Attuned to a world of brutal sieges and mass displacement, The Dread Heights details how the Islamic tradition has guided refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars since the Syrian catastrophe. Through an ethnography of religious imagination and theological argumentation, Iqbal demonstrates what is at stake beyond secular frames for migration and relief. Even as refugees become objects of humanitarian concern suspended between national orders, The Dread Heights brings another suspension into view: a form of life whose gestures are illuminated by the Quranic figure of the Heights. Iqbal’s ethnography pursues an unsentimental lucidity across the search for refuge, the trials of creational existence, and the ultimately enigmatic divine decree. 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 in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Member in the Department of Religious Studies at McMaster University. He is the author of The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham University Press, 2025) and the co-editor of collaborative journal issues on tribulation (2022), the destruction of loss (2023), the incapacitation of tradition (2026), and the unmooring of the present (2027).
This talk is co-hosted by the Migration, Mobilities, and Social Politics Research Cluster at the Balsillie School, the University of Waterloo’s Anthropology department, and Wilfrid Laurier University’s Religion and Culture department.
