Nermeen Mouftah, PhD

I am a faculty member in Sociocultural Anthropology and teach in the Global Middle East Studies and Religious Studies programs. I earned my PhD from the University of Toronto, and graduate degrees from University College London and the American University in Cairo. Before coming to UIC, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Buffett Institute, Northwestern University, and Assistant Professor of Religion at Butler University.

I am a critical ethnographer of ethical and political life with long-term fieldwork that spans the Arabic-speaking Middle East, Canada, the United States, and Pakistan. My research explores how Muslim social interventions are articulated as development, humanitarianism, and care. I am particularly interested in how these projects intersect with, translate, and chafe against Christian, national, and international systems of authority and action.

My first book, Read in the Name of Your Lord: Islamic Literacy Development in Revolutionary Egypt (Indiana University Press, Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, 2024), traces the push for universal literacy as a project caught between revolutionary activism and Islamic reform in post-Mubarak Egypt. The book questions durable education development paradigms and traces their counterrevolutionary impacts on the lives of teachers and students. At the same time, it lays bare the epistemological stakes of literacy development, tying it to the rise of modern scripturalism that underpins mobilizations around basic literacy.

Articles that explore the social ramifications of reading practices appear in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, among others. I am co-editor of the special issue, Centering Muslims in Global Humanitarianism and Development, for The Muslim World. My contribution to the issue examines a major Islamist group’s ideal of Muslim humanitarianism through the human capability of sacrifice.

My latest research explores how Muslims negotiate the legal, biological, and affective realms of the care and abandonment of vulnerable children. The first article from this project depicts the gulf between Muslim jurists’ interpretation of guardianship (kafāla) and the intimate deliberations of adoptive parents. Muslim American families grapple with and circumvent Islamic law as they build their families. Based on fieldwork in Morocco, my current writing explores the fraught relations of brotherhood forged in institutional care, and how the Moroccan expulsion of Christian foster families brought to the fore irreconcilable notions of the spiritual state of children that inform care.

Before entering academia, I worked for the International Labour Organization in Cairo.

PhD from University of Toronto
Graduate Diploma from American University in Cairo
MA from University College London
BA from University of Toronto, Trinity College