DSR Lecture Series: "The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution"
When and Where
Speakers
Description
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.
About the speaker
Basit Kareem Iqbal is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University. He is author of The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (2025) and editor of journal issues on tribulation (2022), destruction and loss (2023), the in/capacitation of tradition (2026), and the un/mooring of the present (2026). His current projects include translating a book on the representation of violence and writing a series of essays on evil in creation.
Our thanks to the Department of Anthropology for its support of this event.