Genealogies of Din, Archaeologies of Iman

Abstract This article reconsiders “conversion” or “Islamization” as the embodied and affective grasping and embrace of din, foregrounding the docility, disciplines, and dependence upon others crucial to converts’ quests of learning their new faith. Where textual accounts of converts are few and adversarial, this article turns to the recently documented archaeological assemblages of a qasba, Indor, built by the newly faithful and inhabited from the fourteenth century AD onward in Mewat, India. It follows the provocations of ordinary artifacts that emerge as conspicuously related to women's pursuit of iman at Indor: glass bangles. Revisiting akhlaqi languages of the ornamented self, this article performs an archaeology of ethical life to provide an exegesis of how these bangles effect reeducations of the gaze central to converts’ avoidance of hasad (envy), a precondition for their striving for virtue. The bangles raise questions of text and artifact, discourse and embodiment, gender and ensoulment, the enigmatic and the normative. Learning from the bangle, this article argues that our accounts of (especially premodern) Muslim life can be transformed if we attend to distinct genealogies of din, to the formations of iman that join bangle maker and patron, and to the bangle as a collective act of material tafsir.