Sarah Hammerschlag: I read two of your essays, “An (Un)Natural History: Tracing the Rhinoceros Horn in Egypt” and “Occult Epidemics,”…
Irreverently reverent
Egypt
Rigor of chess masters, rigor of angels
In preparing my response to the conversation between Sarah Hammerschlag and Taylor Moore, I came across Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön,…
Carceral afterlives: Recording my father’s prison memoirs
In 2021, I began a project that examines Muslim carceral theologies, focusing on prisoners’ key expressions in rituals, theodicies, hermeneutics,…
Incoherent nationalism: Monuments to extinction in Sisi’s Egypt
The Egyptian government pledged in 2017 to allocate 1.27 billion EGP ($71 million) for the preservation of Jewish heritage. Restoring…
A Middle Eastern indigenous critique?
…I ask how Dawn might help us to think of the Americas and the Middle East together. What is to…
Imperial death and belonging in Alexandria, Egypt
Over and again, the stories of Jessie Brown and other foreign nationals of Alexandria demonstrated that death defined the living.…
Fieldwork in translation: Reflections on positionality and distance in Cairo
This reflection was born out of an encounter between two researchers working on the same urban space in Cairo, a…
Reviving revolution
A glimpse into how Arab publics, activists, politicians, and governments mobilized the wildly divergent meanings of revolution refreshes our understanding…
The religion trap
There is a trap in the study of religion and politics. All traditions are equally susceptible to it, but as…
Liberal rights and religious rites
While Constituting Religion provides a detailed case study of Malaysia, the argument Moustafa develops has important implications for much of…