The Dread Heights: Tribulation and Refuge after the Syrian Revolution

Event details Date: Thursday, October 15, 2026 Time: 5:00 PM Location: Constance Chiang Pan Anthropology Reading Room, 230 Anthropology and Art Practice Building Type: Exhibits Audience: Alumni,Faculty,Prospective Students,Public,Staff,Students About this event Attuned to a world of brutal sieges and mass displacement, The Dread Heights details how the Islamic tradition guides refugees, relief workers, and religious scholars since the Syrian catastrophe. Through an ethnography of religious imagination and theological argumentation, Iqbal demonstrates what is at stake beyond secular frames for migration and relief. Even as refugees become objects of humanitarian concern suspended between national orders, The Dread Heights brings another suspension into view: a form of life whose gestures are illuminated by the Quranic figure of the Heights. Iqbal's ethnography pursues an unsentimental lucidity across the search for refuge, the trials of creational existence, and the ultimately enigmatic divine decree. In the shadow of war, beyond humanitarian order, Islam offers an orientation to the devastation of the present. Official event details: https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/322069-the-dread-heights-tribulation-and-refuge-after-the