Abstract: 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. This talk introduces my forthcoming ethnography (Fordham, 2025), which details how the Islamic tradition guides refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars in a world of brutal sieges and mass displacement. Through exploring religious imagination and theological argumentation, the book explores what is at stake beyond secular frames for migration and relief. Even as refugees become objects of humanitarian concern suspended between national orders, another suspension comes 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.

Speaker: Basit Kareem Iqbal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University. Editor of journal issues on tribulation (2022), destruction/loss (2023), and the incapacitation of tradition (2025), his current projects include work across genres on the representation of violence, the language of evil, and the figure of witness.

We hope to see all of you there. 

Warmly,
Department of Sociology and Anthropology