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.