Rizwan Mawani has a background in anthropology and religious studies. For the past three decades, he has been interested in finding ways to recover the history of Ismaili communities around the world through everyday objects, photographs, the built environment, oral histories and textual documents. Rizwan’s research and curiosity has taken him to more than 20 countries where Ismailis live, buried in archival collections in libraries around the world, sifting through old magazines in individual personal collections, discovering old photographs in family and institutional collections around the world and reading old manuscripts.
“We often spend so much time trying to rescue the past, but spend so little time documenting our present,” remarks Rizwan. His particular interests lie in the past two centuries of Ismaili history, in exploring the ways in which the stories of various Ismaili communities converge and diverge from each other under the leadership of the past four Ismaili Imams and exploring that diversity and complexity as it manifests itself in the contemporary moment.
“Whether it’s a century-plus old jamatkhana in small-town Gujarat, Zanzibar or Gwadar, an audio recording of a ginan no longer recited, old newspaper articles from colonial Bombay or a ta’liqa of the Imam preserved in a small village in Iran, each of these reveals another dimension, another window into individual and communal life in that place and time."
Through these, Rizwan attempts to piece together the social history and life of the community in these periods and places. Some of these make their way through short articles that appear in various publications, each which attempt to document, and sometimes challenge what we think we know about our past. “The most recent past of Ismaili communities is often the most misunderstood. I see it as my responsibility to retell and re-present the stories of who we are and how we came to be. I hope in some little way, what I write helps the Jamat rediscover its past in relevant ways.”
Rizwan is the author of Beyond the Mosque: Diverse Spaces of Muslim Worship published in 2019 by The Institute of Ismaili Studies, a book which explores diverse spaces used by Muslim communities around the world. In this book, Rizwan Mawani encounters diverse communities and their sites of worship, including the mosque, husayniyya, khanaqah and jamatkhana. He introduces a variety of Muslim spaces, modest and elaborate: their distinct structures and the rituals practised within them, as well as the purposes they serve as community centres and markers of identity. He showcases these spaces' architectural responses to evolving community needs and local environments, from Senegal and China to Iran and India.
In 2024, along with architectural photographer, Salina Kassam, Rizwan will mount the touring exhibit “Jamatkhanas in Canada: Architecture, Identity, Community” exploring the built heritage and legacy of the Ismaili Muslim community in Canada over the past 50 years.
You can read some of Rizwan's articles here.
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