Basit Kareem Iqbal, The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Basit Kareem Iqbal (BKI): I lived in Syria for one formative year after high school, having gone there to pursue Arabic and Islamic studies. I was utterly entranced by the world of Islamic scholarship I entered in Damascus, and I held onto that commitment after I left in 2005. Years later, I was concerned for my friends and teachers in Syria through the years of revolution and war. Some of them fled; some became revolutionaries; some were imprisoned. That concern developed into a broader question about the multiple ways Islamic traditions encounter the war. When my interlocutors (primarily refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars—overlapping groups in my book) ask what divine fate has led them there, drawing on Islamic traditions in orienting themselves, then the stakes of their questions are not available to the methods of sociology, intellectual history, or political science. Instead they require an anthropological practice. This became one of the central conceits of the book: it is based on fieldwork at sites of Syrian refugee support, but it aims to offer an ethnography of contemporary Islamic theology as it is inherited and inhabited in these sites, which demonstrate the vitality and urgency of this tradition.
At one level, the notion of an “ethnography of theology” should not be surprising. The anthropology of Islam already hosts so many wonderful ethnographies of Islamic ethics, law, politics, psychology, and more. In suggesting an ethnography of theology, I foreground the way my interlocutors recourse to the asymmetrical relationship between the created and the uncreated (which is a conventional Islamic definition of theology: the discourse that concerns the relationship between allah wa ma siwa allah, God and the other-than-God). That relationship resounds through the many other questions pursued in the book: the transmission of tradition, the lacunas of humanitarian reason, the possibility of justice in an abandoned world, the work of gentleness in rehearsing memories of violence, and more. Such an ethnography is not just about reading theological texts with my interlocutors or talking about God. More essentially, it is about the fundamental coordinates of creational existence: in the desolation of the world, before unrelenting horrors in Syria, Palestine, now Iran and beyond, as corruption grows, in lives striated by violence, excess, fear, and sorrow.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
BKI: The research for this book began with fieldwork at sites of Syrian refugee support (primarily in Jordan and Canada). One set of issues addressed in the book relates to the “religion problem” of humanitarianism, which has trouble accounting for local Islamic charities (for reasons we can understand with help from the critical study of secularism). Such organizations are massively effective around the world: they are often more informal and so more flexible than international NGOs with developed bureaucracies and large overheads. But these charitable organizations also raise a lot of anxiety for the international refugee support sector, precisely because of the work they do. As I illustrate in the book, these groups may not meet the criteria of proper humanitarian activities, being both too religious and too political. (These criteria of proper humanitarianism, of course, should not be taken for granted: they emerge from a specific Christian and secular genealogy; there is a formidable literature critiquing how humanitarianism participates in and institutionalizes exactly the fallen world which it tries to redeem: it only addresses emergencies, depoliticizes structural injustice, abstracts difference, produces a hierarchy of victims and saviours, and on and on.) Islamic charities active in Syrian refugee support may be too “religious” to qualify as humanitarian: for example, their work may be the distribution of zakat and sadaqa, in an explicitly “religious” idiom, and be suffused with the language of aiding other Muslims, one’s brethren in the umma. And they may be too “political”: for instance, following precepts of Islamic law, they may have specific allocations for widows and orphans of those martyred or disappeared by the Assad regime, and so are not appropriately impartial. And then, these Islamic charities are also the site of everyday theological debates. I do not want to overstate this difference; I also discuss in the book charitable organizations that act just like their secular humanitarian counterparts. But the secular anxiety is worth thinking about, both for what it reveals about humanitarianism and for what it says about these Islamic charities.
A second set of issues relates to the “ethnography of theology” the book proposes (and seeks to substantiate). The boundaries between anthropology and theology have been variously read in recent years: as complementing each other, as though these two disciplines contribute to a mutual (dialogical) conversation, or supplementing each other, as each answering a constitutive lack in the other. But I’m reluctant to adopt a framework of either complementarity or supplementarity, not least because I’m wary of the institution of anthropology conscripting theology for its own purposes. We see this for example in some 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, not to encourage the former to build on the latter (still less, to translate ‘religion’ opportunistically) but 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.
