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Basit Kareem Iqbal, "The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution" (Fordham UP, 2025)
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Basit Karim Iqbal
Hello, everybody.
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Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Podcast Host (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Hello, and welcome to another new episode of New Books and Islamic Studies, which is part of the New Books Network. I hope you're safe and well wherever you are, and thank you so much for joining us today. In today's episode, we are joined by Basit Karim Iqbal, who's an associate professor of anthropology and an associate member in the Department of religious studies at McMaster University, which is in Hamilton, Canada. Iqbal's new book, the Dread Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution, is published by Fordham University Press in 2025 and uses ethnographic scenes from Jordan and Canada to contextualize the role of Muslim charities and community organizations that support displaced refugees from the Syrian catastrophe. Through these encounters, however, we learn not only of the limitations but of secular humanitarian projects. But we are also privy to the deep theological enterprise of trial and tribulation, of those caught between mobility and immobility and various entangled temporalities. Thus, Iqbal and his interlocutors must grapple with the asymmetrical realities of a divine's mercy and compassion set against violence, horror and death. It is at this juncture that we encounter an ethnography of theology, that is how Quranic principles are fundamentally tested, negotiated and stretched by everyday survivors, be they activist or humanitarian aid workers, as they forge a path ahead in the world of the living. The interpretations that arise from Incbal's interlocutors, be they Salafi or Sufi oriented, challenges readers to contend with religious and theological sensibilities of a secular world of humanitarianism and international aid, but also centers the voices of refugees and their deep theological questions. Iqbal's book is beautifully crafted. It models how one can write of such topics with care and intention without ever escaping or sensationalizing the horrors and evil faced by displaced peoples. This book will be of interest to those who work on Syria, anthropology of Islam, Islamic theology, international aid and humanitarianism, and much, much more. In our conversation today, Basit and I spoke about the Syrian Revolution, the framework of an ethnography of theology, the structure of his book, and some of the interesting theological negotiations around trial, tribulation and dread heights, which are themes the book are structured around. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Basat Karim Iqbal about his new book, the Dread Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution.
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Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Hi Basat, thank you so much for joining me on the new Books in Islamic Studies podcast. How are you doing?
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Basit Karim Iqbal
Oh, very well. Thank you for having me.
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Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
I'm really excited to talk to you about this book. I just finished it last night and it's both a provocative and heartbreaking book. So I usually am. I'm really just grateful to have some time to process with you and hear about your process and all that stuff. As you know, on the podcast, one of our first questions is to learn a little bit about who you are, your intellectual journey, and what really brought you to writing this particular book.
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Basit Karim Iqbal
Oh, all right. Well, again, thank you for having me. 1 I guess the process that brought me to this book, it started a long time ago, I guess maybe over 20 years ago. I lived in Damascus for a year and I was there to study Arabic and Islam. And then I always thought I'd go back, and for various reasons, well, first I thought I'd stay forever, then I thought I'd go back. For various reasons I couldn't. And then with the outbreak of the revolution and the war, eventually I was still always so curious about and concerned for my friends and teachers there. And so then when it came time to do field work, initially I thought I'd do kind of I'd propose an ethnographic project following the conditions and the situations, the life stories of people like those friends and teachers. And so it kind of started out that way, but then in the course of developing the project, trying to think about it from different perspectives and so on Also the process of developing grant applications and so on, I realized that what I was actually interested in wasn't so much trying to understand what happened to those individuals or that tradition of knowledge or those institutions as they were interrupted by the war, but instead I was most interested in trying to understand the war itself through that tradition. And so that's kind of the methodological, I guess, stake or question of the book, Right. How can one do that? Is it possible? Can it, as a polity, do that? And so that's kind of this distinction that I talk about a bit in the introduction that I borrow from people like Michel Rolfe Trouillot, about the distinction between one's object of observation and one's object of study. And so part of what's involved in this bigger theological question of how do you understand something, you know, that breaks apart a world in the terms of that world, in the terms of anthropology, of discipline, of the modern academy and so on. Part of what's involved in that is, you know, can you approach something obliquely? Right. Without coming at it head on? Right. What's the process of translation that's necessary there? How do you, you know, how do you. How do you inhabit the terms of different Islamic traditions to understand that or to apprehend or perceive that world? And so everything kind of rests for me on that distinction between the object of observation and the object of study.
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Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Beautiful, thank you. I think we're going to get into so many of those threads in a little bit. I never want to assume for people that they know the Syrian context. And so I wonder if you could say a little bit, maybe situate us either geographically or politically or socially, into the world that we're entering with this particular book.
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Basit Karim Iqbal
Yeah. Thank you. So it's not. There's a whole host of different kinds of literature on the Syrian revolution and war. Right. Much of it from political science. There's human rights reports, there's all. And so this book isn't trying to give a history of that situation. Right. It's not offering.
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Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
It.
