Date: April 13 | Time: 3:00 – 5:00PM | Location: OISE Room 5150, 252 Bloor St W, Toronto
Description:
An ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West, Racializing the Ummah explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world that defines Muslimness as less than human. Rooted in more than a decade of international research, Rhea Rahman’s study on the organization’s projects, methods, and limitations reveals how racial capitalism permeates all aspects of humanitarianism.
Beginning with a counterhistory of Muslims in the United Kingdom following World War II, Rahman analyzes IR’s mission and transnational activities in and across places including the UK, South Africa, and Mali in the broader context of global white supremacy. She shows how IR’s approaches often effectively secularize Islam to evade anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, implicating concepts such as the “good” Muslim aid worker, who complies with War on Terror surveillance while attending to victims of Western colonialism. Meanwhile, Rahman theorizes the tactics of aid workers on the ground, who creatively draw on an Islamic Black radical tradition to drive real change.
Bio:
Rhea Rahman is an assistant professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her research engages global racial formations in relation to histories and enactments of Islamic practice and Muslim identity. Her first book, Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown and White, (Minnesota, 2026), frames international Muslim volunteerism, humanitarianism and development within intersecting racial logics of white supremacy, Islamophobia, and anti-Blackness, while also locating alternative visions of doing good that are grounded in Islam as the foundation of a revolutionary praxis.
Dear IIS community, I’m thrilled and honoured to be taking on the role of Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies. Since being founded in 2013, the IIS has become a vibrant hub for Islamic Studies at UofT and beyond. I’m grateful to Professor Walid Saleh, the institute’s inaugural Director, and Professor Anver Emon, Director […]
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Date: Sundays, June 7 – Mid August | Time: 10:30–11:45 AM (EDT)Location: Online via Zoom Register Here The Institute of Islamic Studies (IIS) is pleased to announce that Muslims in Academia Association will launch its Summer Reading Circle on June 7, 2026, focused on “Knowledge Transmission & Education in Muslim Contexts.” The ten-week program will engage both classical and contemporary scholarship […]
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The crusader zeal and its attendant polemic established critical precedents for the proliferation of Anti-Islamic tropes and narratives in the premodern period. Throughout the four crusades, these narratives settled in the European canon and the Christian collective ‘psyche’. The discourse produced in this period is foundational in that it ‘sets the stage’ for contextualizing the manifestation of Islamophobic rhetoric across the Latin West, Iberia, and the colonies of European empires.
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