How then to write such insufficiency, as a confrontation with limits? Yes, as anthropologists like to say, there is the aspect of trying to write in a way that is adequate to one’s interlocutors. But there is more at stake than just an effort to “take them seriously”: I do not think the mandate of anthropology is simply to expand the horizons of a metropolitan audience. At risk of self-indulgence, I incorporated some of my own struggles to learn into the text. Stefania Pandolfo insists that ethnography can be capable of hearing the torment of existence. In the space of such a writing, the threshold between here and there, one side of the border and the other, the weight of past and future, all overdetermine the present. In that zone of implication, the ethnographer is also folded into questions asked by their interlocutors.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
BKI: Many of my previous publications have been dedicated to theoretical problems emerging in specific literatures: for example, articles on religion and deconstruction (2019), on tragedy in the anthropology of secularism (2020), on the hiatus between messianism and law (2021), on the temporal genres of Islamic traditions (2022), or on the impoverished analytics of prison religion (2023). I am also committed to collaborative projects that aim to be greater than the sum of their parts, as when friends and I have worked together on journal special issues developing “tribulation” as an analytic term across sites of contemporary Muslim struggle (2022); mapping the “destruction of loss” across multiple global sites and archives (2023); examining epistemic and existential registers of the “incapacitation of tradition” (2026); or observing the “unmooring of the present” in the vertigo of history (forthcoming). Taken together, I suppose these theoretical interventions and collective lines of inquiry all ask what various terms and concepts are good for in approaching the generalized brutality of our time. The Dread Heights does something different: it gave me the space to explore what is possible in longer-form ethnographic writing, involving different methods across its chapters.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
BKI: Broadly, of course, I hope people concerned with the Syrian revolution, refugee studies, Islam, political theology, humanitarianism, and mass violence will find the book worthwhile. Despite the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 (regarding which I was grateful the press let me add a short afterword in February 2025), the struggles of my interlocutors continue. I have a lot to learn from them yet about how “refuge” is made and unmade, for instance, alongside the grim Quranic reminder that there is no refuge from God except in him (Q. 9:118); about the recursive nature of the trials which touch us, that do not allow an easy separation of “politics” from “ethics” or “theology.” A lot to learn about despair too, as when Yassin al-Haj Saleh comments that he learned, over his years in prison, that the way to free himself from despair was to free himself from hope: that hope lies beyond despair, but in the same direction. And a lot to learn about the insistent courage required to try to meet one’s obligations, to risk oneself for others.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
BKI: I’m working on a translation/study of al-Haj Saleh’s 2021 book on “Representing the Atrocious,” which I’m trying to read in conversation with other efforts to “write the disaster”. I’m organizing workshops over the next year on “inhuman justice”, on “movement and reckoning”, and on “paradoxes of witness”. And I’m working on a book of speculative essays in Islamic political theology organized around the terms of Q. 113:2 (seeking refuge “from what evil he created”). None of these questions are settled or distant. Instead they hunt me.
Excerpt from the book (from “Threshold: Ambivalence,” pages 153 to 157)
From state curation of religious institutions to censoring Friday sermons to closing mosques between prayers, the regime saturated the field of religious practice with techniques of discipline and surveillance. These had the double effect of distancing people from religion and incapacitating them, Zāhid had explained: making them unable to appreciate the subtleties of revelation and objectifying religion into a separate social domain instead of a source of sustenance throughout one’s life. Studying Islam in Zaatari Camp had quickened his capacity for understanding, he continued, for only drinking from the cup of knowledge of God quenches one’s thirst.
I glanced at my phone. It was 3:10 p.m. I remembered the stern captain at the gate and started up. “You have to go?” He held my hand as we walked to the complex entrance, our shoes leaving prints in the yellow dust. Two of the courtyard walls were painted in lush colors: verdant meadows, river reeds, purple and white flowers, clouds in a bright blue sky. A boat on a mountain lake. Someone had calligraphed, “Syria is in our hearts” on posterboard in bright red marker and taped it to the wall. I could hear another instructor’s lecture underway from the opposite classroom trailer. I fumbled for words to address Zāhid’s ambivalence.
Between return and refuge, religion had opened a space of possibility for his life. Was a return to Daraa worth the name, when the home he would return to was reduced to rubble? How could refuge in Canada measure against the opportunity to learn and teach the truth in Zaatari Camp? Should he tarry in the present (an exile he had not chosen, which yet allowed him to pursue a divine knowledge of God)? Should he return to Daraa (to confront his disorientation from his former middle-class life)? Should he seek refuge in Canada (choosing to leave the lands of the Muslims, to leave a life of intimacy with one’s family, land, and religion, for an exposed and potentially disaggregating society)? Each of the latter two horizons promised a blank existence: an unknown condition (majhūl), he had said, the grammatical passive participle form effected by the operation of jahl (ignorance), whether forcibly imposed by the regime in Syria or as a result of distance from religion in Canada, where its being-unknown (majhūliyya) is like traversing a desert without signs of the way (majhal)—and this blind incapacitation (jahl) in sharp contrast to his present life devoted to knowledge (‘ilm), albeit stationed in Zaatari in the middle of the desert, without the liberty to come and go from the camp as he might please. For the jahl promised by return to Syria or refuge in Canada is not merely the absence of knowledge, as might be ameliorated with greater information, but a further incapacitation that “causes the weakening, if not complete loss, of the function of reason (‘aql).”
