Knots in the weave: female friendship, ritual tension, and the religious other

This article explores the possibility of inter‐religious friendship in a context where the norms of secular citizenship are not necessarily available to form the grounds of community. Hindu and Muslim girls met every day to learn to sew together in a sewing class located inside a Hindu temple compound in a small town in Pakistan. Ritual tensions arose in this space from the shared effort to maintain conviviality across social and theological differences, which were managed through the embodied labour of sewing. Knowledge of the religious other as friend necessitates continually retracing the fuzzy line between intimate familiarity and potential danger. The article argues that the careful management of ritual rivalries and boundaries engendered tenuous forms of friendship grounded in norms of feminine domestic discipline.