Public lecture with Basit Kareem Iqbal, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University.

Iqbal's areas of research and teaching include political theology, humanitarianism, migration and refuge, Islam, secularism, and poetics. Based on fieldwork in Jordan and Canada with refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars, his forthcoming book, “The Dread Heights: Refuge and Tribulation after the Syrian Revolution,” offers an ethnography of Islamic theology in a time of war.

Lecture abstract:

Freed from the Assad regime’s obsessive control of religion, displaced Syrians in Zaatari Refugee Camp pursue sharia studies. They refuse 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, is inherited from the eighth-century ascetic eponym of their program. It leads away from conventional affirmations of refugee agency or resilience toward admitting the heteronomous conditions of existence. They call this: discovering one’s fate.