Yet he could not relinquish those alternatives; he weighed them every day. “And this, too, is from the divine decree,” he had commented—although so too, strictly speaking, would have been those alternatives. The Saudi textbook he taught from that day noted that affirming the divine decree (qadr) is a pillar (rukn) of Sunni doctrine, against both the heresies of determinism and free will. He did not flee to Zaatari because he was simply fated to do so, nor because he freely created his own actions. While he located his arrival in Zaatari Camp and his rediscovery of religion in the realm of the divine decree, that is, he had come to understand his fate as more than the narrative logic connecting a series of willed actions. The decree lies in every alternative possibility at once and is actualized in their realization. One’s fate needs to be met—the decree needs to be meekly borne—in order to be understood. Hence his constant weighing of these prospects of jahl and ‘ilm.
Far from simply being a temporary condition of statelessness or social abjection, the site of Zāhid’s displacement had come to sustain him. In expressing this contrast between a life pursuing knowledge of the divine reality (ṭalab al-‘ilm) against a life incapacitated (majhūl), he also opened another perspective on what critical scholars have recently called “refugeetude” or the “humanitarian predicament.” Certainly the language of immiseration and precarity, expulsion and abandonment, could well describe the conditions of life in Zaatari. Western news media reports on displaced Syrians emphasize the massive scale of the camp, whose sprawl and sometime squalor is frequently taken as a metonym for the so-called Syrian refugee crisis. Yet Zāhid’s effort to inhabit Zaatari as a site of passage from jahl to ’ilm—and thereby his rediscovery of Islam—expanded its space in another sense. The regime had already destroyed Syria before the war, he had commented, through deadening people’s capacities for religious knowledge (tajhīl al-nās). Now, as the regime was reconquering the country, there was talk of reconciliation agreements under which the displaced could return to the unknown situation (majhūl) of their homes (whichever were left).
Yet between the jahl produced by the regime before the 2011 uprising (tajhīl al-nās, the incapacitation of the people) and the jahl produced by the regime since then (the majhūl countryside reduced to rubble), the war in all its brutality came to seem less a singular event fracturing an original social integrity than the string of a pendulum that, in displacing Zāhid and his fellows from their beloved homes and olive orchards, had also violently ejected them from the grasp of the regime’s various tactics of forcible dispossession. Thus he had acknowledged the difficulties (ṣu’ūbāt) and benefits (fawā’id) of displacement together—not to rationalize his own exile or to justify the divine decree that he be there, as in a simple theodicy, but to more fully apprehend the situation of his life. He presented his repeated determination to stay in Zaatari as a repudiation of jahl, for he could there pursue the religious knowledge (‘ilm) he was concerned with. In seriously weighing the majhūl horizon offered by migration to Canada, he emphasized that his prospective life across the world would be a redoubled exile: both away from his pursuit of ‘ilm and away from the abode of Islam (dār al-islām)—that is, into the abode of incapacitation, jāhiliyya.
Yet the viability of these terms offered by the archives of Islamic ethics, politics, and theology was fundamentally in question in debates around the Syrian war. How can one insist that devastated villages reduced to rubble by a vicious regime properly belong to the abode of Islam, when they seem to offer only another mode of incapacitation? Or that life in Canada would in fact be barbaric (jāhil), if it still released the Muslims from the regime’s brutal grip? If the stability of such inherited terms was contested in these interlocutions, however, their implications were not. The very ability to discern the double movement of the war (destroying and opening at once) rests on a calmness of disposition (ḥilm) that is the basis for sound judgment (‘aql). The former virtue (ḥilm, meekness) is also the archaic antonym of jahl, for one who is intemperate (jāhil) “cannot see through things; his sight stops at the surface of things.” In reiterating his commitment to the third space opened by the path of learning, Zāhid thus aligned knowledge (‘ilm) of Islam available in Zaatari Camp also with self-surrender (islām) and with meekness (ḥilm) in the face of the divine decree, against the multiple horizons of incapacitation (jahl) crowding in. Because Zāhid oscillated among three alternatives (remaining in Zaatari Camp, returning to Daraa, migrating to Canada) that were then condensed into a single contrast (knowledge versus incapacitation), this ambivalence does not simply modulate his identification with his exile. It has less to do with realigning a psychic topography, that is, than with the melancholic spatialization of a temporal schema in which the present holds in tension (without ever fully eclipsing) encounters with a devastated past (Daraa) and an abandoned future (Canada).
A quarter hour after the guard had warned that I should have already exited the camp, we were holding hands at the program site gate, sheltered in the shade of the metal awning. And I still had not answered his request for my advice.
I remembered other Syrian friends describing Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny as pharaonic. On the morning Pharaoh perished, I said (finding some solace in the delimitation of worldly life), no one imagined that would be the day his reign would end. If God wills, then—
He interrupted me. “Not just if God wills—it is definite, we have certainty about this. We believe this, we affirm it, that the victory of God is near.” He quoted Q. 2:214 (alā inna naṣra llāhi qarīb). “Someday we will return. And if God wills it, you will visit us next time in Syria.” I stepped onto the street, blinking in the sudden sun.