B K Iqbal
Biographic Data
| ID | 48153 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B K Iqbal |
| GIVEN NAMES | B K |
| FAMILY NAME | Iqbal |
| SIGNATURE | IQBAL B K |
| AFFILIATIONS | McMaster University |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-2927-8658 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The Aching Community
For secular social science, declarative claims of Muslim unity are not tenable, and the discourse of religious community serves ideological functions. Meanwhile, contemporary discourses and practices variously register the ongoing destruction of the Islamic community (umma): assailed by vicious regimes and civil war, subjected to capital and colonial borders. This article presents two exchanges from my broader fieldwork in and around Syria to eth…
In/Capacitations of Tradition
Scholars have long examined the varied capacities of ethical, political, and theological traditions to engage contemporary predicaments and political crises. This special issue instead problematizes the capacity of tradition, seeking to articulate multiple registers of its incapacity. By shifting our attention from affirming capacity to exploring incapacity, we do not seek to rehearse tired conclusions about the modern interruption of tradition. …
Hold Fast the Rope of God: Space, Authority, and Speech in Muslim Prison Narratives
Scholarship about Muslims in prison has been overwhelmingly dominated by security studies’ radicalization thesis and by a superficial reading of incarcerated Muslims’ “religious resilience.” Such approaches caricature the force of Islam in prison and indeed in Muslim prison narratives. This essay draws on interviews with survivors of prisons in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria in order to develop other terms for analysis. Across our tex…
Patience, Paratext, and the Heteronomy of Critique: An Introduction to Reading Politics of Piety at 20 Years
POLITICS OF PIETY: THE ISLAMIC REVIVAL AND THE FEMINIST SUBJECT. By Saba Mahmood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. The commentaries in this book symposium are drawn from a panel on Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety I convened at the 2024 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. In introducing the panel, I noted that it was something of a traveling road show, as it was the fourth such panel in which some combination of friend…
For a Historical Grammar of Concepts: Thinking About Political Theology with Talal Asad
The term political theology is not central to the oeuvre of the anthropologist Talal Asad; in fact, much of his work is dedicated to problematizing conceptual translations across “religion” and “politics.” Meanwhile, much contemporary literature in the growing interdisciplinary field of political theology cites and engages his wide-ranging work. The chapter presents two divergent examples to illustrate Asad’s approach to political theology: his a…
Apocalyptic everyday
Darryl Li. The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity
The Universal Enemy examines the formation, history, and dissolution of a battalion ("the Katiba") composed of Muslim men who came from dozens of countries around the world to fight in Bosnia in the early 1990s.The 1000-strong Katiba was semi-independent -it had its own leaders, funds, and religious education program -but served under the flag of Bosnia-Herzegovina, fighting alongside NATO to protect the Muslims (p. 2).Many of its members were gr…
We Need Equitable Exercise Opportunities’: The Complexity of Leisure-Time Physical Activity and Its Relationship to Mental Health among Arab Canadians: The CAN-Heal Study
I thought we would be nourished here’: The complexity of nutrition/food and its relationship to mental health among Arab immigrants/refugees in Canada: The CAN-Heal study
Commensuration, Pain, and the Politics of Number
Like the rest of us on the AAA panel for which these remarks were originally prepared, I experienced the months since 7 October 2023 as a reminder of the horrific realities of this hellish world, in which we inhabit a time not only of utter depravity, of dispossession, of abandonment, and of brutal destruction, but also of indifference and mass cruelty. The third chapter of Formations of the Secular reflects directly on the themes of cruelty and …
Formations of the Secular, 20 Years On
The 2003 publication of Talal Asad's Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity was a landmark in contemporary anthropology. An intervention into late modern debates over secularism, the book subjected triumphalist narratives to critical scrutiny while reworking their fundamental elements. It articulated unregarded questions, reframing the terms of secularist discourse with reference to the powers they harness and disable. And amid…
Works from the Dead Inside Series
The Destruction of Loss
Reprising Islamic Political Theology: Genre and the Time of Tribulation
Contemporary Islam has long been presented as the object of modern crises (from colonialism to globalization). But the secular idiom of crisis reproduces the logic of norm and exception, continuity or closure. This essay instead briefly traces the Quranic figure of tribulation in selected Islamic genres (ethics, theology, and historiography) in order to animate another tradition of thinking the difficulty of the present. Because it resists the se…
Economy of Tribulation: Translating Humanitarianism for an Islamic Counterpublic
This paper addresses the theoretical problem of how to approach Islamic charity in a humanitarian world, without simultaneously reproducing a secularization narrative in the terms of analysis. First, I outline the economic theology of an Islamic reformist organization serving Syrian refugees in Jordan. I argue that it should be disarticulated from the interpretative frame of “neoliberal piety” to which the academic literature often refers modern …
