Past seminars
The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution
🗓️ 30 April 2026
📍Online
📚 The second instalment of our "Genealogies of Islam and Humanitarianism” seminar series featured Basit Kareem Iqbal, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University. Professor Iqbal discussed his recent book, The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution (Fordham University Press, 2025). Drawing upon extensive fieldwork, Dread Heights traces the transnational trajectories of Muslim giving within the Syrian diaspora. In addition to Western frameworks of humanitarianism, Iqbal considers how giving animates religious imaginations that arise against the backdrop of war, displacement, and migration. Professor Iqbal was joined in conversation with Charlotte Al-Khalili, Leverhulme in Anthropology, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex.
Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam
🗓️ 24 February 2026
📍FSW Building, Room 1A.20
📚 Entangled Universals launched its "Genealogies of Islam and Humanitarianism” seminar series with a book discussion by Faisal Devji. In his highly anticipated new book, Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale University Press 2025), Professor Devji traces the trajectory of Islam as a historical actor and its implications for Muslim theological authority and political sovereignty. Amidst a dramatically changing international landscape, what impact does the fall of global Islam have on transnational Muslim solidarities? Professor Devji was joined by discussant Ahab Bidaiwi, University Lecturer of Islamic Thought and History at Leiden University.
Faisal Devji is Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at the University of Oxford. His work explores the intellectual history and political thought of modern South Asia as well as the emergence of Islam as a global category. His previous works consider different ways in which the idea of humanity achieves political reality, particularly as the simultaneous subject and object of globalisation.
View the event recording
Da‘wa as development: Kuwaiti Islamic charity in Africa
🗓️ 04 October 2024
📍African Studies Centre, Leiden University
📚 Entangled Universals hosted Mara Liechtman as part of the CRG Africa in the World seminar series at the African Studies Centre in Leiden. Professor Liechtman's talk explored how Direct Aid, Kuwait’s largest charity focused on Africa, carefully mediates between Gulf donor wishes, aid recipient needs, government regulations, and various development priorities. Drawing upon multi-sited fieldwork in Tanzania and Senegal, Professor Lietchman argued that Direct Aid’s approach is strategically grounded in comprehensiveness/“holism,” which serves to blur established categories of “charity,” “relief,” and “development” to become da‘wa-as-development. Based on multi-sited fieldwork, this talk examined Kuwaiti-funded projects in Tanzania and Senegal.