Muslim Volunteering in the West: Between Islamic Ethos and Citizenship [1st ed. 2020] 978-3-030-26056-9, 978-3-030-26057-6

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xv
Muslim Volunteering in the West: An Introduction (Mario Peucker, Merve Reyhan Kayikci)....Pages 1-19
Theologization of Volunteerism: An Islamic Perspective (Zuleyha Keskin, Salih Yucel)....Pages 21-41
Volunteering, Charitable Work, and Muslims: Divine Inspiration, Parallel Networks, and Facts on the Ground (Thijl Sunier)....Pages 43-67
Why Do Muslims Engage in Intra-community Volunteering? Insights from a Multi-method Study in Australia (Mario Peucker)....Pages 69-91
Charity as Civic Participation for Dutch–Turkish Muslims (Yağiz Cebecioglu)....Pages 93-117
In Between Two Traditions: Female Muslim Volunteers in Belgium (Merve Reyhan Kayikci)....Pages 119-140
Muslim Environmentalists, Activism, and Religious Duty (Rosemary Hancock)....Pages 141-160
When Trauma and Citizenship Intersect: British Muslims Volunteering for Mental Health Services (William Barylo)....Pages 161-178
Muslim American Youth and Volunteerism: Neoliberal Citizenship in the War on Terror (Sunaina Maira)....Pages 179-200
Conclusion (Merve Reyhan Kayikci)....Pages 201-203
Back Matter ....Pages 205-216

Citation preview

NEW DIRECTIONS IN ISLAM

Muslim Volunteering in the West Between Islamic Ethos and Citizenship

Edited by Mario Peucker Merve Reyhan Kayikci

New Directions in Islam

Series Editors Joshua M. Roose Institute for Religion, Politics and Society Australian Catholic University Melbourne, VIC, Australia Bryan S. Turner Australian Catholic University and The Graduate Centre City University of New York New York, NY, USA

The New Directions in Islam series will promote creative ways of conceptualizing the practice of Islam in new, challenging contexts and present innovative and provocative interdisciplinary studies examining intellectual, political, legal, economic, and demographic trajectories within Islam. Although recognised as the world’s fastest growing religion, many Muslims now live in secular societies where Islam is a minority religion and where there is considerable social conflict between Muslim communities and the wider society. Therefore it is vital to engage with the multitude of ways by which Muslims are adapting and evolving as social and cultural minorities. How are they developing their faith in line with local and national customs? How are converts and subsequent generations adapting in these challenging contexts? This series moves beyond dichotomies about radicalism, citizenship, and loyalty evident in the proliferation of descriptive and repetitive studies of Islamophobia and Orientalism, which have become both negative and predictable. Rather, contrary to the perception of Muslims as victims of secular modernity, we are interested in ‘success stories’ of Muslims adapting in and contributing to society at local, national and even transnational levels, such as the case of Muslim middle classes in Canada, the United States, South Africa, and Argentina. This series will go beyond the geographic boundaries of the Middle East to examine Islam from a global perspective in vastly different contexts from Brazil to Vietnam and Austria to Papua New Guinea. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14746

Mario Peucker  •  Merve Reyhan Kayikci Editors

Muslim Volunteering in the West Between Islamic Ethos and Citizenship

Editors Mario Peucker Victoria University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Merve Reyhan Kayikci University of Granada Granada, Spain

New Directions in Islam ISBN 978-3-030-26056-9    ISBN 978-3-030-26057-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Katie Edwards / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgment

The idea of editing a book on Muslim volunteering was born in October 2017 with a brief query on the Sociology of Islam mailing list, an academic platform administered by Tugrul Keskin. This is where we, the two editors of this book, connected over our shared research interest in Muslim volunteering, and it did not take long until we discussed possible ways of publishing together. We soon settled on jointly editing a book and were blessed with the passion and commitment of academic experts from around the world who offered to contribute to the book. We all embarked on a journey of academic exchange and profound, cross-­ disciplinary learning—about volunteering, Islamic piety and ethics, citizenship, and so much more. As the editors, we would like to express our deep gratitude to all the authors in this book. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you. Obviously, the book would not have been possible without your wonderful work. We also want to thank Tugrul Keskin, who, unknowingly, helped initiate the idea for this book, and the team at Palgrave Macmillan for their continuous professional support. Lastly, we are most indebted to all those who made our research possible more than anyone—those people who have taken the time to sit down with us over countless glasses of tea, share their stories and views,