Around David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina
Around David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2020, paperback, 210 pages
Book forum on Charles Hirschkind, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago, 2021)
Basit Kareem Iqbal and Candace B. LukasikCharles Hirschkind begins his new book, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia, by stating his argument simply: ‘medieval Muslim Iberia d
The Messiah and the Jurisconsult: Agamben on the Problem of Law in Sunni Islam
Although Giorgio Agamben engages Islam at various points in his work, it occupies an ambivalent role in his hypothesis that messianism constitutes the limit concept of the law. This article amplifies that ambivalence in order to explore how centering the shari‘a would confuse certain categorical divisions on which his messianism relies. I first read Islamic apocalyptic traditions with and against Agamben, and then explore messianic temporalities …
Les croyants comme un corps souffrant: Remarques depuis la frontière jordano-syrienne
Les pratiques humanitaires musulmanes contemporaines sont imprégnées du langage de la solidarité religieuse. Pourtant, les historiens et les politologues ont montré que les déclarations d’unité islamique ne sont pas défendables et que le discours au sujet de la communauté religieuse (l’oumma) a une fonction idéologique. Plus largement, les tentatives des sciences sociales de comprendre l’oumma se fondent souvent sur sa répudiation théologique des…
Asad and Benjamin: Chronopolitics of tragedy in the anthropology of secularism
Divergent theories of tragedy in the anthropology of secularism have been articulated with reference to the work of Talal Asad, yet he himself disavows a tragic sensibility. In seeking to understand this disjuncture, I sketch out political and analytical consequences of invoking tragedy when approaching Muslims in Europe and colonial-era shifts in Islamic law. I then align Asad's demurral of tragedy with Walter Benjamin's differentiation between …
Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-racial Societies
The tone of this book is set on its first page. As the second plane collided with the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Yassir Morsi whispered to himself: what have we done? (3). The rest of the book responds to this whisper; it deconstructs the utterance as the scene of a colonial interpellation and tracks out the political permutations available within it. Ultimately Morsi’s effort is to de-naturalize (bring into view, render explicit) …
Disfiguring Christianity
This essay reads Anidjar’s “critique of Christianity” to confront the history of Western rhetoric, in its separation of figure from referent. He reads blood as catachrestic—catachresis not as abuse of language but its actualization. From the perspective of the tropological system, one might track the different meanings of blood (metaphorical, metonymic, symbolic) of historical Christianity. But from the asymmetrical perspective of catachresis, bl…
Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace
Christianity was the religion of spirit (and freedom), and critiqued Islam as a religion of flesh (and slavery); later, Christianity was the religion of reason, and critiqued Islam as the religion of fideism; later still, Christianity was the religion of the critique of religion, and critiqued Islam as the most atavistic of religions. Even now, when the West has critiqued its own Chris- tianity enough to be properly secular (because free, rationa…
Thinking about Method
In this interview, completed in November 2016, the anthropologist Talal Asad (b. 1933) reviews methodological and theoretical questions that continue to animate his work. The conversation is framed by his concept of tradition and touches on themes of temporality and sovereignty, failure and fragility, ethnographic conceits and forms of life
Islam and Science Online
Qu'est-ce qu'Internet propose a l'etudiant serieux sur l'islam et la science ? Les chercheurs en ces domaines, quelque soit leur discipline, trouvent-ils sur Internet ce dont ils ont besoin ? Les A. de ce travail ont fait une recherche en se servant des termes «Islam et science» et ont decouvert presque deux millions d'entrees, et ont visite 132 sites choisis au hasard. Ils reproduisent ici 30 descriptions de sites
Thinking about Method
In this interview, completed in November 2016, the anthropologist Talal Asad (b. 1933) reviews methodological and theoretical questions that continue to animate his work. The conversation is framed by his concept of tradition and touches on themes of temporality and sovereignty, failure and fragility, ethnographic conceits and forms of life
Economy of Tribulation: Translating Humanitarianism for an Islamic Counterpublic
This paper addresses the theoretical problem of how to approach Islamic charity in a humanitarian world, without simultaneously reproducing a secularization narrative in the terms of analysis. First, I outline the economic theology of an Islamic reformist organization serving Syrian refugees in Jordan. I argue that it should be disarticulated from the interpretative frame of “neoliberal piety” to which the academic literature often refers modern …
Asad and Benjamin: Chronopolitics of tragedy in the anthropology of secularism
Divergent theories of tragedy in the anthropology of secularism have been articulated with reference to the work of Talal Asad, yet he himself disavows a tragic sensibility. In seeking to understand this disjuncture, I sketch out political and analytical consequences of invoking tragedy when approaching Muslims in Europe and colonial-era shifts in Islamic law. I then align Asad's demurral of tragedy with Walter Benjamin's differentiation between …
Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace
