Wednesday 13 May 2026 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College
About
In The Golden Bough, Sir George Frazer famously distinguishes between two types of magic: one grounded in similarity, the other in contagion. Revisiting Frazer’s archive of contagion and his enduring fascination with so-called “superstition,” this lecture advances a theory of baraka. Commonly translated as grace, blessings, or divine power, baraka draws us into Muslim understandings of connectedness, touch, and immanence. It offers a lens through which to approach Islam beyond the prevailing emphasis on transcendence—beyond the image of a distant and inaccessible God. Understood as emanating from God, baraka can stick to material objects, things, people, and places. Many of my Muslim interlocutors in Egypt insist that baraka suffuses the world—even in distinctly non-blessed, if not apocalyptic times. Attending to both the omnipresence and elusiveness of baraka, this lecture reflects on what lived Islamic theologies and anthropology might be able to offer one another amid contemporary crises.
Bio
Amira Mittermaier is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Grounded in long-term fieldwork, her work offers an ethnographic window into how Islam is practiced, debated, and (re)imagined close to the ground. She has written several books on Islam in present-day Egypt: Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (California, 2010), Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times (California, 2019), and Ninety-Nine: A Kaleidoscopic Portrait of Allah (Duke, 2026). Her work on Muslim God-imaginaries was supported by a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. From 2025-2027, Mittermaier is serving as President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, and in July 2026 she is taking on the role of Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto.