Speaker: Stefan Williamson Fa, Research and Outreach Associate, Centre for Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge
What does it mean to approach Islam through the lens of relationality? To understand religious life not as a project of self-cultivation but as fundamentally constituted through interconnection and interdependence? This talk proposes a relational anthropology of Islam that places the bonds forged between persons, communities, and the immaterial at the centre of religious life, attending to the sensory and aesthetic practices through which those bonds are forged, sustained, and felt. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with Azeri-Turkish speaking Twelver Shi'i communities whose lives and histories straddle Turkey, the Caucasus, and Iran, Williamson Fa focuses on sound — vocal recitation, lament, and devotional poetry — as a primary medium of relation, enlisted in the cultivation of ties to the Family of the Prophet. Through close attention to the sonic, affective, and intimate qualities of these genres, he argues that they are not superficial features of religious practice but constitutive of ritual, subject, and communal formation. These same sonic forms, transformed through media technologies, extend those webs of relation transnationally, linking communities that share a language and a faith but are divided by the modern nation state. In doing so, this talk opens broader questions about how religious worlds are built, felt, and sustained across human and more-than-human boundaries.
Stefan Williamson Fa is a social-cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Islam through auditory and culinary cultures. He completed his Ph.D. at University College London in 2019. His first ethnographic project investigated the role of sound in Shiʿi Islam among Azeri-Turkish speakers in Turkey, the Caucasus, and Iran; this research forms the basis of his monograph Sonic Relations: Devotion and Community in Turkey’s Eastern Borderlands (Indiana University Press, 2026). His current research at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge, investigates Muslim foodways in the UK, with a focus on food provisioning and food-aid initiatives and their intersections with Islamic ethics and questions of care.
Presented by The Language of Islam, an Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities research workshop, and the Middle East and North African Studies Program.
Alexander Barna
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