History Speaks EP 20 | Making Muslimness | Roshan Iqbal with Asif Majid

In this episode of History Speaks, Dr. Roshan Iqbal is joined by Dr. Asif Majid to explore how British Muslim youth in Manchester use performance — on stage and in everyday life — to navigate identity, belonging, and race. Together, they discuss what it means to define “Muslimness” as something performed rather than fixed, how these communities responded in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, and why performance offers a powerful lens for understanding racialization and community-making. From devised theatre to the politics of visibility and absence, this conversation opens a window onto a rich and understudied intersection of religion, race, and art.

Asif Majid writes fiction, (academic) non-fiction, and plays. Using community-based participatory theatre and (auto)ethnography, he works at the intersection of Islam, performance, and race as a theatre maker, educator, researcher, and consultant. His work scripts, stages, and traces local and global nodes of power, politics, and (de)coloniality. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut, where he is also Area Head of Theatre Studies and Affiliate Faculty in Anthropology; Asian and Asian American Studies; Intersectional Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, and Politics; Middle East Studies; and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Asif has earned over $500,000 in grant and fellowship funding from funders as diverse as the Asian Cultural Council, Mellon Foundation, Wallace Foundation, and Fulbright Program. His performance work has taken him from the Kennedy Center to Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. He completed his practice-based PhD in Anthropology, Media, and Performance at The University of Manchester, and is the author of Making Muslimness: Race, Religion, and Performance in Contemporary Manchester. Asif is online at www.asifmajid.com and on Substack at Deeds and Du’as.

Dr. Roshan Iqbal hails from a small hamlet of 20 million–Karachi, Pakistan. She received her PhD in Islamic Studies from Georgetown University. Prior to this she read for her MPhil at the University of Cambridge. She has studied in Pakistan, the US, Morocco, Egypt, Jordon, the UK, and Iran. Her research interests include gender and sexuality in the Qur’an, Islamic Law, Film and Media Studies, and modern Muslim intellectuals. Her recent book is titled, ‘Marital and Sexual Ethics in Islamic Law: Rethinking Temporary Marriage.’ As an associate professor at Agnes Scott College, she teaches classes in the Religious Studies department and also classes that are cross-listed with Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Film Studies. When she is not working, she loves talking to her family and friends on the phone (thank you, unlimited plans), tracking fashion (sartorial flourishes are such fun), watching films (love! love! love!), reading novels (never enough), painting watercolors (less and less poorly), and cooking new dishes (sometimes successfully).