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Basit Karim Iqbal
It gives kind of an account of the war through the accounts of my interlocutors. Right. So it's not trying to stand outside it, outside the world of the war, and then kind of trace its development, you know, from beginning to end or whatnot. And so the perspective on the war, the perspective on the world that we get, I think, in that I tried to write in the book, is a world that's already been torn by the war, in which the division between what happened before and what happened after. While it's crucial to the lives of my interlocutors, it's not something that the book itself claims any authority over. And so, just briefly, especially in chapter three, I do narrate certain events of the war from the perspective of, or in the terms of one of my interlocutors, as he recounts, was a situation that had already been torn by multiple layers of violence, of repression, of oppression, and so on. And part of the reason why it's kind of a tangled question is because what's involved for all these interlocutors is, when does this begin? When does the trial of the war begin? Does it begin in 2011, or does it begin, you know, 50 years prior? Right. How do you distinguish, right, between the beginning of an event of violence and its end, right. Or. Or what came before it, right after you've entered the world of the war? Can you distinguish or can you. Can you locate any world outside that? And so, you know, and so, of course, all these. All these kind of political, scientific accounts can tell you that in 2011, there were a series of events unfolded. There was unrest, people protesting for various reasons, in a city in the south of the country. As I narrate also in the book, a group of schoolboys were arrested under suspicion of scrawling some graffiti on a wall of their school. And people were. The different notables in the city were negotiating for their release. And instead they were. They were rebuffed. And, you know, different protests went back and forth. The children were tortured, the protesters were repressed, and then other cities, they rose up. This is also the revolutionary account of the war as well, right? Other cities rose up, you know, in support of the people of Dara and so on. It's also an account from the perspective of the city of Dara, right. Kind of acclaimed as the cradle of the revolution. So, of course, people narrate this story in all sorts of ways, of foreign allies, of Russian bombs, of Iranian militias and so on, of chemical attacks and the splintering of opposition factions. But part of the reason it is so tangled is because this is this interpretive effort that my interlocutors are also always engaged in about trying to understand what this event is, how to narrate it, how to understand it within the terms of the Islamic traditions they inherit and inhabit. And so that's what the book tries to do as well, and follow them in that process of giving a perspective on these events that doesn't try to stand outside them, right. And kind of narrate them from the outside.
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Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Which I think the book just does so beautifully. Well, which is a testament to you in the introduction, you situate us into this idea of the ethnography of theology, which I think the entirety of the book is really organized around masterfully, like, really insightfully. And so can you tell us a little bit about this idea of ethnography of theology and speak more to what you've kind of also spoken about already, and also how this decision, this perhaps method, has led to a structural decision of the book, which I think really stretches, and it stretched me as a reader in kind of, you know, in how you've structured it between these three major chapters or substantive chapters and what you call thresholds that kind of.
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Basit Karim Iqbal
Move.
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Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Us in between these chapters. So I imagine there was a really intentional decision, and it worked really, really well. But how much of the methodology or the method informed kind of the presentation of the booklet in its form at the moment?
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Basit Karim Iqbal
Yeah. Thank you. I guess on the first question, I'd say that the anthropology of Islam has seen all sorts of, you know, lots of inquiries taking us in different directions. You know, there's been a host of. Of work on the ethnographies of Islamic ethics. There's been work on Islamic law, on Islamic politics, Islamic psychology. And, you know, I've been. I certainly, you know, I draw a lot of the sustenance from all that work, and it shapes this project. But what I wanted to foreground, again, going back to what I was saying before about trying to understand the kind of concrete situations through the terms of Islamic traditions, what I was most curious about, wanting to foreground there was the theological terms that I guess, guided my interlocutors, much of which relied on this fundamental division between God and creation. Right. So that asymmetry between the created and the uncreated is something that their accounts always came back to. Right. And that's what defined, for many of my interlocutors, the terms of any subsequent encounter, right, with each other, with me, with the world, of the war, with kind of shaped their own interactions. Everything recourses back to that fundamental distinction, this asymmetry. So it's not just the difference, but it's also an asymmetrical difference between God and creation. And that distinction, certainly it impacts fields like ethics and law and politics and psychology and so on. But I understand that to be kind of a primary theological difference, Right. And so what I wanted to do is to approach that. Right. And so that's why I frame it as an ethnography of theology. It doesn't mean that me and my interlocutors were just sitting down and reading theology all the time. Nor does it mean that everything that they do, I think we should understand that in a theological register exclusively. Nor is it, I think, simply a fair point, but kind of a mundane observation that theology, like everything else, is lived or lived at the level of the everyday or whatnot. But instead, I was most concerned to approach how these Islamic traditions articulate these relationships between created objects and kind of always in distinction from or in relation to, or asymmetrically divided from the uncreated. So that's kind of this basic or fundamental question that rests behind the other things I was doing in the book. It doesn't always come out as kind of the primary thing involved in every ethnographic scene, but it's kind of. It's behind. Behind what's going on. And. And so in practice, what that means is, you know, that that's some of my interlocut. As I write in the book, you know, the obligation to teach and learn the Quran led some of my interlocutors to stay in, you know, in fairly bleak conditions, in bleak material conditions in a refugee camp long after they could have left. It meant that kind of a session on financial literacy for newcomer women ended up being this newcomer. Syrian women in Canada became the scene of a debate over, you know, how best to practice or, like, how best to rely on God. Right. That God will provide even in new conditions. Right. So these kinds of questions or commitments or struggles, right. How to frame these questions, how to relate to them. All of that, I think, is impacted by this primary encounter with these fundamental coordinates of creation and the uncreated. What we end up with then is these three different parts in the book. It's tough to give an elevator pitch on the book because on the one hand I can say, well, all I'm trying to do is follow different ethnographic scenes as they relate to this primary commitment. But that's not a very good elevator pitch. You can also. So with these three different parts, one chapter is called Refuge, one chapter is called Tribulation, and the third major chapter is called the Heights. And they each have different methods and topics. So the first chapter works through ethnographic critique, the second one here through a series of juxtapositions in the hope that, you know, through the contrast of two things, you know, a secret third thing could be pointed to. And then the. The third section kind of abandons both modes of critique and juxtaposition to stay with one man and his Life and kind of his efforts to inhabit a kind of ruined space. And the other things are. The other modes of writing are involved there, you know, of ethnographic critique. It's some of the same field sites right in North Jordan. It's based at an orphanage right on the border with Syria. But. But the same kinds of stability doesn't hold in that chapter, I think, or in that place.