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and so kindly let us into their communities and lives without expecting anything in return. We believe we can speak on behalf of all authors in this book when we say we are deeply grateful for the trust they have put in us, their dedication and kindness. Mario Peucker and Merve Reyhan Kayikci

Praise for Muslim Volunteering in the West “This book identifies the ways in which religious Muslimness is akin to participatory citizenship in the secular sense. The collection is a significant contribution to a discussion in relation to the norms and values that Muslims derive from readings within Islam.” —Tahir Abbas, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University, The Netherlands

Contents

1 Muslim Volunteering in the West: An Introduction  1 Mario Peucker and Merve Reyhan Kayikci 2 Theologization of Volunteerism: An Islamic Perspective 21 Zuleyha Keskin and Salih Yucel 3 Volunteering, Charitable Work, and Muslims: Divine Inspiration, Parallel Networks, and Facts on the Ground 43 Thijl Sunier 4 Why Do Muslims Engage in Intra-­community Volunteering? Insights from a Multi-method Study in Australia 69 Mario Peucker 5 Charity as Civic Participation for Dutch–Turkish Muslims 93 Yağiz Cebecioglu

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6 In Between Two Traditions: Female Muslim Volunteers in Belgium119 Merve Reyhan Kayikci 7 Muslim Environmentalists, Activism, and Religious Duty141 Rosemary Hancock 8 When Trauma and Citizenship Intersect: British Muslims Volunteering for Mental Health Services161 William Barylo 9 Muslim American Youth and Volunteerism: Neoliberal Citizenship in the War on Terror179 Sunaina Maira 10 Conclusion201 Merve Reyhan Kayikci Glossary

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Index209

Notes on Contributors

William  Barylo  is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Warwick University. His work as a researcher in sociology focuses on the articulations between diasporic cultures, religions, and modernity from a de-­ colonial and restorative perspective. He is the author of Young Muslim Change-Makers (2018). He has been awarded, as a photographer, for his social documentary Bushinengue: Guyana’s forgotten people, and as a filmmaker, for the documentary Polish Muslims: an unexpected meeting. Yağiz  Cebecioglu is a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He studied theology at Marmara University, Istanbul, and obtained a MA degree from Leiden University’s Religious Studies Programme. He conducts research on volunteerism in Turkish Islamic movements in Europe with special focus on the Gülen movement. Rosemary Hancock  is the Convener of the Religion and Global Society program and Lecturer in Social Justice at the University of Notre Dame Australia, where she researches the intersection of religion with grassroots politics. She is an editorial board member of the Sociological Review, is the Book Reviews Editor of the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, and was the co-convener of The Australian Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion Thematic Group 2016–2019. xi

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Notes on Contributors

Merve  Reyhan  Kayikci is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Granada’s Department of Semitic Studies. Her current work within the European research project Religious Toleration and Peace (RETOPEA) explores Muslim heritage construction in Europe. She obtained her PhD from KU Leuven, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Her research interests include spiritual economy, ethical selfhood, ethnicity and migration, heritage practices. She is the co-editor of European Muslims and New Media (2017, with L. D’Heanens) and has published in, among others, the Journal of Contemporary Islam. Zuleyha Keskin  is the Course Director at the Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation, Charles Sturt University. She is also a senior lecturer, lecturing on Islamic spirituality and contemporary Islamic studies, and the managing editor of the Australian Journal of Islamic Studies. She has recently co-edited a book which refutes the theological arguments posed by radicalism (2019). She is also a director at Islamic Sciences and Research Academy of Australia. Sunaina Maira  is Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author and editor of several books including The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror and Boycott!: The Academy and Justice for Palestine. She also co-edited The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Maira has been involved with various immigrant rights coalitions and anti-war and global justice groups locally and nationally. Mario  Peucker is Research Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Industries and Liveable Cities, Victoria University (Melbourne). He has undertaken multi-method research on ethno-religious community activism, citizenship, and far-right movements since 2003, both in Europe and Australia. His most recent books include Muslim Citizenship in Liberal Democracies (2016), Muslim Community Organizations in the West (2017, co-edited with R.  Ceylan), and The Far-Right in Contemporary Australia (2019, co-edited with D. Smith).

