I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. As a Cultural Anthropologist and Scholar of Religion, my research comprises the study of carceral practices and theologies, subject formations, and meaning-making practices of Muslim communities. I employ an ethnographic approach, anchored in extensive fieldwork, to explore the structural dynamics between state violence and political theology. Central to this exploration is the understanding of how Muslims navigate tribulation and human suffering and adapt their ritual practices—in the broader contexts of secular modernity, political violence, and carcerality—and reconcile them with God, authority, and doctrine. I have sought to understand this within the milieu of Anglo-American Muslim communities—with a focus on the rise of neo-traditionalist and counter-modernist orientations therein—and in the context of expanding modern carceral regimes and confinement—with a focus on carceral practices in the Middle East.

My latest book When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners—co-written with Asim Qureshi and published by Pluto Press in April 2024—examines how the body and soul of Muslim prisoners become sites of religious contestation between themselves and the carceral regimes in the context of the Global War on Terror. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of released political prisoners, primarily detained in Egypt and Guantanamo Bay, this research shows the way spatial confinement and exercise of control over the bodies and souls in prison can generate a shift in the spiritual lives of the prisoners, their subjectivities, and modes of resistance.

My first book, Neo-traditionalism in Islam in the West: Orthodoxy, Spirituality, and Politics, was published in July 2023 by Edinburgh University Press. This book examines the intellectual, theological, and political commitments of an emerging trend within Anglo-American Islam that emphasizes the primacy of a notion of 'tradition' and sees a moral and political imperative in its resurrection. It examines the broader themes of crisis—personal, political, and ‘civilizational’—to Anglo-American Muslim communities seeking voluntary spiritual discipline and retreat. I examine spiritual retreats and travel as a medium, mobilized by neo-traditionalist shaykhs to reformulate the political and religious subjectivities of the seekers of sacred knowledge in these spaces.