Bilal Nadeem

Bilal is pursuing a PhD in sociocultural anthropology at Stanford and an MD at the Yale School of Medicine. His dissertation project is an ethnographic study of Islamic traditions, embodiment, and loss in the Levant, the region immediately east of the Mediterranean.

Bilal’s work focuses on the currently unfolding aftermath of the Syrian Revolution, where armed encounters have led to the maiming of 1.5 million, the murder of 600,000, and the displacement of 14 million in what constitutes the world’s largest refugee crisis. When their loved ones die in Lebanon or Jordan today, many Syrian refugees are denied burial spots, unable to honor Islamic funerary traditions. Others are living in exile with war-related disabilities that challenge their ability to participate in practices of bodily discipline germane to Islam’s embodied traditions. Bilal investigates how Islamic forms of life are articulated, inhabited, and elegized among Syrian Muslims, whose exile is impressed with mounting loss and ruin. He obtained an AB from Harvard University and an MPhil with distinction from the University of Cambridge.