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Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
And I think these different scenes do the work that you're trying to do, which is not to provide easy outs or not to take us too much to the other out, that we just remain hopeful for just something that's gonna. You know, there's no resolution ultimately. Right. And I think we follow you often in a lot of these scenes also. Just like, pausing or just startled or, you know, because we're also with you in that moment. And I think it helps the reader to know that the point of all of this that we're kind of weeding through is not like an easy solution, which I think is kind of the heartbreak of the book. Right. Is that there isn't an easy exit out of what is really difficult, difficult realities.
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Podcast Host (New Books in Islamic Studies)
To go back to the first chapter.
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Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Which is On Refuge, one of the things this chapter does, as you've mentioned already, is to deal with the problem of religion, and particularly the problem of Islam within humanitarian work and how Muslim humanitarian sites are not only sites where there is really deep theological debate and reflection, but there is also the added burden of having to speak to or against either a secular imperative of humanitarian work or a Christian one. And how. I mean, Islam is not Christianity or perceived as secular. Like, there's all these really entangled webs about how religion is operating. So can you say a little bit about maybe how this showed up? It shows up in this chapter or for specifically your interlocutors that you're engaging.
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Podcast Host (New Books in Islamic Studies)
With in this chapter.
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Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
I know there's a lot in this one, but I felt that maybe this was a really important takeaway of this piece.
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Basit Karim Iqbal
Yeah. Thank you. So I talk about this a bit in the introduction and then also in the first chapter that as I was preparing my grant applications for field work, I came across the report commissioned by an NGO in Beirut, where it was surveying the work of different Islamic charities in Lebanon and Jordan in the face of many Syrian refugees newly in the countries. And so it was observing that, on the one hand, it's very clear that these organizations, these groups are doing so much work, right? They're active in sites of displacement and refuge. They're providing cash. They're providing tents, they're providing food assistance, food relief, you know, nutrition, psychosocial sports, all these things. But there isn't much coordination between the international NGO between the international refugee regime and these local organizations. And so this, this report that I, that I came across, it was kind of, it was trying to map out. It's like, okay, these guys are doing all this stuff, but we, we don't really know what it is. Some of it seems suspicious. It also seems very impressive. So what do we do with this? And so, you know, then it, you know, it gives very various suggestions of, okay, we can work with these Islamic charities, you know, on these fronts and maybe not on those fronts and so on. But it very helpfully maps out the fact that, or signals the fact that these Islamic charities, they don't quite fit standard principles of humanitarian work, right? So as enshrined by different humanitarian institutions, these principles include. The principles that are supposed to guide humanitarian action involve independence, universality, humanity, neutrality. That aid is going to be given impartially, right. To whomever comes. It's not going to be, it's not going to distinguish between its recipients. It's not going to favor one party to a conflict or another, and so on and so on. But then you have these Islamic charities that are doing things like, you know, following Muslim precepts. They have, you've got particular funding set aside from, first of all, it's gathered from pious donors around the world, right? And so already it's got its own funding streams, but it has particular funding set up for widows and orphans, but specifically those who die or are disappeared, for the families of those who die or disappear, engaged in struggle. Right? So those who die or disappear, fighting the regime, for instance, in Syria. And so clearly, these same institutions, they're very impressive. They're doing all this work, but also they are clearly favoring one side of this conflict. They're not offering their funds impartially or regardless of the situation of the recipients and so on. So that's one thing. So on the one hand, they're too political. They're also too religious in that they have their established networks of donors. They get their money sometimes from zakat funds. So these same institutions, they're too political, they're too religious, they're doing all this work, but they don't always coordinate with international NGOs. And so it becomes difficult to. So that kind of that tension organized some of my initial fieldwork. So I did this fieldwork in Jordan, for the most part, and in Canada, somewhat, I Did some interviews with people working in Lebanon and Turkey as well. But this tension between what local Islamic charities and international NGOs were doing kind of became the initial tension that I located the project in. So the kind of immediate fieldwork for the project was with largely Muslim organizations engaged in Syrian refugee support and settlement. But then it's in that same space that I started to follow these kind of broader theological questions and conversations and debates. So that, again, goes back to this division between, yes, in these spaces, the object of observation might be projects of Muslim refugee support. The object of study, though, that the broader project is oriented toward is these kind of more existential questions of how to find one's way.