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Thijl Sunier  is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, holds the chair of Islam in European Societies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He conducts the EU-funded project Mediating Islam in the Digital Age, examining Islamic authority, religious critique, leadership, and knowledge production in Europe. He is chairman of the board of the Netherlands Inter-University School for Islamic Studies (NISIS) and executive editor of the Journal of Muslims in Europe (JOME/Brill). Salih  Yucel  is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Charles Sturt University/Australian Catholic University. He got Bachelor of Divinity from the University of Ankara, and Master of Theology from the University of Sydney. His doctoral research at Boston University was about the effects of prayer on Muslim patients’ well-being. He is the author of four books and co-author of one book and a number of articles. His research interests are Islamic theology, contemporary Islamic movements, and Muslims in Australia.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Motives for volunteering Fig. 4.2 Reasons for choosing a Muslim over a non-Muslim organization

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1 Muslim Volunteering in the West: An Introduction Mario Peucker and Merve Reyhan Kayikci

In June 2018, one of the editors of this book was invited by the chair of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) Canada to visit the ISNA Canada headquarters with its mosque and community center in Mississauga in the Greater Toronto Area. On the tour through the center, the chair pointed in passing at a large box in a hallway, which community members use to give charity. The box had a sign attached that quoted Surah Al-Baqarah, Verse 274 from the Qur’an: “Those who spend their wealth [in Allah’s way] by night and by day, secretly and publicly—they will have their reward with their Lord. And no fear will there be concerning them, nor will they grieve.” Community members who want to “spend their wealth” had three slots to choose from; they were labeled sadaqa, zakat, and donation. M. Peucker (*) Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. R. Kayikci Department of Semitic Studies, University of Granada, Granada, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_1

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This box with its three slots for giving charity seemed to encapsulate a key tenet of this book, which we had just started working on at the time: the relationship between Islamic theological-ethical (here: sadaqa and zakat) and supposedly “Western,” liberal-democratic practices (here: donations). It seemed there was no contradiction between these three concepts of giving money to a good cause among the ISNA community members who would simply choose between the three options, and the money would be forwarded accordingly. Not long after this mosque visit, we learned we were in some ways wrong with this assumption; it was more complicated than we first thought. The ISNA Canada chair mentioned that the sign on this box was modified after confusion had been raised by some community members about the difference between sadaqa and donations, and if, and in what way, both forms of charity differed. While there has been an unanimous understanding of the meaning and purpose of the Islamically mandatory zakat (as this is specified in the Qu’ran), sadaqa is a less clearly defined Islamic concept related to charity or good deeds more broadly (see Keskin and Yucel’s chapter in this volume). According to the executive director of ISNA Canada, community members have also had slightly different, in parts culturally shaped, understandings of what kind of charities sadaqa may encompass. In practice, however, ISNA Canada used the money given as sadaqa and donations for the same non-zakat-specific purposes, for example, to cover the expenses of various community support activities. Hence, having two separate slots at the box for sadaqa and for donations was considered to be unintentionally misleading, and consequently the two were merged. Since then there have been only two slots, one for zakat and the other one labeled sadaqa/donation. The executive director of ISNA Canada explained that this community-internal debate demonstrated to him once again how Muslim communities, and more specifically ISNA Canada, as an Islamic organization, constantly and pragmatically navigate their religious belief and actions in a non-­ Muslim-­ majority society like Canada, “marrying” the religiously grounded with civic-secular practices in a liberal-democratic context. This volume is not about donations and monetary manifestations of sadaqa, but we consider this episode from Mississauga an illustrative opening to this book as it explores a related practice of charity and acts of

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benevolence that may similarly blur the boundaries between Islamic ethical conduct and liberal-democratic norms and practice: Muslim volunteering in a non-Islamic societal context. In public debates, policy statements and (predominately Western) scholarship volunteering is commonly framed as a secular practice, even when performed within a religious or faith-based organizational context—a practice strongly aligned with (neo-)liberal and democratic principles of active citizenship and civil society. This volume critiques this narrow secular lens on volunteering. Not only does such a conceptualization deny that, historically, voluntary community service and charity used to be primarily a religiously grounded practice, it also pays little attention to the enormous religious diversification of community structures and civil societies in post-secular Western countries over the past few decades. While religiosity usually does not feature in these contemporary public and political debates around volunteerism, volunteering research has consistently found a positive association between religiosity (usually focusing on Christian faiths) and volunteering (Wilson and Musick 1997; Wang and Handy 2014; von Essen et  al. 2015). Scholars have argued—and empirical evidence confirms their claims—that religiosity can have both a direct and an indirect positive effect on people’s propensity to volunteering. First, places of worship and religious community life often provide a civically mobilizing environment where people gain certain skills, networks, and motivations, which encourage or facilitate their civic engagement. “Religious organizations tell people of opportunities to serve, both within and beyond the congregation itself, and provide personal contacts, committees, phone numbers, meeting spaces, transportation, or whatever it may take to help turn good intentions into action” (Wuthnow 1994: 253). Second, and linked to this indirect effect of religiosity, most faith systems advocate, in one way or another, “values of altruism and caring for others” (von Essen et al. 2015: 1). This ethical dimension may be a central motivational driver for many religious people to engage in acts of benevolence and doing good deeds—and volunteering could be one way of performing this religiously grounded duty or principle (Peucker 2018). Wilson and Musick (1997: 697), who have carried out

