Basit Iqbal
Basit Kareem Iqbal is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. He received a BA (Interdisciplinary Studies/Philosophy) from the University of Alberta, an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Anthropology with an emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of research and teaching include political theology, humanitarianism, migration and refuge, Islam, secularism, and poetics.
His forthcoming book, The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham, 2025), draws on fieldwork conducted in Jordan and Canada to offer an ethnography of Islamic theology in a time of war. Editor of collaborative journal issues on tribulation (2022), destruction and 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.
His forthcoming book, The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham, 2025), draws on fieldwork conducted in Jordan and Canada to offer an ethnography of Islamic theology in a time of war. Editor of collaborative journal issues on tribulation (2022), destruction and 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.
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Thesis Chapters by Basit Iqbal
Part One (The Grammar of Tribulation) ethnographically follows diverse figures of tribulation in conversation with four primary interlocutors, each of whom is engaged in projects of communal repair. They each understand the displacements of the war as a divine trial marking an existential corruption. The interlude lingers with the life of one man who lives at the Jordan-Syria border. Once an imam in Daraa, at the mosque celebrated as the birthplace of the Syrian revolution, then tortured and hunted by the Syrian regime, he now serves as steward of an orphanage funded by an Islamic charity. His practices of memory and of witness emerge in the hiatus between tribulation and repair. Part Two (Poetics of Repair) turns more directly to the sites of Islamic humanitarianism, albeit with a view not to empirically cataloging its transnational sector but to surveying some of its themes: solidarity (community in question); translation (universal vs. particular humanitarianisms); representation (the ambiguous power of images); and pedagogy (inheriting Islamic sensibilities). The dissertation is framed by two ethnographic sections that focus on the shifting temporal horizons—ruin and hope, despair and disclosure—afforded my interlocutors through their inhabitation of the Islamic tradition in the time of the war.
Book Reviews by Basit Iqbal
Part One (The Grammar of Tribulation) ethnographically follows diverse figures of tribulation in conversation with four primary interlocutors, each of whom is engaged in projects of communal repair. They each understand the displacements of the war as a divine trial marking an existential corruption. The interlude lingers with the life of one man who lives at the Jordan-Syria border. Once an imam in Daraa, at the mosque celebrated as the birthplace of the Syrian revolution, then tortured and hunted by the Syrian regime, he now serves as steward of an orphanage funded by an Islamic charity. His practices of memory and of witness emerge in the hiatus between tribulation and repair. Part Two (Poetics of Repair) turns more directly to the sites of Islamic humanitarianism, albeit with a view not to empirically cataloging its transnational sector but to surveying some of its themes: solidarity (community in question); translation (universal vs. particular humanitarianisms); representation (the ambiguous power of images); and pedagogy (inheriting Islamic sensibilities). The dissertation is framed by two ethnographic sections that focus on the shifting temporal horizons—ruin and hope, despair and disclosure—afforded my interlocutors through their inhabitation of the Islamic tradition in the time of the war.