to answer any questions, repeatedly responding only with “I don’t know” and “maybe”). The normative expectation of indirection allows Ismaʿilis to avoid questions which pertain to their religion in a perfunctory manner, without incurring suspicion from their peers. The minefield of what constitutes asrar al-bayt can be so opaque and convoluted, and the consequences for revelation so unpleasant, that young people come to instinctively avoid topics without having to reflect specifically on the avoidance of religious ones. It is through the ethical imperative of asrar al-bayt that religious differences that adolescents observe (and optionally participate in) are reinterpreted as merely public-private distinctions, and thereby made more-or-less socially innocuous and safe from revelation.
In Fatimah’s case, as someone aware of her status as an Ismaʿili (or Shiʿa) and its social meaning, she concealed her Ismaʿili identity at school and in public—either through silence, withdrawing from conversations, or, at times, explicitly denying that she was Ismaʿili (or Shiʿa) when asked. She often felt that silence was safer than being taken to protest too much, thereby implicitly exposing herself through her emotional response. Fatimah’s interaction strategies in public were cultivated through parental advice to disregard sectarian discussions outside the home. “When I vented to my mother in frustration about sectarian comments at school, she would comfort me by saying, ‘ṭanshi’ (disregard it), or ‘Let it pass from one ear and out the other,’” Fatimah said.
In fact, some of the most important ways that Ismaʿilis in Saudi Arabia manage their visibility are through practices of reception, or what Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas calls “genres of listening,” invoked through a familiar pragmatic frame: “When you hear X, let it pass out the other ear.” In Fatimah’s case, the listening genre of taṭnish—a colloquial Saudi term meaning “disregard”—functions as a situated listening frame in which listeners cultivate an ethics of disregard by attuning their ears and bodies to what is being said, who is speaking, the nature of the social relationships involved, the risks of participation, and by managing their sensory and motor comportment accordingly. Fatimah’s cultivation of this listening practice, whether with her younger sister, Rana, or with classmates at school, shaped her interactional strategy of silence and discretion—one preferred over revealing concealed information.
Ismaʿilis in Saudi Arabia have historically sought invisibility through the suppression of religious public rituals and strict control over the distribution of knowledge, as illustrated in these vignettes of Nourah’s family. While people often think of Isma‘ili hiddenness as a matter of men guarding secret knowledge, we can see how invisibility and occlusion are cultivated by women and girls through speech practices, bodily comportment, and genres of listening, among others.
Sarah Muir and Courtney Handman are the section contributing editors for the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.
For articles on related topics from the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, see:
The Abu Dhabi adhan: An orienting soundmark through scaled configurations of space and time by Deina Rabie
The Masque of Undergrounder and Spy: Ubiquitous Addressivity, Dependent Social Roles, and Panopticism among Nineteenth Century Mormon Polygamists by Daymon Mickel Smith
Becoming Muslims with a “Queer Voice”: Indexical Disjuncture in the Talk of LGBT Members of the Progressive Muslim Community by Katrina Daly Thompson