Christianity was the religion of spirit (and freedom), and critiqued Islam as a religion of flesh (and slavery); later, Christianity was the religion of reason, and critiqued Islam as the religion of fideism; later still, Christianity was the religion of the critique of religion, and critiqued Islam as the most atavistic of religions. Even now, when the West has critiqued its own Chris- tianity enough to be properly secular (because free, rationa…
I thought we would be nourished here’: The complexity of nutrition/food and its relationship to mental health among Arab immigrants/refugees in Canada: The CAN-Heal study
The Messiah and the Jurisconsult: Agamben on the Problem of Law in Sunni Islam
Although Giorgio Agamben engages Islam at various points in his work, it occupies an ambivalent role in his hypothesis that messianism constitutes the limit concept of the law. This article amplifies that ambivalence in order to explore how centering the shari‘a would confuse certain categorical divisions on which his messianism relies. I first read Islamic apocalyptic traditions with and against Agamben, and then explore messianic temporalities …
Reprising Islamic Political Theology: Genre and the Time of Tribulation
Contemporary Islam has long been presented as the object of modern crises (from colonialism to globalization). But the secular idiom of crisis reproduces the logic of norm and exception, continuity or closure. This essay instead briefly traces the Quranic figure of tribulation in selected Islamic genres (ethics, theology, and historiography) in order to animate another tradition of thinking the difficulty of the present. Because it resists the se…
Islam and Science Online
Qu'est-ce qu'Internet propose a l'etudiant serieux sur l'islam et la science ? Les chercheurs en ces domaines, quelque soit leur discipline, trouvent-ils sur Internet ce dont ils ont besoin ? Les A. de ce travail ont fait une recherche en se servant des termes «Islam et science» et ont decouvert presque deux millions d'entrees, et ont visite 132 sites choisis au hasard. Ils reproduisent ici 30 descriptions de sites
Thinking about Method
In this interview, completed in November 2016, the anthropologist Talal Asad (b. 1933) reviews methodological and theoretical questions that continue to animate his work. The conversation is framed by his concept of tradition and touches on themes of temporality and sovereignty, failure and fragility, ethnographic conceits and forms of life
Disfiguring Christianity
This essay reads Anidjar’s “critique of Christianity” to confront the history of Western rhetoric, in its separation of figure from referent. He reads blood as catachrestic—catachresis not as abuse of language but its actualization. From the perspective of the tropological system, one might track the different meanings of blood (metaphorical, metonymic, symbolic) of historical Christianity. But from the asymmetrical perspective of catachresis, bl…
Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace
Christianity was the religion of spirit (and freedom), and critiqued Islam as a religion of flesh (and slavery); later, Christianity was the religion of reason, and critiqued Islam as the religion of fideism; later still, Christianity was the religion of the critique of religion, and critiqued Islam as the most atavistic of religions. Even now, when the West has critiqued its own Chris- tianity enough to be properly secular (because free, rationa…
Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-racial Societies
The tone of this book is set on its first page. As the second plane collided with the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Yassir Morsi whispered to himself: what have we done? (3). The rest of the book responds to this whisper; it deconstructs the utterance as the scene of a colonial interpellation and tracks out the political permutations available within it. Ultimately Morsi’s effort is to de-naturalize (bring into view, render explicit) …
Asad and Benjamin: Chronopolitics of tragedy in the anthropology of secularism
Divergent theories of tragedy in the anthropology of secularism have been articulated with reference to the work of Talal Asad, yet he himself disavows a tragic sensibility. In seeking to understand this disjuncture, I sketch out political and analytical consequences of invoking tragedy when approaching Muslims in Europe and colonial-era shifts in Islamic law. I then align Asad's demurral of tragedy with Walter Benjamin's differentiation between …
Book forum on Charles Hirschkind, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia (Chicago, 2021)
Basit Kareem Iqbal and Candace B. LukasikCharles Hirschkind begins his new book, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia, by stating his argument simply: ‘medieval Muslim Iberia d
The Messiah and the Jurisconsult: Agamben on the Problem of Law in Sunni Islam
Although Giorgio Agamben engages Islam at various points in his work, it occupies an ambivalent role in his hypothesis that messianism constitutes the limit concept of the law. This article amplifies that ambivalence in order to explore how centering the shari‘a would confuse certain categorical divisions on which his messianism relies. I first read Islamic apocalyptic traditions with and against Agamben, and then explore messianic temporalities …
Les croyants comme un corps souffrant: Remarques depuis la frontière jordano-syrienne
Les pratiques humanitaires musulmanes contemporaines sont imprégnées du langage de la solidarité religieuse. Pourtant, les historiens et les politologues ont montré que les déclarations d’unité islamique ne sont pas défendables et que le discours au sujet de la communauté religieuse (l’oumma) a une fonction idéologique. Plus largement, les tentatives des sciences sociales de comprendre l’oumma se fondent souvent sur sa répudiation théologique des…
Reprising Islamic Political Theology: Genre and the Time of Tribulation