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extensive scholarship on volunteering, refer to this motivational factor in their theoretical framework on volunteerism as a “culture of benevolence,” emphasizing that religiosity can be a key source of this kind of “cultural capital” (see Peucker’s chapter). The Islamic faith is no exception here, as several chapters in this volume firmly demonstrate.

Islam, Ethics, and Citizenship The ethical dynamics of being a “good Muslim” have been subject of extensive research. The specifics of how an Islamic ethos encourages or urges Muslims to do good deeds in their everyday lives have been explored by scholars who have contributed extensively to studies concerning the ethical turn in Islam. One of the first anthropologists to assert the ethical in religion is Talal Asad (1993), who argued, inspired by Foucault’s writings, that physical discipline has a significant role in ethical self-making. This line of thinking has been followed by anthropologists such as Saba Mahmood (2005) on the politics of piety, Charles Hirschkind (2006) on the ethics of listening, Hussain Agrama (2010) on the ethics of fatwa, and Samuli Schielke (2010) on the tensions of pursuing an ethical life. The common point in these writings is the focus on the individual and the individual’s focus on their own ethical self-making. There is little engagement with how ethical becoming is relationally intertwined with the individual’s social interactions and commitments. In this context, little systematic research has been undertaken into the gateways, goals, and experiences of Muslim volunteers and what community services they seek to contribute to. This volume seeks to address some of these gaps and to contribute to a debate, in academia and beyond, on the meaning of religious norms and specifically Islamic piety and ethos for the lived everyday experience of Muslim volunteers in culturally, ethnically, and religiously diverse, post-secular societies. This resonates with Bryan S. Turner’s (2013: 15) call for greater scholarly attention to be directed toward “how Muslims live their everyday lives through practices and institutions.” Turner’s call resonates to some extent with the recent work of scholars on the emerging category of ordinary ethics. This concept suggests that

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the ethical is present in mundane choices, emotions, utterances, and doings. Michael Lambek (2010) initiated the analysis of the “ordinary” or the “everyday,” trying to shift the focus on ethics from a power perspective toward an approach where the ethical is grounded in the moment, rather than in any kind of transcendent knowledge. What the scholars of ordinary ethics attempt to do is develop an analytical focus on the practical aspects of ethics more than the transcendent or liturgical aspects (Lambek 2010). Ethics is not a distinct kind of activity; it is a “modality of everyday action or being in the world” (Lambek 2010: 10). They understand that in some circumstances, individuals need to make explicit ethical choices, but they also scrutinize the daily implicit circumstances wherein ethical positions are imbricated. On the one hand, such research opens an avenue for further advances that try to unpack how vocal and sartorial dispositions embed the mundane and re-signify their virtue. On the one hand, ordinary ethics is an important analytical tool to move away from the idea that the ethical is a certain set of embodied practices, affects, and sensibilities that are separate from the ordinary flow of life (see Schielke 2010). Referring to a set of practices as ordinary may seem as if we are suggesting that there are extraordinary ethics. Fadil and Fernando (2015) point to this conundrum. While the attention to locate the daily complexities of life has opened the way to these studies, it has, according to Fadil and Fernando, “conceptually, methodologically, and politically problematic effects” (2015: 61). They point out that the concept of the everyday, and the way in which it has been recuperated within the anthropology of Islam, seems to emphasize one side of the paradigmatic agency/power and the unity/diversity debates within anthropology, reiterating human creativity against the weight of norms and highlighting the universally shared conditions of human subjectivity. (Fadil and Fernando 2015: 61)

Studying the “everyday Muslim” seems to imply that, on the one hand, there are “ordinary” Muslims, whose practices, thoughts, and (pious) reflections can be analytically traced in the modern-liberal conceptualization (Fadil and Fernando 2015: 61). On the other hand, there are

