The Subject Tonight is Love
Performance
This evening brings together two inspiring elements of Persian heritage – poetry and music – which together explore the nature of human existence and love. Drawing from the wisdom of 12th and 13th century poets Rumi, Sa’adi, Khayam and Hafez as well as the modern poems of internationally renowned…
Book Discussion: "International Political Economy and the Global South" (2025)
Book launch
Dr Zaynab El Bernoussi will discuss her new co-authored book with Dr Jessie Moritz on International Political Economy and the Global South: Perspectives from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East (2025). The primary goal of this new book is to provide an alternative or…
CAIS Public Lecture Series | Crescent Moon, Hammer, and Sickle: Muslim Socialists, Marxist Muslims, and Islamic Populists in Modern Iran
Lecture/seminar
This presentation explores the fraught and generative encounters between Islam and socialism in modern Iran, from the early days of the Cold War through the post-1979 revolutionary order. It identifies three analytically distinct yet historically overlapping political-theological orientations –…
CAIS Public Lecture Series | States and Social Hierarchies in Kuwait and the Arab Gulf Region
Lecture/seminar
How do autocratic regimes instrumentalize ascriptive identity to maintain political power? I argue that by enforcing status boundaries for privileged groups, status rewards act as a club good for those in a regime's coalition. To demonstrate the empirical implications of these ideas, I…
CAIS Public Lecture Series | Islam in a Globalised World: Local, National, and International Dimensions
Lecture/seminar
What is the role of Islam as a lived, embodied faith in shaping individual subjectivities, collective identities, and political practices across different spatial scales? This lecture will critically examine the vernacularization of Islam—how global Islamic discourses are translated, localized, and…
A Master Class and Workshop with CAIS HDR Students and ECRs on “Researching Social and Political Movements in the Middle East and Central Asia"
Workshop
This interactive workshop will explore theoretical and methodological approaches to studying Islamic social and political movements in the Middle East and Central Asia. How and under what structural, political, and cultural conditions does Islamism emerge as an oppositional identity? What…
CAIS Public Lecture Series | Severing Colonial Relationality: Towards an Islamicate Theory of Autonomy and Refusal
Lecture
In this paper I seek to bring to the fore the theological sources of everyday resistance in the Islamicate, focusing specifically on emancipatory detachment. In doing so, I think with anti-colonial theories of relationality and strategies of refusal, both generatively and critically. While the…