Thursday, April 9, 20263:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
Muslim charities and community organizations have assumed a significant role in refugee support since the Syrian catastrophe: in Jordan and Canada, as elsewhere, they deliver food aid, house orphans, and organize remedial education. But Islam is more than just a resource for humanitarian projects. The Dread Heights details how the Islamic tradition guides refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars in a world of brutal sieges and mass displacement. Even as refugees become objects of humanitarian concern suspended between national orders, this ethnography brings another suspension into view: a form of life whose gestures are illuminated by the Quranic figure of the Heights. In the shadow of war, beyond humanitarian order, Islam offers an orientation to the devastation of the present.
Basit Kareem Iqbal is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Member in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University. An anthropologist and longtime academic editor, his research explores the difficulty of the present within and across distinct traditions and forms of life. He is author of The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (2025) and editor of collaborative journal issues on tribulation (2022), the destruction of loss (2023), the incapacitations of tradition (2026), and the unmooring of the present (2027). His current projects include translating a book on the representation of violence and writing a series of essays on evil in creation.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, Center for Middle East Development, Center for Study of International Migration, Islamic Studies, UCLA Center for the Study of Religion