TAKHAYYUL is a collaborative research project that will ethnographically excavate the imaginative forces in the formation of populist religious aspirations in the interconnected geographies recently coined as the Balkan-to-Bengal complex - namely the Balkans, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Such political aspirations provide its followers with a wide range of historical references, religious cosmologies, nationalist feelings and other affective and imaginative registers; this is best represented by the concept of takhayyul (a theory of imagination).

The Institute for Global Prosperity’s ERC-funded TAKHAYYUL project will develop an extensive and comparative formulation of the concept to set the basis for an anthropology of imagination and expand anthropological knowledge on religious politics by exploring the historical, ethical and aesthetic aspects. This project seeks to contribute to global prosperity by offering a fresh perspective that does not reproduce the tropes on irrationality. Instead, it is designed to provide a sound theoretical ground upon which to delineate the ways populist forms of religious politics forge imaginative landscapes beyond the borders of nation-states.