Biography
Aseel is a 4th year PhD student in Islam, Society and Culture - Religious Studies Department. She is interested in studying how contemporary Muslims, particularly in Egypt, engage both with their political realities and the Islamic textual tradition to cultivate ethical subjectivities and socio- political projects
Paper Abstract
When engaging with eschatological scripture, Muslim readers often seek to identify themselves with those groups promised salvation amidst growing corruption of the world. Turning this tendency on its head, I consider one Prophetic ß©Ñad─½th 'Blessed be the strangers', and ask what can a Muslim ethical framework for the good life in our eschatological moment look like? I argue that a Muslim's ethical responsibility can be understood as a function of the objective reality of their historical moment, as well as their subjective position within it [both in terms of empowerment and complicity]. I use examples of modern socio-economic practices to illustrate how this requires sensual and embodied recognition and familiarity with the forms of harm characteristic of our modern context, their unprecedented magnitude and reach, and interrogating which of - and to what degree - our practices contribute to these forms of harm. Centring the framework on the conception of strangerhood, I explore what sensibilities, affinities, relations, perceptions, and orientations [towards oneself, human and non-human others, and the built environment] are cultivated if one is to become i.e. embody a stranger subjectivity. I thus offer a portrait of stranger subjectivity and argue that behaving like strangers can help us soberly learn about harm, and adopt ethical practices that try to lift/reduce/redress it. Instead of seeking comfort through 'identification' with those Muslim groups whom the ß©Ñad─½th described as 'blessed strangers', I argue that to be that kind of Muslim, to attain that 'blessed' description, Muslims today must approach the ethics of 'strangerhood' not as an identity marker, but to intentionally embody and enact a Prophetic praxis. I end with a reflection on how these sensibilities mean habituating oneself to experiencing, attuning to, and carrying distressing, anxious, and melancholic feelings, as well as the conditions [which I locate from within the grammar of Islamic ethics, intentionality, and eschatological time] under which they can be generatively carried along one's path.