Abstract
AbstractRecent research on contemporary modalities of Islamic or Muslim philanthropy has focused on processes of subjectification through which givers and recipients of charity are habituated or craft themselves to an ethic of piety, social responsibility, and (neoliberal) economic virtuosity. These studies, however, have concentrated almost exclusively on those who give charity, leading to an over-emphasis on the perspectives of givers, and on their role in determining how the poor might deal with their everyday lives and imagined futures. As a result, small-scale gifting relations in which the Muslim poor may also be involved—making the poor simultaneously giversandrecipients of charity—have been obscured or erased altogether. In this article, we argue that the concerns of the poor might not always or necessarily be those of the wealthy donors of charity. By receivingandgivingsadaqaandzakat, poor and working-class Muslims in a Colombo neighbourhood imagine inclusion and belonging to the wider Muslim community in Colombo, which is not contingent upon the mediation and pedagogical interventions of charitable organizations and (middle-class) pious donors. Importantly, this imagination of inclusion and belonging comes at a time when the Muslim poor are increasingly marginalized by virtue of a (middle-class) discourse that, by framing charity as a means ‘to help the poor to help themselves’, has turned socio-economicupliftmentinto an ethical duty and, consequently, failure to improve oneself has become the symptom of wider moral shortcomings.
Highlights
FILIPPO OSELLA AND TOM WIDGER which is not contingent upon the mediation and pedagogical interventions of charitable organizations and pious donors
Research has indicated that many expressions of present-day social activism—of which contemporary forms of organized charity are an expression—are responsive to the weakening of state-sponsored social welfare programmes and a progressive Islamization of the social, but appear to be congruent with novel forms of capital accumulation engendered by global processes of economic liberalization.[5]
The imagination of a moral economy engendered by charity, voluntarism, and humanitarianism is located in the rhetoric, aesthetic, and practices of the market itself, as expressed, for instance, by the practices of philanthrocapitalism.[9]
Summary
‘The practice of zakat is not just intended to temporarily alleviate suffering. By demonstrating an example of virtue and duty, granting zakat encourages all members of society to work harder, to be compassionate, and to improve the lot of the community. The practices of contemporary organizations devoted to the collection and distribution of Muslim charity in Colombo reveal an impetus toward individual and collective moral responsibilization seeking to shape the Muslim poor into self-disciplined economic and religious subjects This takes the configuration of an art of reforming and governing the poor that does not objectify theologies articulated within specific Islamic discursive traditions, and draws on the legacy of colonial debates about the idleness of the (non-working) poor and the moral value of work; neoliberal notions of entrepreneurship and meritocracy; the global discourse of development; the charitable practices of other ethnic-religious communities in Sri Lanka[26]; as well as on a growing middleclass uneasiness with the public spectacle of begging.
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