Visiting Scholars

Tanzeen Rashed Doha is an anthropologist of Islam(ism), secularism, and race. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory. He also has graduate degrees in Philosophy and Humanities. In 2021-23, he held a “Global Racial Justice” postdoctoral fellowship at the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. His research explores the relationship between race and religion as categories of modern secularity, and his ethnographic meditations trace a contemporary history of tribulation within the structure of the global War on Terror. Dr. Doha engages with 20th-century Islamist thought as he analyzes political-moral actions and psycho-existential conditions of Muslims entrapped in post-9/11 security regimes. His first book project—an ethnographic study of the affective and ethical lifeworld of Muslims of varying political and spiritual commitments—traces how Islamic practitioners of the Deobandi tradition became ethically suspicious of the sovereign powers of the state in the aftermath of the 2013 Shapla massacre in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

His second ethnographic project examines an encounter between the Rohingya muhajir (Islamic migrants) and Deobandi ansar (helpers) during two waves of migration in 2016-17 at the border region between Myanmar and Bangladesh. Through textual and ethnographic engagement with classical Islamic texts and contemporary discourse, the project investigates how the interactions between Deobandi practitioners and Rohingya ulama (scholars) are producing a new cartographic politics, including an embodied and discursive set of practices that call into question given concepts and histories of maps, borders, and sovereignty.

Dr. Doha is the founder and general editor of the journal-magazine Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World. He is also the founder and host of the podcast Everything is Fire, the first season of which is sponsored by the Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University.

Degrees and Education

Courses

The Task of Thinking (Graduate Seminar, Cornell University, Anthropology, 2023)

Martin Heidegger in the essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” declares the end of a particular epoch. But such a declaration of an end (of institutional philosophy) simultaneously came with a potential new beginning: the very possibility of thinking itself outside of the conventions of philosophy and metaphysics. This seminar takes its cue from this orientation: a paradoxical circumstance in which what is dying away is allowing for an overhaul and a reconfiguration. Instead of a moralistic condemnation of Eurocentrism (a current trend in academia that often manifests as “decanonization"), the seminar will look closely at the very architecture of thought itself (including European) and its limits and capacities. This seminar will introduce multiple theoretical texts and approaches organized around the concept of thinking. It will involve careful and close reading of texts in phenomenology, critical theory, political-economy, psychoanalysis, subaltern studies, Black Studies, and anthropology. What is critique (a particular modality of thinking) and is it necessarily secular? What is immanent critique? What does it mean to invert speculative thought in order to analyze the commodity-form? What is the relationship between thinking and time? What is embodied thinking? What is a hermeneutic of suspicion? Is all thought Black thought (Afropessimism)? How does desire and the unconscious shape our orientation in thinking? What are the political and epistemological consequences of fieldwork (ethnography)? What is humanitarian reason?

Race and Religion: Slavery, Colonialism, and their Afterlives (Carleton College, Religion, Winter 2020)

This course examines the emergence and entanglement of “race” and “religion” as categories, especially in relation to slavery and colonialism, and with regard to the study of Islam as well as other traditions. By touching on themes in postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, black liberation theology, and decolonial studies, we will ask questions such as: What is the relation between the invention of the “infidel” and the invention of the “negro”? How did the classification of non-Christians by missionaries help shape the emergence of racial “science”? Is the construction of the “enemy combatant” in our contemporary age of terror informed by the fifteenth century classification of natives as “savages”?

Religion and Critical Theory (Carleton College, Spring 2020)

This course examines the purpose, influence, and erasure of religion in the history and methods of critical theory. We will ask: How is religion examined in modern continental philosophy? What is the relationship between the declaration of the “death of God” and critique as a mode of inquiry? How does messianic time interrupt teleological accounts of history? How does the commodity form come to supplant religion? What is the function of the libidinal economy in organizing our pleasures, desires, anxieties, and passions in relation to religion? The course focuses broadly on religion and covers specific topics within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Global Islam, Global Asia

In this course, we examine how Islam through its transregional discursive, social, cultural, political traditions re-configure and transgress nation-state boundaries, and in the process globalizes Asia. In this exploration, we refrain from thinking of Asia as simply contextual background for Islam. Instead, we interrogate how Asia itself as a concept (and a method) influences Islamism’s self-description in the modern period. Why did Muslims who formerly referred to various regions as Hindustan, Bengal, Gujarat, the Indian Ocean, Persia, the Lands Below the Winds, and Mawara' al-Nahr (“beyond the river”), turn towards the concept of Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries? Ambitious in its geographical breadth, this course covers a vast area between West, Central, South, Southeast, and East Asia. How did the Deobandi Islamic tradition, for example, which began in India, spread out into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh? How did this quietist movement become politically active in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and now in Bangladesh after 2001? What kinds of shifts in discursive traditions allow non-state actors in the 1990s to travel from the Arab world into Central and South Asia to engage in a global jihad? How do the various contestations and disputations, for instance, between the Deobandi tradition and the Salafi traditions generate overlapping and conflicting ideas of governance and sovereignty? Is Islamism theoretically coherent and historically adequate as a name? What are the world-making projects of contemporary Islamism? How does Islamism develop critiques of Third World nationalisms? How does the abolition of the caliphate—what Salman Sayyid calls the second crisis of Islam—affect its approach towards nation-states and secularism as a cartographic model and a political doctrine? What kinds of political and critical theology did Islam develop to counter the metanarrative of secularism and what does Asia have to do with it? The course also takes an aesthetic turn, as it asks in the South Asian context, how Islamic sufi traditions engage with rituals and discursive practices of the Bhakti traditions? Conversations on subjectivity and psychic life take us into the world of ghosts, jinn, and angels that travel between and within South, Southeast, and Far East Asia. The course involves close and careful readings of texts in history, anthropology, cultural studies, Islamic studies, and literary studies, as well as critical reviews/analysis of films, documentaries, images, and media representations.

