Nada Moumtaz
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Nada Moumtaz is Associate Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion & in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. After a Bachelor of Architecture at the American University of Beirut, she received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research stands at the intersection of the anthropology of Islam, Islamic legal studies, studies of capitalism, and urban studies and spans the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries in the Levant, with a focus on Beirut, Lebanon. Her book God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State was published in 2021 and received an honorable mention from the Clifford Geertz Prize of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion and from the J. Willard Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association.
Nada Moumtaz joins the Paris IAS in May 2026 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Elder care; filial piety; aging; caregiving; death; Islamic ethics.
“And Be Good Upon Thy Parents:” Elderly Care and Filial Piety in Times of Crisis
This project focuses on the Islamic injunction of filial piety and care for one’s parents, especially in their old age. The question is especially pressing given the current financial and economic crisis in Lebanon and the displacement caused by the Beirut port explosion in August 2020. Indeed, a disturbing number of senior citizens are sleeping on the streets—historically, a very unusual sight in Lebanon. Furthermore, the hyperinflation has rendered the savings and end-of-service lump-sum compensations cashed by many retirees almost valueless. This makes seniors even more precarious and needing to rely on family members who are in the labor force, in the midst of skyrocketing unemployment. The project asks: What does it mean to live a good life when one is nearing death, in the midst of crisis? What matters, really: closeness to children and family, friends, religious practice? Who carries out the labour of care for seniors? What role do religious institutions play in this care? For those who can afford it, domestic foreign laborers have been an essential component of senior at-home care, and with the financial crisis, many are unable to afford such labor, leading to a renegotiation of caregiving labor among the family. How do different forms of care affect family relations? How do these variables change with class? The project examines different configurations of elderly care among Sunni Beirutis, assessing sites where seniors live in their own homes, with a child, and at a senior home.
Key publications
Nada Moumtaz. “Gucci and the Waqf: Inalienability in Beirut’s Postwar Reconstruction,” American Anthropologist 125 (1):154–167, 2023.
Nada Moumtaz. God’s Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021.
Nada Moumtaz. “Chapter 7: Refiguring Islam,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, edited by Soraya Altorki, 125-150. Malden, MA & Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.
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