Iqbal Basit, Assistant Professor
Basit Iqbal
Assistant Professor
Faculty
Department of Anthropology
Adjunct and Associate Members
Department of Religious Studies
Area(s) of Interest:
Biography
I am a socio-cultural anthropologist who works at the intersection of political anthropology, anthropology of religion, and (increasingly) aesthetics. The topics I explore include displacement, refuge, and hospitality, which I approach not just as objects of anthropological critique but also as problems for and of philosophical ethics and political theology. Ethnography anchors this research, as do my readings in critical theory and in the Islamic scholarly tradition. I also have an interest in the topologies of contemporary violence and its possible representation, which has led me back to the question of theodicy (across religious and secular forms of life) in our time of generalized cruelty; and an interest in the figure of “witness” across disciplines, from humanitarian testimony to eschatological reckoning.
I am currently completing a book manuscript titled "The Dread Heights: Refuge and Tribulation after the Syrian Revolution." Based on fieldwork in Jordan and Canada, it elaborates how Muslim humanitarian practices in the midst of the so-called refugee crisis have become the sites of serious theological debate (engaged by refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars alike) over the limits of community, the possibilities of secular translation, overlapping regimes of sovereignty, and the politics (and lacunas) of bearing witness. The book thus provides an ethnographic account of contemporary Islamic ethics in the shadow of mass violence. My second major project turns more directly to aesthetic practices, drawing out the poetics which articulate Muslim life in sites of exile and alienation.
I welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students interested in working on questions of religion and culture, violence and migration, aesthetics and politics.
Education
Arabic and Islamic studies, Damascus, 2004-2005
BA, Interdisciplinary Studies/Philosophy, University of Alberta, 2010
MA, Religious Studies, University of Toronto, 2012
Professional editing and indexing courses, George Brown College/Ryerson University, 2013
MA, Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, 2015
PhD, Anthropology with Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley, 2019
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Alberta, 2020
Teaching
Depending on the year, my undergraduate courses include an introductory lecture course (1AB3), mid-level classes on Anthropology of Ethics (3ET3) and Dissent, Power, and History (3PH3), and/or seminars on Borders, Migration, Refuge (4MM3), the anthropology of violence (4BB3), and anthropological ethics and practice (4D03). My teaching increasingly includes multiple media and narrative forms, returning me to methodological questions of translation, expression, and critique.
Course Listings (reverse chronological order)
Winter 2024
- ANTHROP 3ET3 - Anthropology of Ethics
Fall 2023
- ANTHROP 1AB3 - Introduction to Anthropology: Race, Religion, and Social Justice
- ANTHROP 782 - Diaspora, Transnationalism, Religion (graduate)
Winter 2023
- ANTHROP 722 - Ethnographic Theory and Research Methods (graduate)
- ANTHROP 4D03 - Practicing Anthropology: Ethics, Theory, Engagement
Fall 2022
- ANTHROP 1AB3 - Introduction to Anthropology: Race, Religion, and Social Justice
- ANTHROP 4MM3 - Borders, Migration, Refuge
Winter 2022
- ANTHROP 4D03 - Practicing Anthropology: Ethics, Theory, Engagement
Fall 2021
- ANTHROP 1AB3 - Introduction to Anthropology: Race, Religion, and Conflict
- ANTHROP 4BB3 - Current Problems in Cultural Anthropology II: Anthropology of Violence
Winter 2021
- ANTHROP 4BB3 - Current Problems in Cultural Anthropology II: Borders, Migration, Refuge
- ANTHROP 4D03 - Practicing Anthropology: Ethics, Theory, Engagement
Fall 2020
- ANTHROP 1AB3 - Introduction to Anthropology: Race, Religion, and Conflict
Search current course offerings in Anthropology
Research
Book and Volumes
In preparation. The Dread Heights: Refuge and Tribulation after the Syrian Revolution.
2023 (forthcoming). The Destruction of Loss. Co-edited with Rajbir Singh Judge. Special issue of Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 6, no. 2. Contributors: Gil Anidjar, Amaryah Shaye Armstrong, Christopher Bracken, Sophie Chao, Ali Cherri, Anila Daulatzai and Sahar Ghumkhor, Basit Kareem Iqbal & Rajbir Singh Judge, Deepti Misri, Emily Ng, Marc Nichanian, Milad Odabaei, Mary Louise Pratt, Kali Rubaii, Juan Carlos Medel Toro, Mareike Winchell, Kee Yong, Abraham Weil.
