Politics of welfare in Muslim societies

• How do modern Islamic and Islamist NGOs offer charity? To what extent are they demanding religious or ideological submission of the beneficiaries?

• How do the states intervene in local and transnational Islamic welfare?

• How are local forms of charity embedded in structures of morality, legitimacy and related to political power?

• Which historical paths have the traditional legal institutions of organized Islamic welfare (zakāt, waqf) taken in different Muslim states?

These questions and many more are in recent times being asked by historians and social scientists alike. Charity, welfare services and non-state infrastructure provided by Islamic organisations and endowments have a long history in Muslim societies and in the wider Islamic tradition. At times, they have proliferated and provided welfare services, sometimes alternative to those of the national state. In other periods they have been nationalized or co-opted by colonial powers or national states. Islamic forms of welfare are often looked upon with scepticism and reluctance by many decision makers in the West, and governments in Muslim societies are equally eager to control the political and symbolic power of aid and welfare. Knowledge concerning these phenomena is often politically biased. Interdisciplinary academic research is necessary by combining the perspectives of Arabic, islamology, history, anthropology and political science.

Researchers at the University of Bergen and the CMI have long focused on charity, welfare, and the non-state public sphere in Muslim societies. Together, these researchers have now complied a significant amount of empirical material, which deserves to be focused on. This workshop intends to bring together these researchers, and inviting external ones, to present empirical material to each other and to discuss and analyse it with a comparative theoretical perspective. The region covered ranges from Muslim societies in East Africa to the south, the Levant, to Europe and Turkey in the North and Afghanistan and Pakistan in the East. Common to the all is the role of various forms of Islamic religious, moral and legal ways to organize, legitimize and invoke welfare, or the encounters between these and the West. 

Keynote speakers will include Jonathan Benthall (others to be announced)