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Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
This kind of continues, as you say, into, I think, the most substantive chapter, the tribulation chapter, which is also the longest chapter, which is interesting in terms of thematic and kind of space that it takes up. And there's so much that comes up in this chapter, really, in terms of theology, some around just like Islam and neoliberalism and, you know, economic theology, organized around these four, you know, I guess, smaller themes of accepting, reckoning. And so. And all of your interlocutors also have the names that you've intentionally chosen from the early leaders, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali. And so you had. They have these different perspectives, you know, Islamic theology or kind of, as you say, pragmatic pedagogue, a Salafi scholar, a lay activist, and a Sufi mystic. Of course, my inclination is to ask you about the Sufi mystic because I found that you struggled with him a lot. I think you sat in a coffee shop with him in Edmonton as you were having this conversation. And I was really, really interested about the fact that within this context, he brought up the story of Hither and Musa. Right. And I even was like, wait, what's happening? And then also how he kind of helped you navigate this huge question of tribulation, which I felt like you. You were sitting there really trying to, like, take his answer and be like, can I. Can I accept this? Right. So can you talk us through a little bit? I know it's unfair that there's all these other perspectives, and I'm asking you to talk about one perspective, but I think that one really does also piece together all the other ones that you do talk about a little bit. So can you bring us into that moment of you sitting at the coffee shop, you pulling your phone and starting to read from Sarah Kaf about Musa and his really wild journey with this unnamed and how this story is a story that's being used to perhaps really understand really, you know, serious, painful tribulation of displacement and war and, you know, revolution. How. What is the relationship?
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Basit Karim Iqbal
Yeah, thank you. So I was also surprised by the turns of those conversations with him. So I guess this interlocutor himself is somebody I met a long time ago in Damascus itself. And so then we reconnected later on, and I told him that I'd been doing these interviews and Jordan and elsewhere, and, you know, people kept referring me to this theological figure of tribulation, but that it also, you know, it wasn't always clear to me what that meant, right? And so, you know, the news of bombardment and images of rubble and so on, they're difficult. And how do we understand that in relation to this theological figure? And he took a second, and then he said, well, what I'm pointing to is actually the relationship between, as in what I'm pointing to in terms of this question of how to understand, you know, the desolation of Aleppo as a trial. He said, it's actually the relationship between Jalal and Jamal, right? Divine majesty and divine beauty. And, you know, he said that God has both attributes, both need to be affirmed, and both are related in everything in creation. And so many. He asked me to pull up Surat Kahf. And so. And we. And so we read it together. And he basically engaged in a sort of kind of impromptu exegesis in relation to the kind of offering a political theological answer to the question I was struggling with. And then part of the rest of the chapter involves me, or that section of the chapter involves me trying to wrestle with that answer. And so he goes through this journey that the prophet Moses, Musa and Khidr are on together, right? That Khidr, this enigmatic keeper of the divine mysteries who's been given knowledge from divine presence, is taking Musa on this trip, right? He's saying, you know, don't. You can come with me as long as you don't balk, as long as you don't ask questions. If you can bear what you don't know, if you don't have knowledge of something, can you still bear patiently through it? Then he says, yes, I'll be patient. I won't argue. And then Khudr does a series of things that are curious. He. He puts a hole in a ship. He kills a young boy, right? And Musa is surprised. He's like, what are you doing? And so then he explains why he did what he did. Things kind of fall into place. But my interlocutor kind of walks me through this passage, kind of ayah by ayah or verse by verse, and kind of taking me through some of the kind of the key theological questions that are embedded in this. One of these for him is this question of how one witnesses that which one doesn't encompass, right? I don't have a kind of knowledge of something in a way that gives me mastery over it, and yet I'm. I witness these things all the time, right? And we struggle to gain some kind of mastery, masterful knowledge over these things, right? So we can mobilize them in different arguments and justifications and debates and, you know, come up with a theory of this or that. But, you know, but all those things are also futile in various ways, right? All those things. One's understanding of those events still rests on a divine disclosure, right? You can. You can strive in various ways. You can cultivate yourself in order to become, you know, pious in certain modes and so on, but all of this still rests on a divine disclosure, right? And so he's in. My interlocutor Ali is taking this from, you know, different traditions of Sufi knowledge and so on. So he keeps walking me through this passage, and he says, okay, at the end of this passage, everything becomes known, right? So Khidr there shows Musa the true reality of what he couldn't stand, right? So the truth there is then disclosed, and then he makes it. He made an analogy between Musa and Khider in this passage and the rest of us, right? He says, we also don't bear the world with steadfastness. And so this is where my back kind of went up, as you mentioned, because I was trying to draw these analogies and found them difficult, too, right, Okay. I was like, well, I was taken aback. Surely he wasn't saying that the destruction of Syria was like, who, they're killing this child, right? To avoid the future grief that he would cause his parents, right? So this would then fold into a kind of, you know, theodicy and so on. And, you know, it would be a way that, you know, God populates paradise through the destruction of the earth. And I was. And so I tried mapping out those analogies. I was like, well, is this what you're saying? And he said, no, no, of course not. I'm saying the opposite of that. And so even kind of these analogical relations that I was trying to set up through my understanding of what we've just been talking about, that was also actually not what he was trying to teach me. And so this conversation with this interlocutor ends up reverberating in different ways. I describe later in the section, later conversations with him, he pointed me to a short theological text, and I try to offer a small, very brief reading of that. But it's this way that through our conversation, I tried to develop kind of an analogical theory, right? Musa to Khiderm to things in the world. The graph goes the other way to us in the world in relation to violence and terror and horror. And so I tried mapping out those things, but actually all those lines of my map were actually off the mark. And so it's like over the course of thinking about these interlocutions and writing it and rewriting it and so on there, I tried to. I had to reconfigure how I understood his resistance as well to my analogies. And so in the end, he. In the end, he pointed me to a different kind of relationship, right, Where I knew he was fairly politically independent. I wanted him to condemn, give me kind of a spiritual condemnation of the Syrian regime and maybe give a spiritual reason for it that would work in my analogical system. But he resisted that actually very much. And so I write a bit about how I came to understand his resistance, like that of Khidr as well, in the Quranic passages that we had read together. And so for him, it comes back to, you know, there's an, again, a fundamentally asymmetrical relationship between outer meaning and inner reality. And so, yes, these things can reflect each other, in which case my analogy would make sense, right? But those two, the inner reality and the outer meaning, they can also be inverted or transposed. And their relationship also can be asymmetrical. It can be interrupted. And so in trying to follow that relationship, you encounter a kind of intolerable limit, right, where the analogies break down. And so that's why I think he kept coming back to the same dynamic, right, between inner and outer. They may relate, but also they may not. And the only way that you will understand the relationship or be able to apprehend it is through a kind of divine disclosure. And so it can't be stabilized into, you know, a single form, because there's a kind of dynamism built into the relationship between divine beauty and divine majesty. And so, yes, there is, of course, there's a relationship between history and theological interpretation, right, or history and theology, but it can't be stabilized, right, into a kind of concrete form. So following his instruction, I guess I would say that he would insist on the possibility of kind of an imaginal encounter or like a theophany in every moment, but also that that's terrifying and kind of awful or awesome in the sense of that kind of trembling.
- [40:17]
Marshall Po
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- [40:44]
Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Experian Kay Jeweler's Early Black Friday sale is happening now. Get up to 50% off Black Friday deals and up to 40% off everything else. Don't miss this sale. Start your season with savings only at k exclusions apply ck.com exclusions for details it's I I just felt like I was at the table or like a fly on the wall watching you two have this conversation because it, I mean the way you wrote it is beaut and just I think the depth and density of the conversation, but just the vulnerability too. Like, I think both of you were just actually struggling with this question from the way I read it, and this is just an si like, but I have never, I think one of his exegetical points was that of the parallel between what Hither does and the life of Moses. And I have never in my, like, all of my reading ever seen that. And so that is also something that was like, whoa. I've just never seen the parallel between some of the things that is happening in this encounter with this mysterious figure and the life of what happened to Musa as he came about. And so, yeah, that was great as well. The final kind of substantive chapter is called the Heights. And I mean this chapter, again, like all chapters are just really provocative and intense. And this one is a little bit different because you start the section or the chapter really allowing for Bilal, who lives at the Syrian border, to tell his story in his own way. And so the first few pages are just his story and his narrative of what you said in the beginning was kind of the context of the war and the revolution and his relationship to it and see talks about things like friends he had lost and he was an imam. And so, you know, how his interaction with the young people when they came to him and he's kind of processing his I did what I have to do or you know, and so there's a lot of kind of, I guess, maybe doubt and kind of trying to re understand these decisions people make in these really difficult moments. And then what's really interesting about this chapter is you follow Bilal through the entire chapter and you see how he retells a story in different moments. Sometimes he's posting pictures on Facebook, and so you have this archive of photographs that you're kind of navigating of how some posts and reposts on Facebook show up. Right. And how he references certain maybe stories from the Quran. But all of this really crescendos to this one point. Well, at least I felt this one point of this idea of the height, which is also a word that is in the title of your book, the dread Heights. Right. And so can you talk a little bit about this decision in naming this chapter the Heights, what it's alluding to and how maybe your interlocutor Bilal, who's a center in this chapter, really helped you arrive maybe at this kind of important, maybe reference. I don't know if that's a good way to think about it. I think you use the word grammar a lot, like how it allows you to enter into these textured grammars or granularities of trial and tribulation and refuge that you're really working through in all.
- [44:07]
Podcast Host (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Of the previous chapters.
- [44:09]
Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
But I feel like there was an arrival moment, but an arrival that still tells you it's not an easy one. You know, you are maintaining multiple temporalities of mobility and immobility of inside and outside. And I think it's really emblematic of the fact that there's somebody that's really just stuck on the other side of the border and can get across.
