When Only God Can See: Muslim Carceral Theologies in the Prisons of Egypt and Guantanamo Bay

ACGIS Guest Lecture with Walaa Quisay

Wednesday, September 25, 2024 3:00 PM EDT
Fenwick Library, Main Reading Room, 2001

When Only God Can See examines the body and soul of Muslim prisoners as sites of religious contestation between themselves and the carceral regimes in the context of the Global War on Terror. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of former political prisoners, primarily detained in Egypt and Guantanamo Bay, this research shows the religious experiences of prisoners that are intrinsic foremost to their personhood, formations of popular theology and hermeneutics, and even to ethereal beliefs. Muslim prisoners are regularly confronted with issues that are unique to their situation – such as maintaining ritual purity when there is little access to clean water, maintaining communal prayers in isolation or discerning prayer times and Qibla when knowledge of time and space is unattainable, as well as acts of resistance including acts of legitimized self-harm such as hunger strikes. In doing so, it examines the impact of carceral structures in producing transformed understandings and practices of fiqh.

 

About Walaa Quisay

Walaa Quisay is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Neo-Traditionalism in Islam in the West: Orthodoxy, Spirituality, and Politics and co-author of When Only God can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners. She worked at numerous academic institutions, including the University of Manchester, the University of Birmingham, and Istanbul Sehir University. In 2019, she received her DPhil from the University of Oxford at the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, the study of Muslim political and religious subjectivities, carceral theology, theodicy, and traditionalism and modernism in contemporary Islamic thought.