Islamophobia and Lebanon: Visibly Muslim Women and Global Coloniality

Islamophobia and Lebanon: Visibly Muslim Women and Global Coloniality
Join us for our fourth Book Talk

Date: Monday, May 29, 2023 at 5:00pm
Location: Architecture Lecture Hall, Dar Al Handasah Design and Architecture Bldg., American University of Beirut


Islamophobia and Lebanon: Visibly Muslim Women and Global Coloniality (I.B. Tauris, 2023)  

Authored by Ali Kassem

Discussants:
Ghina Abi-Ghannam, a PhD candidate in Critical Social Psychology at City University of New York
Zina Sawaf, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Lebanese American University
Nada Moumtaz, Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto 

Moderated by: 
Mona Harb, Professor of Urban Studies and Politics at the American University of Beirut, Research Lead at the Beirut Urban Lab


All are welcome!
This book panel is the fourth in our Book Talks Series featuring roundtable discussions on urban and other issues that are of relevance to the lab's research scope and core values.

This event is open to the public and will be live-streamed on Beirut Urban Lab’s Facebook page.

About the Book

Thinking through anti, post, and decolonial theories, this book examines, analyzes, and conceptualizes 'visibly Muslim' Lebanese women's lived experiences of discrimination, assault, wounding, and erasure. Based on in-depth research alongside over 100 Sunni and Shia participants between 2017 and 2019, it situates these experiences at the intersection of the local and the global and argues for their conceptualization as a form of structural and lived anti-Muslim racism. In doing this, it discusses the convergences and divergences of anti-Muslim racism in Lebanon with anti-Muslim racism in other parts of both the global north and the global south. It examines the production of this racialization as well as its workings across spheres of public, private, work, and state – including an analysis of internalized self-hate. It further explores various forms of resistance and negotiation and the contemporary possibilities and impossibilities of working beyond the epistemic framework of Eurocentric modernity. As the first in-depth and extensive study of anti-Muslim racism within Muslim-majority and Arab-majority spaces, it offers an urgent and timely redress to multiple gaps and biases in the study of the Muslim-majority and Arab-majority worlds as well as racialization broadly and Islamophobia specifically. 

Bios

Ali Kassem is a Lecturer in Sociology at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. Ali was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Al-Waleed Centre at the University of Edinburgh where he also taught at the School of Social and Political Science. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and the Carnegie Corporation of New York affiliated to the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut. He obtained his PhD in Sociology from the University of Sussex, UK, where he taught between 2018 and 2021. He has held research and/or teaching positions at the Finnish Institute for Middle East Studies, the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich, the Ecole Des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, the American University of Beirut, the Lebanese American University, the Free University of Brighton, and others. 

Ghina Abi-Ghannam is a PhD candidate in Critical Social Psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She holds an MA in Psychology, with an emphasis on Social/Political Psychology, from the American University of Beirut. Broadly, her research includes the study of resistance, (de)colonial violence, and the political psychology of social movements in the Global South. 
 
Zina Sawaf is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Lebanese American University. A social anthropologist, she has written and published on ethnographic practice in the Arab region, divorce and the state in Saudi Arabia and the history of anthropology in Lebanon.  Her book project, Encountering the State: Women and Intimate Lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula, is a study of embodied encounters between women and the processes, offices, and officials of the state, as well as its material culture.

Nada Moumtaz is Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interests center on capitalism, Islam, charity, the urban, law, and span the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in the Levant. Her book God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State examines the contemporary Islamic revival of waqfs in Beirut to shed new light on the secularization of religion through the lens of its separation from “the economy.” She is embarking on a new project to examine practices of elderly care among Sunni Muslims in Beirut.

Mona Harb is a Professor of Urban Studies and Politics at the American University of Beirut where she is also Co-founder and Research Lead at the Beirut Urban Lab. Her research investigates governance and territoriality in contexts of contested sovereignty; urban activism and oppositional politics and how people make collective life in fragmented cities. She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beirut: de la banlieue à la ville, co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’i South Beirut (with Lara Deeb), co-editor of Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World (with Sami Atallah), and co-editor of Refugees as City-Makers (with Mona Fawaz et al.). She serves on the editorial boards of MELG, IJMES, EPC, and CSSAME.