Contemporary Islam has long been presented as the object of modern crises (from colonialism to globalization). But the secular idiom of crisis reproduces the logic of norm and exception, continuity or closure. This essay instead briefly traces the Quranic figure of tribulation in selected Islamic genres (ethics, theology, and historiography) in order to animate another tradition of thinking the difficulty of the present. Because it resists the se…
Economy of Tribulation: Translating Humanitarianism for an Islamic Counterpublic
This paper addresses the theoretical problem of how to approach Islamic charity in a humanitarian world, without simultaneously reproducing a secularization narrative in the terms of analysis. First, I outline the economic theology of an Islamic reformist organization serving Syrian refugees in Jordan. I argue that it should be disarticulated from the interpretative frame of “neoliberal piety” to which the academic literature often refers modern …
Around David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina
Around David Henig's Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2020, paperback, 210 pages
Works from the Dead Inside Series
The Destruction of Loss
Darryl Li. The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity
The Universal Enemy examines the formation, history, and dissolution of a battalion ("the Katiba") composed of Muslim men who came from dozens of countries around the world to fight in Bosnia in the early 1990s.The 1000-strong Katiba was semi-independent -it had its own leaders, funds, and religious education program -but served under the flag of Bosnia-Herzegovina, fighting alongside NATO to protect the Muslims (p. 2).Many of its members were gr…
We Need Equitable Exercise Opportunities’: The Complexity of Leisure-Time Physical Activity and Its Relationship to Mental Health among Arab Canadians: The CAN-Heal Study
I thought we would be nourished here’: The complexity of nutrition/food and its relationship to mental health among Arab immigrants/refugees in Canada: The CAN-Heal study
Commensuration, Pain, and the Politics of Number
Like the rest of us on the AAA panel for which these remarks were originally prepared, I experienced the months since 7 October 2023 as a reminder of the horrific realities of this hellish world, in which we inhabit a time not only of utter depravity, of dispossession, of abandonment, and of brutal destruction, but also of indifference and mass cruelty. The third chapter of Formations of the Secular reflects directly on the themes of cruelty and …
Formations of the Secular, 20 Years On
The 2003 publication of Talal Asad's Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity was a landmark in contemporary anthropology. An intervention into late modern debates over secularism, the book subjected triumphalist narratives to critical scrutiny while reworking their fundamental elements. It articulated unregarded questions, reframing the terms of secularist discourse with reference to the powers they harness and disable. And amid…
Hold Fast the Rope of God: Space, Authority, and Speech in Muslim Prison Narratives
Scholarship about Muslims in prison has been overwhelmingly dominated by security studies’ radicalization thesis and by a superficial reading of incarcerated Muslims’ “religious resilience.” Such approaches caricature the force of Islam in prison and indeed in Muslim prison narratives. This essay draws on interviews with survivors of prisons in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria in order to develop other terms for analysis. Across our tex…
Patience, Paratext, and the Heteronomy of Critique: An Introduction to Reading Politics of Piety at 20 Years
POLITICS OF PIETY: THE ISLAMIC REVIVAL AND THE FEMINIST SUBJECT. By Saba Mahmood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. The commentaries in this book symposium are drawn from a panel on Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety I convened at the 2024 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. In introducing the panel, I noted that it was something of a traveling road show, as it was the fourth such panel in which some combination of friend…
For a Historical Grammar of Concepts: Thinking About Political Theology with Talal Asad
The term political theology is not central to the oeuvre of the anthropologist Talal Asad; in fact, much of his work is dedicated to problematizing conceptual translations across “religion” and “politics.” Meanwhile, much contemporary literature in the growing interdisciplinary field of political theology cites and engages his wide-ranging work. The chapter presents two divergent examples to illustrate Asad’s approach to political theology: his a…
Apocalyptic everyday
The Aching Community
For secular social science, declarative claims of Muslim unity are not tenable, and the discourse of religious community serves ideological functions. Meanwhile, contemporary discourses and practices variously register the ongoing destruction of the Islamic community (umma): assailed by vicious regimes and civil war, subjected to capital and colonial borders. This article presents two exchanges from my broader fieldwork in and around Syria to eth…
In/Capacitations of Tradition
Scholars have long examined the varied capacities of ethical, political, and theological traditions to engage contemporary predicaments and political crises. This special issue instead problematizes the capacity of tradition, seeking to articulate multiple registers of its incapacity. By shifting our attention from affirming capacity to exploring incapacity, we do not seek to rehearse tired conclusions about the modern interruption of tradition. …
Philosophy (14 works) · Political science (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Politics (11 works) · Islamic Studies and History (10 works) · Law (9 works) · History (8 works) · Islam (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Theology (7 works)