MA alumnus Basit Kareem Iqbal returned on a bitterly cold day in December 2025 for the department's 50th anniversary year DSR Lecture Series to speak about his new book The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (2025). Iqbal is an associate professor of anthropology at McMaster University 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 (n.d.). His current projects include translating a book on the representation of violence and writing a series of essays on evil in creation. This interview, with PhD student Ian Greer, has been shortened and edited for clarity.
Tell us about the background for this book.
I went to Syria for one, formative year after high school, to pursue Arabic and Islamic studies. I was entranced by the world of Islamic scholarship I entered in Damascus. Concern for my friends and teachers informed this project a decade later.
When my interlocutors ask what divine fate has led them there, how one should inhabit one’s exile, where one’s obligations lie, and to whom; when they draw on Islamic traditions in orienting themselves –- then these questions are not available to the methods of intellectual history or political science. Instead they require an anthropological practice. This became the central conceit of the book: it is based on fieldwork at sites of Syrian refugee support, yes, but it aims to offer an ethnography of theology.
Do you see theology filling a methodological blindspot for anthropology?
Recently scholars have proposed that anthropology and theology each complement the other, in a dialogical conversation, or supplement each other, in answering a constitutive lack. But I’m reluctant to adopt a framework of either complementarity or supplementarity, not least because I’m wary of the conscripting operation of the institution of anthropology. We see this for example in arguments that anthropology can only ever study the social life of theology—which ends up reinscribing society and the social as the ultimate horizon of anthropology. Anthropology then remains unscathed by the theological and existential stakes of these questions: secure, sovereign, and self-same. Instead I remember Talal Asad’s question in Secular Translations: “what if we confronted anthropology with theology (…) to draw on the latter to provoke the former”? Such provocation becomes a way to attune anthropology to its own insufficiency, without simply reproducing itself in a different form.
The Islamic charitable organizations where you did fieldwork are the object of suspicion by secular humanitarian NGOs. Why is that?
Local Islamic charities are massively effective around the world: they are often more informal and so more flexible than international organizations. But these charities also raise a lot of anxiety for the refugee support sector. As I illustrate in the book, these groups may not meet the criteria of proper humanitarianism. (These criteria, of course, have a specific Christian and secular genealogy; they depoliticize structural injustice, abstract difference, produce a hierarchy of victims and saviours, and on and on.)
Islamic charities active in Syrian refugee support may be read as too “religious”: for example, in their language of aiding other Muslims for the sake of God. And they may be too “political”: for instance, following precepts of Islamic law, some support widows and orphans of those martyred or disappeared by the regime, and so are not appropriately impartial. And then, these Islamic charities are also the site of serious theological debates, much of which would be entirely irrelevant to the international humanitarian organizations. All of this elicits a secular anxiety.
The titular motif of The Dread Heights refers to the enigmatic ‘People of the Heights’ mentioned in the Qur’an. How do you compare them to refugees living along the border of Jordan and Syria?
I don’t compare the People of the Heights to my interlocutors. That would also imply comparing one side of the Jordan-Syria border to heaven and the other to hellfire, or, because the Heights is a scene of the otherworld, suggesting a kind of living death (bare life) for my interlocutors. Instead the book explores how such identifications are confounded. I say instead that this Quranic figure illuminates the form of life of my interlocutors. There is a significant difference.
Refugees have long been understood as those who are dis-placed (out of their proper place) and so suspended, horizontally, between national orders. But the Quranic figure of the Heights brings a different, vertical, suspension into view: an eschatological space of witness between Garden and Fire. The Quranic exegetes offer various glosses for the People of the Heights, but what is of interest to me is the relationship between their position and their lucidity. This lucidity does not mean they can then escape their position, of course, but it does shape their gestures, which always recourse back to the fundamental asymmetry between creation and God. As do my interlocutors.
In academic literature, Salafis have both been cast as the “repugnant other” and presented as the very embodiment of the Islamic tradition. How do you approach writing about worldviews that might grate against predominant liberal sensibilities?
Oh, interesting – I really don’t think of the book as being about Salafis! I mean, some of my interlocutors are, but their Salafism itself is not what is of interest to me. For example, chapter two juxtaposes four versions of the theological figure of the ‘trial’, which the Quran builds into the very nature of creation. The four main interlocutors of this chapter all use this term, but it leads them to very different political and ethical commitments.
I’d think that the answer given by the “Sufi” interlocutor in that chapter is just as grating to “predominant liberal sensibilities” as that of the “Salafi” interlocutor, maybe more so: the latter is brusque about the brutal war being the scourge of God, but he readily identifies heroes and villains in terms that are at least legible to liberal sensibilities. By contrast, the “Sufi” interlocutor insists that this violence is part of the divine self-disclosure: he unsettles the categories of modern politics altogether.
How then to write about it? Yes, there is the aspect of writing an account that is adequate to one’s interlocutors. But it is more than just an effort to “take them seriously”. I don’t think the mandate of anthropology is simply to expand the horizons of a metropolitan audience. [The anthropologist] Stefania Pandolfo insists that ethnography can be capable of hearing the torment of existence. In the space of such a writing, the difference between here and there, the weight of past and future, all become overdetermining. In that zone of implication, the ethnographer is also subjected to the questions asked.
See also “Listening to the torment of existence” Iqbal’s discussion on The Immanent Frame website of Stefania Pandolfo’s book, Knots of the Soul.
