In many Biblical and Qur’anic stories, the protagonist isolates themselves and, at times, even go to prison. In this interview, I chat with Walaa’ Qusaiy about her new book “When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners”. Walaa’ discusses how faith and spirituality of Muslim prisoners merge with that of prophetic ones, and how they find inspiration and hope in their stories. The prison experience is pervasive in Muslim society and Islamic scholarship and we need to study that space to better understand the lives of the various Muslim scholars and activists.
Dr. Walaa Quisay is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. As a Cultural Anthropologist and Scholar of Religion, her research comprises the study of carceral practices and theologies, subject formations, and meaning-making practices of Muslim communities.
Her latest book When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners—co-written with Asim Qureshi and published by Pluto Press in April 2024—examines how the body and soul of Muslim prisoners become sites of religious contestation between themselves and the carceral regimes in the context of the Global War on Terror. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of released political prisoners, primarily detained in Egypt and Guantanamo Bay, this research shows the way spatial confinement and exercise of control over the bodies and souls in prison can generate a shift in the spiritual lives of the prisoners, their subjectivities, and modes of resistance.
Her first book, Neo-traditionalism in Islam in the West: Orthodoxy, Spirituality, and Politics, was published in July 2023 by Edinburgh University Press. This book examines the intellectual, theological, and political commitments of an emerging trend within Anglo-American Islam that emphasizes the primacy of a notion of ‘tradition’ and sees a moral and political imperative in its resurrection. It examines the broader themes of crisis—personal, political, and ‘civilizational’—to Anglo-American Muslim communities seeking voluntary spiritual discipline and retreat. Dr. Quisay examines spiritual retreats and travel as a medium, mobilized by neo-traditionalist shaykhs to reformulate the political and religious subjectivities of the seekers of sacred knowledge in these spaces.
Dr. Younus Y. Mirza is a Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University and Director of the Barzinji Institute for Global Virtual Learning at Shenandoah University which seeks to improve America’s relationship with Muslim-majority countries. He is currently writing a book about the Islamic Mary. To learn more about his scholarship, teaching and speaking, please visit his website http://dryounusmirza.com
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