- [44:33]
Basit Karim Iqbal
Yeah. Thank you. So this third chapter is, as you said, it's called the Heights, which echoes also the title of the book in kind of an effort to say that this chapter, to me, is kind of the heart of what I wanted to explore in the book. And so the other earlier I mentioned, I described this chapter as where breakdown happens. But I also feel like the other chapters of ethnographic critique and Understanding, different versions of a trial and so on, those are also necessary to arrive at that moment of breakdown as well. And so, on the one hand, it's kind of the heart of the question that I wanted to explore. On the other hand, it's also where I felt like you had to work through some other things in order to get there. So the figure of the heights itself, it's from this surah, like the Quranic chapter of the same name. And it's a figure of suspension and in betweenness. It's from this figure of this kind of. It refers to this Quranic topos of a space between paradise and hellfire whose inhabitants stay there, right? They can see, they bear witness to the saved and the damned, right? In the passage itself, it reads that upon the heights are men who know all by their marks. They will call out to the inhabitants of the garden, peace be upon you. They will not have entered it, although they hope. And when their eyes turn toward the inhabitants of the fire, they will say, our Lord, place us not among the wrongdoing. And so there's a way that they can see both. They can see the saved and they can see the damned, right? The drowned and the saved, they can recognize the conditions of each other, but they themselves, they seek to leave that space, right? They can supplicate, they can pray, but yet they're still suspended there. And the Quran is, of course, enigmatic about this figure. It doesn't elaborate it. And the commentators go into great detail in various ways, trying to understand who these people might be. And, you know, are they people who, you know, they did good and evil in this life, and so they reached some kind of balance. Are they those who actually are released from the economy of good and evil and instead stare only at the face of God? Are they people who are exempted from a divine reckoning in some way? So the exeges go into, you know, various possibilities of who these people might be. But what was, what is or was kind of what drew my fascination is this relationship between their position, right? Their position between and their recognition, right? That they witness both possibilities, but that witnessing doesn't necessarily bear on. On what they can do about it, right? So they've already passed from this life. They're subject to the divine mercy as they were before, right? But there they are, right? So there's a relationship between. There's a possible relationship between their lucidity about these conditions of existence and their suspension, right? Their position. And so that figure is what I was most keen to follow, partly because there was another figure of suspension that I also came across, not vertical suspension, but a kind of horizontal one in that those who are displaced from their lands are suspended between national orders. This is the implication of so much work in refugee studies that according to the methodological nationalism that we all inhabit, every people has a place and a place. People that's not in their place is displaced until they find a new place. This is the story of migration, of immigration Those who are displaced between national orders are those who are objects of humanitarian concern. This goes back already to Hannah Arendt writing we refugees that one thing that is so unprecedented in the history of international law and politics is this emergence of the possibility of a people who are displaced but will not find a home. She's talking about those after World War II. So a kind of suspension that lasts, that isn't then followed by a kind of emplacement. And so those who are displaced, those who are suspended between national orders are those who become objects of humanitarian concern. But then what we also see in, you know, certainly in the Quranic figure, but also, I think, through other, I guess my fieldwork, is the sense of a different kind of suspension in which the fundamental coordinates of our existence, right, as being ultimately subject to the divine mercy, those coordinates become foregrounded, right? For those in these spaces as they inhabit Islamic grammars of action and practice and meaning in finding their way. But again, that doesn't necessarily mean that, okay, well, now that we see what's going on, we know what to do, right? We can see where paradise is or hellfire is. We know what to do. There's no necessary relationship between those things. And so certainly I'm not trying to say, of course, that one side of the border between Jordan and Syria should be identified with paradise and the other side with hellfire, right? But that this question of the border of living on the limit of suspension, that gives rise to a certain lucidity. That's the resonance, the echo that I try to follow. And of course, there's other kinds of forms of life today that aren't marked by this kind of displacement that also give rise to kind of life suspended. So, yes, there's a conversation or a literature about life suspended, caught between time, modernity halted, this kind of thing. But what was of interest to me was how my interlocutor's forms of life are reflected in this Quranic figure of undecidable location, dislocation. And so that's what I try to explore in that chapter called the Heights. And so part of that involves my interlocutor Bia's story of how he arrive to where he is, how he understands his life, how he understands possible movements or the spaces of action that open up there in some way. He also refuses to leave that space of liminality as well, right? So he refuses to leave the border. He's living, over the course of my fieldwork, he was living at this orphanage, which is just across the border from Syria, meaning That when I was doing my field work there and the regime was taking back that southern province, we could see and hear the bombardment just on the other side of the border. His own family, his brothers and extended family, certainly many of his friends were still there. He was in contact with him constantly, but he couldn't cross over because they'd been hunting him when he left. There's all these ways that. So he refuses to leave the border. He's also working, living at this orphanage where the people, the children that he's raising, many of them are children of his fallen, killed or disappeared friends and fellows in the revolution. And so this very dense space of memory, possibility, impossibility, death, future horizon, limit, right? It all kind of condenses in that space. And it's dense with this kind of constant recourse back that we can't move from here. So all we can do is repeat our supplications for relief. But that's. That's. And then. But then it always becomes. This becomes the second movement. That. Yes, that's all we can do, but that's all. That's all we can ever do, really. Right. And so it's this kind of constant expansion from the coordinates of our immediate existence, you know, to that of actually all of creation. Right? Because the rest of us, we also think we're in control of various things, but ultimately that's a ruse. And so there's something about the suspension that also affords that lucidity. And that's also maybe, I'd say also you'd asked earlier about the thresholds of the book. So between each of the three chapters, I've got small sections called thresholds. One on the theme of natality and one on the theme of ambivalence. And that's part of what's involved in those thresholds too, that these are thresholds between two chapters. But there are also thresholds in which many of my interlocutors or interlocutions on that same theme of either natality, the possibility of a new beginning, or ambivalence of having multiple and competing identifications in both those thresholds, my interlocutors kind of turn those questions back on me as well. And, you know, I'm not always, to be honest, I'm not, you know, I know that, as you said, I am in the book. And we do follow, you know, me and my conversations at the cafe and so on. But I'm not always a fan of, like, autoethnography and. And some of the literature on that. But in these Two cases or in these thresholds, my interlocutors do turn these questions back on me in a way that is demonstrative. I think, to me and hopefully to others, that these questions aren't only questions that arise for those who are displaced, Syrian refugees in Jordan or in Canada. These questions of the possibility of a new beginning or the competing identifications that lead one in one direction or another with ambivalence, these are questions that also implicate me as well and others. And they recourse back to that fundamental asymmetry between. Between God and creation. And so there's kind of a gesture of mutual implication maybe at that threshold right, between where these kind of political and legal categories that we often fall back on about who is a citizen and who is a refugee or who is here, who is there, this kind of thing. Those distinctions don't always hold the same weight.
