Contesting Benevolence: Market Orientations among Muslim Aid Providers in Egypt

Abstract

This paper studies the pro-market and communitarian tendencies among Egypt’s khayr (benevolence) organizations based on interviews with and observation of managers, staff and volunteers. Can the conflicting market and community orientations in the field of benevolence be interpreted as an instance of the “double movement” of marketization and protection against the market? The analyses demonstrate a growing tendency of marketization and only weak tendencies to transform established communitarian ways of giving into more systematic ways of non-marketized giving. Due to an emergent state-business-civil society nexus, market-oriented voluntary associations hold the potential to undermine or absorb the actually more entrenched communitarian associations. Potentials for a double movement in the era of neoliberalism seem to be weaker than in the classical liberal era because of the deeper permeation of society by market ethics.