Date/Time
Date(s) - 14/02/2025
12:30 am - 1:30 am

Join us for the third lecture of our public lecture series, in LRW 1003!

As part of our Graduate Seminar GLOBALST 702 – Urgent Global Issues, we will be opening the doors to the public for 4 of our lectures this term, giving you the opportunity to hear from McMaster’s Experts, while we explore these interdisciplinary topics!

Friday, we will be joined by Dr. Basit Kareem Iqbal, Assistant Professor for Anthropology, and an Associate member of Religious Studies here at McMaster. 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. His current projects include work across genres on the representation of violence, the language of evil, and the figure of witness

Friday’s talk is titled, “Tribulation and Ambivalence in Zaatari Refugee Camp”

Abstract

This lecture begins by outlining the limitations of refugee politics today: what scholars of humanitarianism have called the problems of compassion, of emergency, and of innocence. It then suggests alternative routes of inquiry, based on my fieldwork in Zaatari Camp in north Jordan. Freed from the Assad regime’s obsessive control of religion, displaced Syrians in Zaatari pursued sharia studies. They refused the lure of resettlement or restoration, developing instead an extensive program of study. These teachers and students relate their pursuit of religious knowledge to the existential question of their own individual and collective capacities. In doing so they underscore the essential opacity of human experience. This lesson, at once anthropological and theological, leads away from conventional affirmations of refugee agency or resilience. This lesson demands admitting the heteronomous conditions of existence. They call this: fate.

All are welcome, please register here to ensure a seat!

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