2022. Ethnographies of Tribulation. Edited special issue of Political Theology 23, no. 6: 525-628. Contributors: Tanzeen Doha, Basit Kareem Iqbal, Zunaira Komal, M. Bilal Nasir, Walaa Quisay, Hussein Ali Agrama.
Journal Articles
In preparation. “The Crucible of Tribulation: Reckoning the Victory of God after the Syrian Revolution.”
In preparation. "Remembering the Umma in a Secular Age."
Accepted pending revisions. “Holding Fast the Rope of God: Carceral Space, Mutable Power, and Difficult Speech in Muslim Prison Narratives.” Co-authored with Walaa Quisay. CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture. Special issue edited by Anne-Marie McManus and Brahim El Guabli.
Abstract: The world is a prison for the believer, says the Prophet Muhammad in a famous report – but some believers are held imprisoned in the world. From the archetypal Quranic story of Joseph to narratives of the Global War on Terror, Islamic literatures are historically replete with accounts of incarceration as shaping existential transformation and spiritual endurance. Such narratives are invoked, contested, circulated, and modulated across contemporary Muslim networks, so-called “Islamist” and otherwise, reflecting political topographies of authoritarianism and dissent. They participate in an inherently comparative genre, considering “comparison” not just spatially (parallel developments occurring in different political contexts around the world) but also temporally (as different historical moments are invoked, cited, referred to over time). Scholarship has either caricatured or taken for granted the trope of religious “resilience”. But how is such resilience shaped, sustained, inhabited? We draw on initial ethnographic research, conducted separately with survivors of prisons in Egypt and Syria, to present key topics of Muslim prison narratives.
2023 (forthcoming). “The Destruction of Loss: An Introduction.” Co-authored with Rajbir Singh Judge. Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 6, no. 2. Special issue edited by Basit Kareem Iqbal and Rajbir Singh Judge.
Abstract: This special issue of the journal Critical Times explores global permutations of loss while remaining attentive to the history of destruction. How does one narrate a loss after the destruction of its context, when the border between mourning and melancholia is rendered unstable, or in the absence of a common historical horizon? This special issue maps out asymmetric distributions of loss across varied disciplines and archives (psychoanalysis, ecology, history, anthropology, literature, film, and more) in order to grapple with these difficult questions. The introduction begins by exploring the generalization of loss in Sinan Antoon's 2010 novel The Corpse Washer before presenting the stakes and aims of this collaborative project and relating its sixteen essays.
2023. "A Tropics of Estrangement: Ghurba in Four Scenes." Co-authored with Aaron Eldridge. diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 50, no. 1 (March 2022). https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2022.0004.
Abstract: This essay traces distinct itineraries of ghurba (estrangement, exile, alienation) across four ethnographic scenes: Orthodox Christian activists in austerity Beirut refuse to abandon the corrupted world; a Syrian Islamic scholar in Jordan insists on the patient work of rehabilitation; Orthodox ascetics in a monastic community outside Tripoli turn to the hidden alienation of the world; and a Muslim calligrapher in Canada relinquishes the guarantee of ethical relation. Taken together, these scenes form a contemporary tableau of alienation in the shared vocabulary of Eastern Christianity and Islam. Drawing on Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah—in its articulations of soul, community, and world, always already shadowed by their destructive undoing—we situate these four articulations along spatio-temporal axes of destruction and production, city and desert, paradise and hellfire: a purgatorial topology which modulates what Agamben calls the contemporary destruction of experience.
2022. "Reprising Islamic Political Theology: Genre and the Time of Tribulation." Political Theology 23 (Ethnographies of Tribulation). Special issue edited by Basit Kareem Iqbal. https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2022.2092680.
Abstract: Contemporary Islam has long been presented as the object of modern crises (from colonialism to globalization). But the secular idiom of crisis reproduces the logic of norm and exception, continuity or closure. This essay instead briefly traces the Quranic figure of tribulation in selected Islamic genres (ethics, theology, and historiography) in order to animate another tradition of thinking the difficulty of the present. Because it resists the secular periodization of Islam even while retaining a productive relationship to history, tribulation reprises the rupture conventionally narrated in and of Islamic political theology. More generally, developing “tribulation” as an analytic term may allow for a more adequate conceptualization of the temporal architecture of Islamic forms of life. Finally, foregrounding genre in attending the temporalities of tribulation and tradition allows for methodological resonances between anthropology, psychoanalysis, and poetics.
