Basit Iqbal
Associate Professor, Anthropology

I am Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. I received a BA (Interdisciplinary Studies/Philosophy) from the University of Alberta, an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Anthropology with an emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. My areas of research and teaching include political theology, humanitarianism, migration and refuge, Islam, secularism, and poetics.

My recent book, The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham, 2025), draws on fieldwork conducted in Jordan and Canada to offer an ethnography of Islamic theology in a time of war. I have edited journal issues on tribulation (Political Theology, 2022), destruction and loss (Critical Times, 2023), and the in/capacitation of tradition (History of the Present, 2026). My other publications have appeared in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Anthropological Theory, The Journal of Religion, The Muslim World, diacritics, qui parle, Anthropologie et sociétés, and elsewhere. Current writing projects include work across genres on the representation of violence, the language of evil, and the figure of witness.

I welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students.