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Muslims whose dispositions pertain to different ontologies and cannot be traced with such “ordinary” categories, and are thus extraordinary (Fadil and Fernando 2015: 62). Acknowledging the importance of taking these analytical questions into consideration, this edited volume is an attempt to think through binaries and traditions that inform one another. While it looks at how orthodox religious practices and knowledge inform modern (liberal and secular) ways of life and vice versa, it seeks these translations in the cracks and creeks of daily endeavors. It seeks to explore the multifaceted everyday community engagements of Muslims in the West through the under-utilized lens of volunteering.

 ood Activism—Bad Activism G and Volunteering in the War on Terror Era Muslim volunteering is not always a benign form of civic or political activism, but may have extremely severe personal consequences; some Muslims have paid the ultimate price for their humanitarian commitment. According to Jonathan Benthall (2009), for example, many of the prisoners in Guantánamo were Muslim volunteer aid workers who were suspected of working for terrorist organizations. Another extreme example of just how dangerous, even deadly, Muslim volunteering can be is the tragic incident in 2010, where Israeli navy stormed the ship Mavi Marmara in international waters close to Gaza; several Muslim activists on board of the ship were killed during this military operation. The Mavi Marmara was owned and run by the IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation and was part of a Gaza Freedom Flotilla, trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. Muslim volunteers are regularly thought to be associated with armed conflicts, where Muslims voluntarily travel to war zone countries, like Afghanistan and Bosnia, as a form of jihad (see Hegghammer 2010; Sanadjian 2002; Leiken 2005). However, many of these Muslim individuals have gone to such conflict regions not to combat, but to deliver humanitarian aid. A number of Islamic aid organizations have become involved in such humanitarian aid initiatives by facilitating the flow of

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aid workers and supplies into war zones, often driven by tangible Islamic narrative pertaining to the solidarity among Muslim and with the global umma. Among these organizations is the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO, based in Jeddah), Islamic Council for Eastern Europe (which was funded by the IIRO), and the organization Merhamet, which was later funded by the director of Islamic Relief. This history of Muslim volunteering in humanitarian aid initiatives has led to distrust toward certain Muslim organizations in the West. The money flow between European and American Muslim organizations and their non-European funders are often a point of contention. These funders can be non-European governments or umbrella organizations based in non-European countries. The questions often concern transparency and whether the money spent on humanitarian aid is obtained and used legally. Moreover, there is an apprehension on the side of Western media and politics as to whether the intentions of the volunteers are sincere or if they have a hidden agenda beyond providing food and other supply to people in need. International aid organizations aside, there is also an extensive emergence of Muslims participating in local activist circles, which have been the subject of several studies in recent years. The object of study differs from fundamentalist movements (Roy 1994), to state-recognized organizations (Ferrari 2016), and grass-root civil society associations (Deeb 2006; Fernando 2014; Peace 2015). The latter two groups are more or less acknowledged as acceptable networks by governments and other public institutions. This discursive binary is critically dealt with by several contributors in this volume (in particular Maira’s chapters). These studies have unpacked how the objectives of Muslim grassroots movements are often build on notions of autonomy, choice, and human rights, as Muslim volunteers adopt a discourse of “personal autonomy, freedom and self-realization” in their public claims (Fernando 2010: 20). Fernando extensively elaborates this point in the French context and observes that Muslim groups, who have been subject to scrutiny from the liberal secular public, are increasingly re-claiming their religious and ethical positions through such liberal articulations (see Fernando 2010, 2014). The utilization of such liberal vocabularies—as opposed to Islamic

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vocabularies—assists these networks’ acceptability in the Western public sphere. Such forms of public activities are also influenced by contemporary practices of citizenship that embrace cultural, ethnic, and religious particularities (Soysal 2000). Studies show that minorities mobilize around claims for recognition of their group’s particularities; and even when these particularities concern religious or ethnic rights, they still tend to appeal to universalistic principles of equality and human rights (Soysal 2000: 7; see also Mustafa 2016). Soysal (2000: 8) observed, for example, that Muslim associations making claims for the accommodation of Muslim students’ religious needs (e.g., headscarf or halal food) often relate to discourses of universal rights rather than simply drawing on their religious ethics and teachings. There is an evident duality within such grassroots organizations and the moral rubrics to which they subscribe. On the one hand, there is an increasing body of grassroots organizations that tackle social and political issues, such as dietary rights, headscarf bans, and Islamophobia. This kind of social movement is often met with curiosity and doubts by the wider society. Nevertheless, Muslim participants persist in their claims for acceptance and equality as populations of a difference. In doing so, they utilize their claims and demands through liberal vocabularies. On the other hand, these movements are met with more anxiety on a national and global level the further they stray from liberal vocabularies and pursue a religious agenda. The anxiety is so pertinent that in some cases it can lead to legal persecution. The common denominator between these seemingly different modes of volunteering is that liberal or not there is an underlying narrative of difference that is being made public and visible.

