Basit Kareem Iqbal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University.
Description
"The Dread Heights is a remarkable contribution to the anthropology of religion. Iqbal traces the different ways refugees fleeing from the political cruelty and oppression of the Syrian regime resort to the Islamic tradition to make sense of their desperate, disrupted lives. The book offers insights that are at once moving and original, and it helps to push the debate about the relationship of transcendence to immanence, of theology to politics, to new levels. It deserves to be widely read." - Talal Asad, City University of New York "Artfully and poignantly, Basit Iqbal guides us through a landscape of displacement, devastation, and destruction. His gripping book asks us to reflect on an apocalyptic present without ever resorting to the temptation of hope or the promise of healing. It offers a pathbreaking example of what an ethnography of theology (and specifically of eschatology) can look like - one that takes seriously the hold of the Islamic tradition while also showing how multiple interpretations can coexist and honoring the ultimate unknowability and incommensurability of the Divine." - Amira Mittermaier, University of Toronto