Full Description
Muslim charities and community organizations have assumed a significant role in refugee support since the Syrian catastrophe: in Jordan and Canada, as elsewhere, they deliver food aid, house orphans, and organize remedial education. But Islam is more than just a resource for humanitarian projects. The Dread Heights details how the Islamic tradition guides refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars in a world of brutal sieges and mass displacement.
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.
Contents
Introduction: God Grants Relief 1
1 Refuge 29
The Ruin of Community, 30 • Translating Muslim Humanitarianism, 38 •
Abstemious Images, 47 • Pedagogy in Exile, 53 • No Refuge from God but God, 63
Threshold: Natality 69
2 Tribulation 78
Accepting, 82 • Reckoning, 100 • Distributing, 114 •
Disclosing, 125 • A Grammar of Tribulation, 144
Threshold: Ambivalence 150
3 The Heights 158
Woe to Our Condition Here, 159 • Brutal Tyranny, 163 •
AsThough It Were Yesterday, 171 • If the Horizon Breaks, 184 •
The Dread Heights, 192
Afterword: Eternity Has Fallen 200
Acknowledgments 205
Notes 209
Bibliography 259
Index 281
