Abstract
This chapter focuses on how members of the UK-based global NGO Islamic Relief negotiate tensions surrounding the humanitarian principle of impartiality. While Muslim donors show preference for Muslim beneficiaries, staff and volunteers assert the organization’s commitment to impartiality. Distinguishing its ethical approach from a charity based on pity, Islamic Relief promotes an aid encounter that emphasizes the dignity of their beneficiaries. Maintaining that zakat is a “right” of the poor reverses received anthropological wisdom that the giver dominates the recipient. By documenting the hierarchical vision of zakat that underlies Islamic Relief’s endeavors, this chapter claims that while the poor have a claim on the rich, an emphasis on spiritual equality maintains systemic material inequality.
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- 1.
Islamic Relief-USA’s annual donations increased from approximately $7 million to $25 million in the months following 9/11 (Strom 2009).
- 2.
I put “secular Western” and “conservative Muslims” in scare quotes to note that I do not take such categories as essential or mutually exclusive but rather to articulate the ways such categories are meaningful to those who use them. My perspective is informed by the work of anthropologist Talal Asad in Genealogies of Religion (1993) and Formations of the Secular (2003), analyzing the historical and political production and use of such categories.
- 3.
One of the founders of Islamic Relief-USA explained to me that Islamic Relief is equally in the business of educating Muslims about the proper interpretation of Islam (which he explained to me meant that as Muslims they should help anyone in need, regardless of race or religion), as they are in the business of development and aid (interview with author April 29, 2009, Alexandria, VA).
- 4.
Like Petersen, political scientist Bruno De Cordier (2009) – analyzing the particular value of Western-based Muslim NGOs in the international aid sector – also distinguishes “organisations that have a religious agenda and use humanitarian aid as a vector for it, and organisations that are aid workers initially but are inspired by religion – in the case Islam” (609). He suggests that Western-based Muslim NGOs such as Islamic Relief Worldwide and Muslim Hands belong to the latter category.
- 5.
Since 2008 Islamic Relief Worldwide have been publishing academic articles on their website investigating Islamic perspectives on contemporary humanitarian and development issues. Today these are published through Islamic Relief’s Policy and Research Division which can be accessed here: http://policy.islamic-relief.com/our-work/
- 6.
- 7.
In an account of giving among Christian evangelicals in the United States, Omri Elisha (2011) highlights the conflicting moral ambitions of donors to give with unconditional compassion, while also holding receivers accountable with the expectation of reformed moral behavior. Given many Muslim donors’ preferences for certain kinds of beneficiaries (not only Muslims, but more specifically pious Muslims), I suggest that expectations for a particular moral character on the part of beneficiaries are expressed before the act of giving as opposed to afterward.
- 8.
“What is Zakat,” Islamic Relief UK, http://www.islamic-relief.org.uk/resources/charity-in-islam/zakat/, accessed January 14, 2015.
- 9.
Amira Mittermaier uncovers discrepancies between future-oriented goals of social justice as articulated in the Egyptian uprising of 2011–12, and an “ethics of immediacy” which is radically oriented to the present through traditions of giving, sharing, and hospitality (2014).
- 10.
Islamic Relief-South Africa is the only office in the global organization that was designated as both a field office (in that they execute domestic development projects) and as a fundraising partner (in that funds raised in South Africa are distributed to Islamic Relief projects worldwide). However, whereas the 2009 Islamic Relief Worldwide Annual report lists South Africa as both partner and field office, the 2014 Annual Report designates South Africa as only a Partner.
- 11.
A group of about 15 sponsored orphans from a township outside of Johannesburg performed “We Are the World” at the fundraising dinner. When after the performance one of the orphans was singled out by Hasaan and began to cry on stage, board members later advised that they need to exhibit caution so as to ensure fundraisers do not exploit the children.
- 12.
Sayyid Qutb likened charity to a loan made to God whose repayment is assured in paradise. “It is a means of purifying one’s soul, an expenditure that credits the donor on Judgement Day” (quoted in Toth 2013: 185).
- 13.
For every grant Islamic Relief-Mali received, Islamic Relief Worldwide in Birmingham, received a percentage of the total funds.
- 14.
While managers in the United Kingdom encouraged me to move my research site to Mali after security concerns prevented my return to Chad, staff in the US proudly recounted to me the 2010 high-profile campaign with the American Imam Zaid Shakir in the northern Mali desert, together with the Bite-the-Bug anti-malaria campaign described in the introduction. In the Netherlands, a program manager in Amsterdam showed me their elaborate selection criteria process and explained how Mali was chosen as one of four countries for which Islamic Relief-Netherlands raises funds.
- 15.
In addition to Islamic Relief, there are two more South African Muslim NGOs with offices located on the same street as Islamic Relief.
- 16.
The group ranged from approximately seven to fifteen women. In addition to South African women, migrant women in the support group were from Congo, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Burundi.
- 17.
A madrassa is an Islamic education center. A number of children who participated in Islamic Relief’s community center also attended local madrassas. Though Muslim proselytization in South African townships is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to point out its presence. Commenting on the presence of madrassas in the townships, one fundraising staff member from the Johannesburg office incredulously said to me, “Youngsters from informal settlements can read and speak to each other in Arabic!” Some children from non-Muslim families subsequently converted to Islam. One particularly enthusiastic grandmother told me that she was Christian and her grandchild converted to Islam, exclaiming, “I’m glad she accepted, nobody forced her.”
- 18.
According to the Qur’an, there are eight categories.
- 19.
The legal term for “post-puberty” in Islamic jurisprudence. It is the age at which a person is deemed mature and therefore ethically responsible to accept Islam.
- 20.
Whereas over six weeks in Mali I witnessed two teams of fundraisers from the United Kingdom gathering promotional materials, during my twelve months in South Africa, no fundraisers came from the headquarters in Birmingham to promote South African development projects abroad. Instead, most of the funds for South African domestic development programs came from local private or small-scale institutional donors.
- 21.
Islamic Relief’s response in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake gained international attention, as it was the first country without a significant Muslim population where Islamic Relief opened a field office.
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Acknowledgments
This research would not have been possible without the time and support of Islamic Relief staff and volunteers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Mali, and South Africa. Research for this article was funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and The New School for Social Research Dissertation Fellowship. This article has benefited from the thoughtful readings and comments of Hugh Raffles, Janet Roitman, Miriam Ticktin, Julienne Obadia, Atallah Fitzgibbon, and Ruth Jansen. I am also grateful to the participants of the Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography and Social Thought and the dissertation writer’s workshop at The New School for Social Research in 2014. I would especially like to thank Frederick Klaits, whose patience and thoughtful suggestions significantly contributed to the organization of this chapter.
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Rahman, R. (2017). Dignity, Not Pity: Fundraising, Zakat, and Spiritual Exchange. In: Klaits, F. (eds) The Request and the Gift in Religious and Humanitarian Endeavors. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54244-7_7
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