Vital Perspectives: Rhea Rahman and Brahim El Guabli, RACIALIZING THE UMMAH

The Vital Perspectives on Healthcare and Science series engages with some of the most pressing public health issues of our time, in a regular public forum catalyzed by a book.

For this March 25th event, we are delighted to welcome Dr. Rhea Rahman in celebration of her new book Racializing the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians beyond Black, Brown, and White! 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.

Rahman paints a frank, nuanced portrait of the constraints Islamic aid entities face in the effort to disentangle themselves from neocolonialism and Western hegemony. Yet she also locates the possibility of escape from the all-encompassing dictates of racial capitalism in alternative visions of doing good—ones that are grounded in Islam as the foundation of a revolutionary praxis.

We are lucky that Dr. Brahim El Guabli, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University, will join Dr. Rahman in conversation.

Order RACIALIZING THE UMMAH here!

Rhea Rahman is assistant professor of anthropology. Her research and teaching focus on transnational practices of racialization and forefronts the question: how is human difference used for justifying systems of inequality and oppression, and how might we instead engage difference with an eye towards liberation? Rahman’s forthcoming book, Racializing the Ummah, Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown and White (University of Minnesota Press 2006), frames international Muslim volunteerism, humanitarianism and development within historicized, intersecting racial logics of white supremacy, Islamophobia, and anti-blackness. She is working on a second project that explores transnational links between Muslim Queerness, Blackness, and abolition in the U.S. and South Africa.

Brahim El Guabli is a Black, Amazigh Indigenous scholar from Morocco. As an interdisciplinary scholar, Professor El Guabli teaches a variety of topics in Tamazghan (the broader North Africa, including parts of sub-saharan Africa) and Middle Eastern literatures.

Professor El Guabli’s scholarship has appeared in PMLA, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and The Yearbook of Comparative Literature, among others. He also authored a number of book chapters on race and racism, joint authorship practices in Morocco, translation in transitional justice, and the return of Jews in literature and film.

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