Birthing Islam: The New Muslim Midwifery in Mexico, 1987–2024
Authors: Pastor Camila 
Published: August 2024

As women convert to Islam in Mexico and go on to become pregnant, give birth, and care for their infants as Muslims, a number of them have trained as midwives, birth attendants, and lactation consultants with the intention of serving their communities. They attend births in homes, birth centers, and some clinical settings, provide postpartum care for mothers and infants, and support breastfeeding. Attending to Muslim converts as healers and midwives invites recognition of new birthing practices among women socialized into what they narrate as emancipatory understandings of corporeality through conversion. My ethnographic exploration of their practice draws on key insights from the anthropology of birth inaugurated by Brigitte Jordan and the core questions developed by her students around childbirth and the construction of authoritative knowledge about pregnancy, birth and nursing These include recognizing the cultural definition of these processes and the ideological status of such definitions in guiding how decisions and routines are conducted around preparation for birth, attendants and support systems, birth territory, the use of technology and medication, and the allocation of decision making. Descriptions and analyses of the role that spiritual practice and religious tradition plays in these processes are surprisingly absent from this rich literature, as key contributors such as Sheila Kitzinger have recognized .

The construction of midwifery practices that sacralize and naturalize pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding in convert experience occur at a peculiar transnational node of corporeal knowledge. Convert midwifery has flourished in the context of a wider rebirth and professionalization of midwifery in urban Mexico . The creation and legal recognition of modern midwifery schools and birth centers in Chiapas, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and San Miguel Allende have been achieved in conversation with global midwifery associations and funding partners, within the larger context of movements asserting women’s sexual and reproductive rights and championing the female subject’s autonomy. Converts’ commitment to midwife-assisted births partly originated in the preference for home birth among the Spanish Murabittun community in San Cristobal de las Casas since they began proselytizing there in 1994. Many of the new Muslim midwives narrate long family histories of healing expertise in different regional indigenous or rural traditions however, which are also mobilized by the new professionalized midwifery at large along with other practices labeled holistic, natural, or traditional and which include herbal medicine, prenatal yoga, meditation, acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and placental therapies. Muslim midwives’ repertoires include therapeutic recourses that reference historically Muslim healing traditions, such as prophetic medicine, hiyama, or Quranic recitation, dua, and dhikr as accompaniment to birth. I argue that these midwives and the women they assist are bodies archiving assemblages of aggregate authoritative knowledges about being inhabited by new lives and the transcendental experience of birthing them.