The NGO-ization of Everyday Islam: The Expansion of a Shi'I Islamic Organization within and beyond Senegal

Abstract

For decades, religion was effectively ignored by practitioners concerned with development and humanitarian aid. However, in recent years, religion has become central to the agenda of major donors and NGOs. This paper helps us understand a moment of significant transformation for religious movements as they increasingly present themselves to the world in the institutional form of non-governmental organizations. These formalized and bureaucratized structures allow Islamic movements to engage in various public spheres and translocal networks and to access material and symbolic resources. Yet even as religious communities plug into global institutions and discourses, Islamic practice and identity are perceived as matters of personal choice and responsibility. Through the case study of Institut Mozdahir International, a fast-growing indigenous Shi'i organization in Senegal, I examine the sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory relationship between individual moral fulfillment and joining religious networks institutionalized as NGOs. The establishment of a Shi'i Islamic network in Senegal is one alternative to following the country's dominant Sufi orders. Lebanese migrated to Senegal as early as the 1880s, but Senegalese began to “convert” to Shi'i Islam mainly as a result of the Iranian revolution of 1979. Shi'i advocates spread their religious convictions in Wolof or other local languages through teaching, conferences, holiday celebrations, and media publicity. Leaders skillfully detach this foreign religious ideology from Middle Eastern politics and make this branch of Islam relevant to Senegalese through establishing religious centers as NGOs, which work to bring economic development to neighborhoods in the name of Shi'i Islam. In Senegal spiritual progress is thought to lead to material progress and Senegalese Shi'a are firm advocates of their religious work having concrete secular benefits for society. They move into areas such as health care and agro-pastoral development underdeveloped by the weak Senegalese state. Contrasting their movement to Sunni reformism financed by Saudi Arabia, Senegalese Shi'a firmly declare that operating merely as Islamic organizations no longer suffices without also providing services to the people. Thus the new face of Islamic reformist movements couples religious education and the building of mosques and institutions with extra-religious benefits. More than their Sunni counterparts, Shi'i organizations are dependent on NGO status in order to obtain legitimacy and convince their growing network of followers of the wider benefits of adhering to a minority branch of Islam. This paper examines how Mozdahir merges the sacred and profane to present themselves to the wider world of both Middle Eastern and Western potential donors while proselytizing to and consolidating a growing community of loyal employees, followers, and grateful aid recipients. Ethnographic research is based on participant observation, interviews, and discourse analysis of religious preaching and promotional materials.