Nada Moumtaz

I received my PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. My research stands at the intersection of anthropology, history, and Islamic legal studies, and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in the Levant. My book God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State (2021) examines the contemporary Islamic revival of a centuries-old charitable practice of pious endowment in Beirut to shed new light on the secularization of religion through the lens of its separation from “the economy.” I am currently working on two projects—one, entitled “#BeirutIsNotForSale: Urban Regulations and the Fight for the City,” thinks about Islamic legal tools to regulate the city before modern planning and their afterlives, their intersections with, and displacement by new concepts and legal instruments. The second examines practices of elderly care among Sunni Muslims in Beirut, particularly under the on-going financial crisis in Lebanon.