UC Berkeley

This dissertation is an ethnography of refuge, religion, and repair in the aftermath of violence and dispossession. Based in fifteen months of fieldwork with refugees and aid workers in Jordan and Canada, it considers the field of “Islamic humanitarianism” writ large in the wake of the Syrian civil war. I include under that name Quranic pedagogy and cultural translation, dramatic reenactments and poetic elegies, furniture drives and legal paperwork. What unites these heterogeneous elements is not a set of principles or theological doctrine, far less the institutional divisions of the international humanitarian regime, but their engagement by those compelled to act after the Syrian war. The forms of such action are modulated by my interlocutors’ inhabiting the tradition of Islam. Their struggle to inherit the sensibilities of this tradition is what articulates their practices of care.

Part One (The Grammar of Tribulation) ethnographically follows diverse figures of tribulation in conversation with four primary interlocutors, each of whom is engaged in projects of communal repair. They each understand the displacements of the war as a divine trial marking an existential corruption. The interlude lingers with the life of one man who lives at the Jordan-Syria border. Once an imam in Daraa, at the mosque celebrated as the birthplace of the Syrian revolution, then tortured and hunted by the Syrian regime, he now serves as steward of an orphanage funded by an Islamic charity. His practices of memory and of witness emerge in the hiatus between tribulation and repair. Part Two (Poetics of Repair) turns more directly to the sites of Islamic humanitarianism, albeit with a view not to empirically cataloging its transnational sector but to surveying some of its themes: solidarity (community in question); translation (universal vs. particular humanitarianisms); representation (the ambiguous power of images); and pedagogy (inheriting Islamic sensibilities). The dissertation is framed by two ethnographic sections that focus on the shifting temporal horizons—ruin and hope, despair and disclosure—afforded my interlocutors through their inhabitation of the Islamic tradition in the time of the war.