Understanding the Syrian War (Seminar, Institute for Social Sciences, UC Davis, 2018)

In this advanced seminar, we will discuss the contemporary Syrian War and the historical conditions out of which it emerged. Over ten sessions, we will read texts in political science, history, sociology, and other disciplines in the social sciences. While this course focuses on the problematic of Syria from an empirical standpoint, it also dwells on conceptual questions focused on religion, secularism, sectarianism, crisis, and temporality. Beginning with the post-WW1 history of colonial cartography in greater Syria, we will examine the emergence of Islamic revivalism and its antagonistic encounters with the Ba’ath regime. We will ask: What exactly is the dynamic between secularism and Islam in the Syrian context? How have Syria’s bureaucratized institutions, neo-liberal economic practices, and surveillance apparatus shaped the popular response against the regime? In this course, we also examine the tumultuous relationships between the autonomous ulama in Syria and other Islamist political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. Relatedly, we trace the history of salafism in the Syrian rebellion - its slow beginnings, the rise of jihadist mobilization and consequent factionalism. We will ask: How can we account for the emergence of an apocalyptic religious sectarianism in the Syrian context? How does sectarianism become - simultaneously - the basis of particular political theologies, ethical dispositions, and knowledge systems, and an outcome of political engineering by the regime and its international supporters?

Look for Us in the Storm: The Successors of Malcolm X (Political Education Series, co-taught with Hannibal Shakur; Guest appearances by A. Rahman, A. Ali; Moderator: Isra Ibrahim, 2020)

This educational series introduces Malcolm X through historical speeches, texts and events. Malcolm’s efforts, words and immense personal sacrifice, culminating in his martyrdom established with great clarity the Islamic platform of Black liberation and divine justice. This immeasurable sacrifice would be utilized by generations to come (his direct and indirect students) in their fight against American plantation structures and Western imperialism. We examine the writings and experiences of Muhammad Ahmad (Max Stanford), Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), Safiya Bukhari, Nuh Abdul Qayyum, Russell Maroon Shoatz among others, who were youth during the height of Malcolm’s political life, and discuss how they advanced the avenues of struggle which Malcolm opened up as an orator, teacher and radical organizer. Our aim is to show that the legacy of Malcolm X was not murdered in the Audubon Ballroom. It is alive and kicking in the prisons, ghettos, mosques and black uprisings in America. As Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin teaches us, as political organizers we wish to “take the struggle to a higher level".

Publications

Doha, T. (2023). Godforsakenness. Journal of World Philosophies. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp/article/view/5864/584

Doha, T. (2018). Specters of Islam: Anti-Islamist (Re)Presentations in Secular Media and Feminism (1979-2011). American Journal of Islam and Society. https://www.ajis.org/index.php/ajiss/article/view/95

Doha, T. (2022). Brokenheartedness. Political Theology. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1462317X.2022.2073012

Doha, T. (2023). Godforsakenness. Journal of World Philosophies. (forthcoming)

Doha, T. (2023). Anti-Islamist (Re)Presentations in the New York Times and Academic Feminism, 1979-2011. Reporting Islam: Muslim Women in the New York Times, edited by S. Joseph. I.B. Tauris. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Doha, T. (2023). “They are muhajir, we are ansar.” Care in a Time of Humanitarianism: Stories of Refuge, Aid, and Repair in the Global South, edited by C. Robinson and A. Osanloo. Berghahn Books. (forthcoming)

Doha, T and Jamil, I. 2016. Deadly Milestone. Evening Will Come, Issue 62, edited by Nathan Brown. The Volta. https://www.thevolta.org/ewc62-trdoha-ijamil-p1.html

Doha, T. 2023. Book Review Forum on Darren Byler’s Terror Capitalism, edited by V. Lu. Antipode Online. https://antipodeonline.org/2023/06/05/book-review-forum-terror-capitalism/

Doha, T. 2021. The Last Sky, Above Ground Zero: Introducing Ethnography #9. Book Symposium on Ethnography #9, edited by T. Doha. Milestones: Commentary on the Islamic World. https://www.milestonesjournal.net/ethnography-9