In 2021, I began a project that examines Muslim carceral theologies, focusing on prisoners’ key expressions in rituals, theodicies, hermeneutics,…
Carceral afterlives: Recording my father’s prison memoirs
Egypt
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…
On continuity and rupture: A reply to Elshakry and Quadri
By pulling at different threads of the book’s argument, Elshakry and Quadri expose a basic tension between the book’s emphasis…
Encountering another science
The Lighthouse and the Observatory’s learned account of nineteenth-century Egyptian astronomy’s imbrications with religion, empire, and the social realities and…