Dr Hanane Benadi

Dr Benadi is an IASH-Alwaleed Postdoctoral Fellow and anthropologists of the Middle East, broadly working at the intersection of ethics, politics, and religion.

She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2017. Her current book and research project is an ethnographic inquiry into the ways in which the revolution and its violent collapse have reconstituted the political and ethical worlds of young Islamists. For many young Islamists, the failure of the revolution generated questions over the foundations that underwrite Islamist political projects, the ethical and political subject they lay claim to, and the visions of Islamic governance they promote. This project explores young Islamists’ engagements with these questions in order to map out the shifts in ethical and political subjectivities emerging out of their attempts to inhabit the Islamic tradition and Islamist political projects amidst post-revolutionary turmoil.

This research draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork since 2013 among young Islamist political activists. Her current project at IASH and Alwaleed Center seeks to trace the ways the intertwinement of humanitarianism and Islamic moral reasoning in Islamist activism on behalf of political prisoners in Egypt is transforming understandings of pain, suffering, and tribulation among young Islamists and the consequences of these transformations for future Islamist politics.