Muslim Volunteering and Active Citizenship Volunteerism is a form of civic engagement and a manifestation of active citizenship in post-secular, (neo-)liberal-democratic societies. The civic and political engagement of Muslims has recently received some scholarly attention in North America, the United Kingdom, continental Europe ,

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and Australia. This research is obviously also pertinent to Muslim volunteering, despite the fact that it does not specifically focus on volunteering. Key insights from this research stream on Muslims’ civic engagement resonate with findings from (non-Muslim specific) research on volunteering and the role of religiosity in particular. The empirical knowledge specifically about Muslim volunteering in Western societies is currently quite limited and rarely reaches beyond some statistical survey data, available in some Western countries. The recent US survey Religion in Everyday Life (Pew 2016: 74), for example, includes a question on volunteering and allows for a breakdown by different faith groups: One third of all surveyed American Muslims stated they have done voluntary work in the “last week,” which amounts to the same proportion as among all surveyed Americans. In contrast, according to official census data, Australian Muslims are significantly less likely to volunteer (9 percent) than the national average (18 percent) (Peucker et al. 2014). It has been argued, however, that this figure underestimates Muslim volunteering due to, among other factors, the narrow definition of volunteering in the census, which fails to capture many forms of voluntary community work that Muslims may not consider volunteering (Peucker 2016: 98–99). A number of Australian research studies have found much higher rates of Muslims’ civic engagement. According to a survey among 500 Muslims in Sydney, for example, 36 percent of survey Muslims “volunteered for a faith-based organisation” and 14 percent “for a sporting association” (Dunn et  al. 2015: 37). This and other studies suggest that Muslims, similar to other ethnic or ethno-religious minority groups, demonstrate a preference for spending their volunteering time (also) within their own community organizations (Bhasin 1997; Wilson 2012). Examining civic and community engagement through the lens of volunteering has generated crucial insights into the practices, personal motivations, goals, and many positive effects of people’s voluntary civic and social activism. However, notwithstanding the scholarly recognition of the relevance of religiosity for volunteering in general, empirical volunteering research has thus far largely failed to apply this analytical prism to Muslim communities in non-Muslim-majority societies.

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This is certainly not due to a general lack of scholarly attention to diasporic Islam and Muslim communities in Europe, North America, or Australia—rather to the contrary. Especially since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Muslim communities, and the Islamic faith has attracted an unprecedented level of academic interest, driven by near-­ obsessive public and political debates around Islam in “the West” and facilitated by numerous newly established funding opportunities. The pertinent body of academic work has been primarily occupied with Islamophobia, Muslim Otherness, or governance attempts of integration, domestication, and securitization of the Muslim subject. There is no doubt that these are important issues for academic inquiry, but they hardly reflect all the intricacies of Muslim communities and Muslim life in Western societies. The aforementioned civically mobilizing effect of religious community organizations and places of worship, for example, has been consistently found also in Muslim community contexts in various Western countries. Muslims who regularly attend mosques and religious services are significantly more likely to be civically engaged citizens, active within both the Muslim community and the non-Muslim civil society organizations (Jamal 2005; Fleischmann et al. 2016; Read 2015; Vergani et al. 2017; McAndrew and Voas 2014). Some studies show that this mobilizing effect extends to political participation as Muslims who frequently visit their mosque are significantly more often politically engaged (McAndrew and Sobolewska 2015; Jamal 2005; Ayers and Hofstetter 2008; Dana et al. 2017; Giugni et al. 2014). While these quantitative studies leave little doubt about the positive effects of “organizational religiosity,” as Read (2015) called it (e.g., attending mosques), they are somewhat less conclusive when it comes to the effect of “subjective religiosity,” i.e. Muslims’ personal religious belief. This relates to the question as to what role Islamic faith plays as a driver for civic engagement. McAndrew and Voas (2014: 111–112), for example, found that in the United Kingdom, civic engagement rates of Muslims were particularly high among those who rank higher on the subjective religiosity scale. Read (2015) did not identify such a correlation in her US study, but she emphasized that there was also no negative association between Muslim respondents’ subjective religiosity and their