- [57:29]
Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Yeah, I'm so glad you answered the question about thresholds. I wasn't sure if you were avoiding talking about yourself, and so I didn't want to ask again to put you on the spot in case you didn't want to answer. But I do really appreciate how you. Yeah, you show up in the book. You do show up in the book faucet. And it's really important. So I'm glad you felt okay to comment on it. I'm going to ask a different question that I rarely ask my guests, partly because you are an amazing writer. I think one of the things I'm most moved. I know you're going to deflect too. I could see it. You're just such a stunning, beautiful, provocative, but just an accessible writer. And I'm just going to read the last paragraph you wrote in the book, which is in the afterword. And I'm going to ask you this question of who are writers that have inspired you to be able to write the way that you have? So I'll give you some time to think about it. As I read this passage, and there's so many passages I could pick in the book that just like there were moments when I read it and I just most stunned by your writing that, you know, the. I don't know. James Baldwin often talks about clean writing and accessible writing and just how you write a clean sentence. And so there's just power in that. And so I often thought about him when I was reading some of just. Just what you did. And so you write on page 203, God grants relief my interlocutors had repeated over the years of their abandonment, displacement, and exile. But what that means is radically open. It was a time of unfamiliar affects, of transformation, of mourning and of joys mixed with deep sorrows, as it already had been. For we are all returning to God, whether we will it or not. The Position of The Dread Heights February 2025. So tell me about your writing practice and other people that inspire you, that you look at and say, that's something that I want to try myself. Or do you even think about yourself as a writer? Because you are an amazing writer.
- [59:33]
Basit Karim Iqbal
Oh, dear. So my deflection answer would be, I try to cobble things together, and sometimes they hold and sometimes they don't.
- [59:41]
Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
They hold. Boss set.
- [59:43]
Basit Karim Iqbal
And that's the end of the story.
- [59:45]
Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Yeah.
- [59:47]
Basit Karim Iqbal
I don't know. I try to read different kinds of things. I think there's some incredible ethnographic writing, but there's also a lot of really instrumental ethnography as well, seriously, that I want to work on. But it's also, I think one of my deep worries, actually, is that the ethnography ends up contrived, that there's ways that the form and the argument, they map so neatly onto each other that you can. One thing I can say is one thing that I. Especially with this book or with difficult topics. So the book also deals with, certainly, displacement in refugee politics, but also, you know, there are scenes describing, through different levels of mediation, certainly scenes describing terrible violence. Right. And some, you know, of torture and whatnot. And there's one thing that I'm often concerned with is the status of that representation, right. That it's so easy to represent moments of terror in a way that's sensationalistic. And that's something that. I don't know. It really bothers me because on the one hand, we live in. We're surrounded by them all the time. And yet sometimes it seems like the way to gain a certain kind of traction on these moments is through a kind of representation that plays to kind of exciting this kind of sensational, sentimental affect. Right. And so part of this actually comes back to the theme of the book as well, right? Where in humanitarian imagery, the way to make a claim on sympathy and affection is through exciting the sentiment of another, the sympathy of another through a spectacle of suffering. And that's how one makes a claim, through performing one suffering. That's how the sympathy of the other is secured. And it's awful. And so there's been a whole series of anthropological and critical and other rejoinders to that. Right. You think already back to someone like Susan Sontag writing about Photography and the pain regarding the pain of others. Right. Where she, you know, it's a modified position from her deep skepticism about images decades earlier. But it's still a kind of. It's no longer a cynicism, but it's still deeply skeptical about the work that images can do. Right. In producing the right kind of politics. And, you know, she's very insistent over and over that actually, you know, images don't deliver anything. They always need a caption to guide the interpretation of the viewer. And we see this certainly more recently with two years of broadcast horrors from Gaza and those horrors being received with indifference or exaltation on the part of many around the world, but certainly also during the Syrian war as well, similar kinds of dynamics where the images themselves don't deliver any kind of politics or reception. So if you can't rely, or if you're not going to rely on that surplus affect that's generated through leaning into the sensation to produce the right kind of reception, what other ways do you have to engage that difficulty? And so I think that's maybe what I'm. I guess I am working toward a more substantial answer. That's what I'm most interested in. Right. What are other ways of engaging? Not turning away, certainly, but what are other ways of engaging in those same spaces of difficulty in a way that doesn't simply recourse back to the spectacle of suffering? And I mentioned that that's also part of the theme of the book as well. Right. In terms of humanitarian representations, one example that I talk about briefly in the book is a kind of restraint that some of my. I call it restraint that some of my interlocutors offered when talking about or when presenting the work of their organizations. This is in chapter one in the section called Abstemious Images, where one of the Islamic charities where I did some of this fieldwork, it advanced, it did circulate images on its network of pious donors. But these weren't images of, you know, the. The suffering refugees whom they were going to go help. Instead, the images that they circulated were either of the receipts of the donations that people had sent in. So the image there functions as a kind of guarantor or kind of a warrant to show that the donations were in fact delivered and so on, or they gave. They showed images of the bags of food that were being distributed. So these weren't images that focused in on the dusty face of a pained child. Anonymous in a refugee camp, although that was certainly there. So other people, I think, who I mentioned in Sontag already You know, I've long followed someone like Teju Cole. Right. And was recently teaching his collection of words and images with the photographer Fazal Sheikh. It's called Human Archipelago. So Cole gave the words and Sheikh gave them photographs. And then paired together, they kind of offer this remarkable exploration of something else. Right. It's not even about those being pictured. It's about the kinds of questions about hospitality that open up through the pairing of the words and the images, the sequence of images, the sequence of words. So, yeah, so I think I'd say I'm interested in efforts at engaging these spaces of difficulty without recoursing back to that spectacle of suffering. And that happens in different medium as well. Right. And also in film and in poetry and certainly, I'd hope, also in ethnography, too.