2022. "Economy of Tribulation: Translating Humanitarianism for an Islamic Counterpublic." The Muslim World 112, no. 1 (Centering Muslims in Global Humanitarianism and Development): 33-56. Special issue edited by Nermeen Mouftah and Abbas Barzegar. https://doi.org/10.1111/muwo.12420.
Abstract: This paper addresses the theoretical problem of how to approach Islamic charity in a humanitarian world, without simultaneously reproducing a secularization narrative in the terms of analysis. First, I outline the economic theology of an Islamic reformist organization serving Syrian refugees in Jordan. I argue that it should be disarticulated from the interpretative frame of “neoliberal piety” to which the academic literature often refers modern Islamic charity. Second, I outline how the organization’s director locates Islamic charity and international humanitarianism together within the same moral economy. I argue that his account, which relates but does not assimilate distinctive regimes of care, problematizes the acts of secular translation which generally mediate humanitarianism and religion. Taken together, these two arguments methodologically return us to the anthropological reclamation of historical difference.
2021. “Les croyants comme un corps souffrant: Remarques depuis la frontière jordano-syrienne.” Translated by Anne-Hélène Kerbiriou. Anthropologie et sociétés 45, no. 3 (Anthropologie politique du religieux): 47-66. Special issue edited by Jean-Michel Landry and Katherine Lemons. https://doi.org/10.7202/1088009ar.
Abstract: Contemporary Muslim humanitarian practices are suffused with the language of religious solidarity. Yet historians and political scientists have shown that declarative claims of Islamic unity are not tenable and that the discourse of religious community (umma) serves ideological functions. More broadly, social-scientific attempts to understand the umma often founder on its theological repudiation of modern political categories (nation–state–territory). In contrast, drawing on fieldwork conducted with relief efforts in Jordan and as a contribution to the political anthropology of religion, this paper argues for another way of understanding the umma: not exposing the difference between ideal and reality but rather considering religious community through the form of its loss.
2021. "The Messiah and the Jurisconsult: Agamben on the Problem of Law in Sunni Islam." The Journal of Religion 101, no. 3 (July 2021): 351-370. https://doi.org/10.1086/714258.
Abstract: Although Giorgio Agamben engages Islam at various points in his work, it occupies an ambivalent role in his hypothesis that messianism constitutes the limit concept of the law. This article amplifies that ambivalence in order to explore how centering the shari‘a would confuse certain categorical divisions on which his messianism relies. I first read Islamic apocalyptic traditions with and against Agamben, and then explore messianic temporalities disclosed in the human articulation of divine law. While Agamben’s method organizes Islam alongside the other traditions he engages, the persistence of the Islamic theologico-juridical apparatus instead articulates his political theology as a Christian science.
2020. "Asad and Benjamin: Chronopolitics of Tragedy in the Anthropology of Secularism." Anthropological Theory 20, no. 1: 77-96. http://doi.org/10.1177%2F1463499618770310.
Abstract: Divergent theories of tragedy in the anthropology of secularism have been articulated with reference to the work of Talal Asad, yet he himself disavows a tragic sensibility. In seeking to understand this disjuncture, I sketch out political and analytical consequences of invoking tragedy when approaching Muslims in Europe and colonial-era shifts in Islamic law. I then align Asad’s demurral of tragedy with Walter Benjamin’s differentiation between classical tragedy and baroque drama. Benjamin demonstrates how anthropology could register (without affirming) secularism’s promise of disenchantment. Rather than tragedy, whose catharsis remains available for conscription by secular power, Asad’s critical project is animated by a methodological antihistoricism.
2019. "Disfiguring Christianity." Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 31, no. 3 (on Gil Anidjar, Blood): 261-280. Special issue edited by Francis Landy. http://doi.org/10.1163/15700682-12341448.