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propensity to civic engagement. She concluded, “Islam is not inherently restrictive of participation in American life” (Read 2015: 41). Vergani et  al.’s (2017) Australian study among Muslims in Melbourne, which deploys a methodology similar to the one Read used (though with a much smaller, non-representative sample), reached the same conclusion. Ayers and Hofstetter (2008: 18), on the other hand, found in their US study that the level of subjective religiosity (they referred to it as “religious salience”) is negatively associated with Muslims’ inclination to political participation, but that this negative effect is consistently neutralized by Muslims’ organizational religiosity (“religious resources”). Findings from qualitative studies on Muslim’s civic engagement and active citizenship in countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany (Vergani et al. 2017; Peucker 2016; Mustafa 2016) stand in contrast to Ayers and Hofstetter’s (2008) conclusion about the civically hampering impact of Islamic faith. To the contrary, these qualitative studies consistently reveal that Muslims’ Islamic belief is a major motivational driver behind their, often multifaceted, civic engagement. Mustafa’s (2016: 464) study on British Muslims’ active citizenship, for example, identified a “recurring reference to faith and humanity as the moral compass guiding active citizenship.” These qualitative studies lend support to the claim that the Islamic faith, similar to other religious belief systems (e.g., Christianity), instills a “culture of benevolence” (Wilson and Musick 1997), motivating Muslims to become civically engaged.

Interdisciplinary Research on Muslim Volunteering This volume enters some sensitive territory, as it sets out to explore Muslim volunteering between Islamic ethos and citizenship. We acknowledge that the neoliberal transformation of Western liberal societies has put increasing pressure and demands on volunteer work and civil society organizations more broadly to fill the gaps left behind by the state’s continuous retreat from its obligation to provide crucial welfare and support to its citizens. This growing reliance on services by civil society and

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c­ ommunity groups, which are often poorly resourced and rely themselves primarily on unpaid work of volunteers, has in effect led to an increasing exploitation of the benevolence and good intentions of these community groups and their many volunteers. This applies to many civil society organizations, both secular and religious or faith-based, but it puts particularly heavy constraints on ethno-religious minority community organizations, which tend to have even fewer resources available. As if that were not enough, Muslim communities face additional challenges arising from the need to respond to marginalization, Islamophobia, and an omnipresent securitization agenda in Western societies, which treats them as a “suspect community” and urges them to act “as integration facilitator, as 24-hour contact partners for politics and media, and as counter-terrorism activists” (Rosenow-Williams 2014: 759). We also recognize the risk of further objectifying and essentializing Muslims and their communities through this book, as elements of contemporary scholarship on Muslims and Islam in “the West” have done in the recent past. As mentioned above, Muslim communities and diasporic Islam have been over-researched, at least in certain thematic realms. This scholarly obsession has reinforced in some segments of the community a sense of disempowerment and becoming mere objects of research, especially when the research is seen as being undertaken with a White gaze. We have been acutely aware of this risk, and we have tried to minimize it in our academic work, for example, by collaborating closely with the members of the community, taking into account, to the best of our ability, their input throughout the research process. This certainly does not nullify the risk of objectifying Muslims, but it demonstrates our awareness of it and, more importantly, our best intentions to reduce it. It is ultimately up to the individual reader to judge whether we have succeeded or not. The title of this book may also raise concerns about potentially essentializing Muslims as it seems to locate their practice of volunteering between a religious ethos and liberal citizenship. The research presented in this volume, however, challenges this essentializing dichotomy, highlighting the epistemological inappropriateness of pitting the supposedly “modern,” secular-liberal concepts of active citizenship against a supposedly pre-modern religious ethos. It is one of the key tenets of this volume

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to critique such a binary opposition between the divine-religious and the mundane-secular and, as several contributions in this book argue, ultimately reject this dichotomy as deeply flawed and analytically unhelpful. For us, examining Muslim volunteering in liberal democracies offers an opportunity to explore the complex and manifold ways in which secular modernity and Islamic belief system are intertwined in the everyday lives of many Muslims, with all its ambivalence and tensions—or the lack thereof. Borrowing from the work of anthropologists Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Ferando (2015), we seek to explore how Islamic piety, principles, and norms interact with, and shape, Muslims’ everyday practice of volunteering in liberal societies and vice versa. This ambitious scholarly project is well placed to avoid further essentializing the Muslim subject by paying attention to structures and individual agency, and the interaction between both, and demonstrates “dual commitment to humanity’s heterogeneity and commonality” (Fadil and Fernando 2015: 59, emphasis in original).