- [67:37]
Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Thank you. I think you've hit it, like, just hit the. What do they say? Hit the nail on the head. Because I think beyond what is a really important and sensitive topic, I think what you've done is have you presented it to us, which I think I'm really moved by. There's subtlety and there's intention and care. And I think people who work in areas should look to this as one, as you say, one possibility of how to write with such care and intentionality, but also not to absolve the complexity and the pain, because I don't think you ever dismiss it. I think you hold the reader really well and you hold yourself very well, which is a really difficult thing to do. So huge congratulations to you on this beautiful, stunning book. I know people will be talking about it, especially in the anthropology of Islam, for a long time, and I know the book has just come out and I hope you're celebrating and treating yourself and doing important things to care for yourself. But I wonder if there's anything on the horizon that you're starting to think about or in terms of a future project or anything like that.
- [68:44]
Basit Karim Iqbal
Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things. So, one, I've got some pieces that didn't fit in the book, really, and I was unsure what to do with. But I've been kind of moving them around in kind of collage form, and they seem to be hanging together further. And so I'm working on a book, I guess, about Evil. It's kind of a dramatic statement, but about. It's centered on questions that came up during the fieldwork for this book, but that there wasn't space or time to really fully follow. So it's got a few different threads, but it's centered on the second last surah of the Quran, which begins by seeking refuge in God from the evil that he created. And so what does it mean to do that? That's kind of the guiding frame of the book. And so, again, coming back to questions of refuge, but its methods are going to be more. It'll be partially ethnographic, but also partially textual as well. And so looking at some texts.
- [70:10]
Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Both.
- [70:10]
Basit Karim Iqbal
In contemporary texts and also classical ones, kind of on this theme. So that book on evil, the ethnographic parts are going to include some work with prison survivors who now are in Jordan and Canada and Syria. So in some ways, that retreads some of these same questions, but from a different angle. It's a book of essays, less a book of ethnography. So in some ways, it's me kind of experimenting with another mode of approaching the same questions. I'm also working on a translation of a book by a Syrian intellectual on destruction, on the destruction of Syria and how that destruction also touches the language that we have for speaking about destruction. So again, I guess it's kind of back to the same questions about representation. How do we represent something if that thing also confounds our capacity for representation? And then a couple of smaller essays, too. I'll just mention one of them. It's on some of these flyers that the Israeli army drops on Gaza, or I guess on Palestine more generally, and specifically on how some of these flyers they mine or colonize Islamic archives in doing so. And so the one that really struck me that kind of spurred my interest in this was, you know, I'd written about tribulation at some length. And in Ramadan last year, there was a flyer, a purported flyer that was dropped where people reported encountering, in which the. In which the fire begins by quoting the same Quranic ayah that I have kept coming back to, right? About how God will test you with fear and hunger and loss. And, you know, it incensed me, of course, but also, like, it's. It's, you know, it's. It's very curious, right, where on the one hand, the same text, it draws on this Quranic and hadith corpus. On the other hand, in doing so, it also ventriloquizes the voice of God, right? And so what. It's not the worst kind of violence that we've seen, of course, but it does condense something specific about it, right? About what makes it. What makes this, you know, what makes this exercise of what makes this Israeli flyer, you know, and dropped across Gaza a kind of violence that's what makes for the obscenity of this violence. Right. And that's what I'm curious about. Right. But it condenses something about the total ambitions. Right. Of that claim. Right. To be able to claim or ventriloquize the voice of God in that way as a way of. And so I write about it a bit as an effort to destroy the limit between this world and the next. Right. Because there's a way of. And so what we're left with then is not a kind of discourse of trial and tribulation that, you know, through which, you know, one might pass, but instead there is no passage at all. Right. This is the space of the end, at least, you know, in that discourse. So that's what I'm trying to understand.
- [74:09]
Interviewer (New Books in Islamic Studies)
Now, as I said before, provocative and heartbreaking stuff. Thank you so much. Thank you for being on the podcast to talk with me about your book. I really appreciate your work and I'm looking forward to all the other stuff that you'll be doing. Thank you.
- [74:22]
Basit Karim Iqbal
Well, thank you very much. I much appreciate it.
- [74:25]
Podcast Host (New Books in Islamic Studies)
And that was my conversation with Basat Karim Iqbal about his book the Dread Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution. I hope you enjoyed my conversation and I hope you'll join me again next time. Until then, take good care.