Abstract: This essay reads Anidjar’s “critique of Christianity” to confront the history of Western rhetoric, in its separation of figure from referent. He reads blood as catachrestic—catachresis not as abuse of language but its actualization. From the perspective of the tropological system, one might track the different meanings of blood (metaphorical, metonymic, symbolic) of historical Christianity. But from the asymmetrical perspective of catachresis, blood maps out the divisive activity of Christianity, even in its institution of the propriety of figure. Blood thus does not deliver a revolutionary program somehow “against” Christianity so much as demonstrate its impropriety. In so doing Blood partakes of the temporality of besiegement expressed in the Darwish poem with which the essay opens, where the possibility of escape is neither relinquished nor celebrated but endured. A postscript takes up Anidjar’s reading of Moses and Monotheism in order to raise the question of Islam.
Other Publications
In preparation. “On Defamiliarization: The Interpenetration of Worlds.” In Remembering, Repeating and Working Through Selfhood: Essays by Katherine Pratt Ewing, edited by Rajbir Singh Judge and Zehra Mehdi (Columbia University Press).
Under review. “For an Historical Grammar of Concepts: Thinking about Political Theology with Talal Asad.” Political Theology Reimagined: Theories, Ruptures, Itineraries, edited by Alex Dubilet and Vincent Lloyd (Duke University Press). Co-authored with Milad Odabaei.
2024 (forthcoming). “Jordan, Orphanage for Syrian Families, Cruelty, 2018.” In Fieldnotes, Raw and Unedited, edited by Denielle A. Elliott and Matthew Wolf-Meyer (University of Minnesota Press).
2023 (forthcoming). "Dead Inside: Behind the Living Form." Curatorial statement on the artistic feature in The Destruction of Loss. Edited special issue of Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 6, no. 2 (2023). Co-authored with Rajbir Singh Judge.
2022. Review of David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Religion and Society 13.
2022. “Writing Life No. 18: An Interview with Stefania Pandolfo.” Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology. March 17. http://somatosphere.net/2022/writing-life-stefania-pandolfo-basit-kareem-iqbal.html/
2021. Book forum on Charles Hirschkind's The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia. History and Anthropology 32, no. 5: 637-669. Co-organized with Candace Lukasik. Participants: Rajbir Singh Judge, Hussein Fancy, Patrick Eisenlohr, Martin Stokes, Stefania Pandolfo, and Charles Hirschkind. http://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2021.1987235.
2021. "Thinking about Political Theology with Talal Asad." Critical Theory for Political Theology 2.0, curated by Vincent Lloyd and Alex Dubilet. https://politicaltheology.com/talal-asad/. Co-authored with Milad Odabaei.
2021. Response to Rebecca Comay, "Deadlines (literally)," Being Human Summer Institute, Center for Religion & the Human, Indiana University Bloomington. http://crh.indiana.edu/projects/being-human-institute/deadlines.html.
2019. "Theorizing Humanitarianism for an Islamic Counterpublic." Allegra Laboratory, MuHum: Muslim Humanitarianism Roundtable. http://allegralaboratory.net/theorizing-humanitarianism-for-an-islamic-counterpublic-muhum/.
2019. Review of Yassir Morsi's Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-Racial Societies. In American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 36, no. 1 (Winter): 79–85. https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v36i1.689.
2018. "Listening to the Torment of Existence." Review of Stefania Pandolfo's Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam. At The Immanent Frame, Social Sciences Research Council. http://tif.ssrc.org/2018/10/18/listening-to-the-torment-of-existence/.
2018. Review of Irfan Ahmad's Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace. In American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 35, no. 3 (Summer): 93–98. https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v35i3.488.
2018. Contribution to "Saba Mahmood: A Tribute." Anthro{dendum}, April 19. http://anthrodendum.org/2018/04/19/saba-mahmood-a-tribute/.
2017. "Releasing the Umma from Geopolitics." Review of Cemil Aydin's The Idea of the Muslim World. At The Immanent Frame, Social Sciences Research Council. http://tif.ssrc.org/2017/10/05/releasing-the-umma-from-geopolitics/.
2017. "Thinking About Method: A Conversation with Talal Asad." Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 26, no. 1 (June): 195-218. http://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-3833800.
2013. Assistant editor, The Integrated Encyclopedia of the Qur'an, ed. Muzaffar Iqbal et al. Center for Islamic Sciences. Vol. 1. Access online.