Homemaking as Devotional Act

Rabia al-Adawiyya, despite living in poverty and precarity, approached her spiritual practice with meticulous devotion and care. For diaspora communities, the act of homemaking—creating shared apartments, communal meals, decorated gathering spaces—becomes a devotional practice rather than mere survival logistics. Each act of nesting in a place that is not one's homeland birthplace contains spiritual significance: the careful arrangement of objects from multiple homelands, the preparation of foods from various traditions, the deliberate creation of beauty in temporary spaces. Found family members who cook together, maintain gardens, decorate shared walls, and ritually gather around tables are engaged in sacred work. This concept elevates the domestic labor that diaspora communities (particularly women and gender-marginalized people) perform, recognizing it as spiritual rather than simply instrumental. Homemaking in diaspora become a form of resistance and reclamation—asserting the right to cultivate belonging in places that immigration systems position as temporary, hostile, or precarious. Found family homes become evidence of the diaspora community's determination to root itself.