Contents of the Book To pursue such a scholarly endeavor calls for contributions from a range of disciplines. This book brings together anthropologist, sociologists, and scholars in Islamic Studies to present their theoretical and empirical research on Muslim volunteering in the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Australia. The chapters provide manifold theoretical and empirical insights into Muslims’ individual agency and experiences as volunteers in specific socio-political environments. The thematic and disciplinary breadth of the volume echoes the complexity and diversity of Muslim volunteering itself. The book also delves into the theological underpinnings of Muslims’ social and civic engagements and how the Islamic tradition has come to be re-read in light of contextual shifts and dynamics. With this introduction, and indeed with the volume as a whole, it is our aim to bring more clearly into view how contextual structures shape Muslims’ subjectivities and practice.

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Following this introduction, Keskin and Yucel discuss in Chap. 2 the theological foundation of Muslims’ volunteering activities. Their analysis reveals how this phenomenon has been handled in the Islamic tradition. Drawing on examples of the Qur’an and Sunna, the authors bridge the Islamic texts with contemporary practices. Setting the stage for a more elaborate discussion on how Islam merges with modern-liberal practices of volunteering, Keskin and Yucel’s chapter traces how vicegerency intersects with responsibility and ultimately philanthropy. Using the Netherlands as a case study, Sunier discusses in Chap. 3 how Muslim community organizations and volunteer community and charity work are often viewed with skepticism by Western governments. Against the backdrop of assimilationist perspectives on integration, religiously inspired voluntary work among Muslims is often narrowly depicted as an activity that only benefits their own community rather than viewing it as a manifestation of outward compassion. Sunier argues that suspicion toward Muslim community volunteering is further aggravated by a prevalent secularist discourse that renders Muslims’ religious motivations anachronistic and questions their “real” motives. In Chap. 4, Peucker takes up this thread of Muslims’ motive and goals behind their community volunteering. He presents selected findings from a mixed-method study among Australian Muslims who volunteer within an Islamic community context, from Muslim mainstream organizations to politically radical and religiously orthodox groups. He provides quantitative and qualitative empirical insights into Muslims’ multiple personal drivers and the goals they pursue with their intracommunity engagement. The quantitative and qualitative data analysis demonstrates that Muslim volunteering is usually not a reflection of social withdrawal and separateness but driven by their commitment to both their faith community and the wider Australian society. Religiously driven motives and non-religious civic drivers are usually inherently linked. Simplistic binaries of secular/religious or communitarian/republican commitment are not suitable to capture the realities of Muslim community volunteering. The next two chapters take an anthropological approach, focusing on Muslim charity and volunteering in the Netherlands and Belgium, respectively. Cebecioglu’s contribution (Chap. 5) explores charity practices as a form of voluntary civic participation among Turkish-Dutch

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Muslims affiliated with the Millî Görüş and the Gülen movements. Drawing on fieldwork in the Netherlands and Turkey, Cebecioglu argues that piety is a key concept to explore the ethical agency of Muslim individuals, but it manifests in different ways in response to the specific discourses and interpretations of piety of Millî Görüş and the Gülen Movement. While Millî Görüş prioritizes the ummah and focuses its volunteer work on the well-being of the global Muslim community, the Gülen Movement emphasizes dialogue and education as the key components of their service to humanity. In Chap. 6, Kayikci explores Muslim volunteering also through the lens of public piety, discussing the findings from her anthropological research in Belgium, where, like in other European countries, public manifestations of religious symbols and practices are often regarded as contentious visibilities. Kayikci interrogates how Belgian Muslim volunteers re-signify everyday mundane practices as ethical and thus pious. In doing so, they manage to find creative ways of being publicly pious and handling negative (social-political) attention. The volunteers are in constant deliberation of what is compatible-good Islam. These deliberations often reflect public narratives of modern liberal norms and Islamic interpretations doing good. It approaches Muslim subjecthood as relationally embedded in both liberal and non-liberal (Islamic) traditions. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on two specific areas of Muslim volunteering in different national contexts. Rosemary Hancock (Chap. 7) presents empirical insights into Islamic environmentalism in the United States and Great Britain, based on the qualitative research with Muslim environmental activists in both countries. In her exploration of Muslim environmental groups and their dedication to promote environmental action and responsibility, Hancock found that Muslim activists interpret environmentalism to be a religious duty, inspired by environmental readings of Islamic scripture and theology. She argues, however, that such a religious framing of environmentalism alone is not sufficient to motivate action, and that most Muslim environmental activists came to the movement with a pre-existing commitment to grassroots political action, synthesizing their religious and political practice. In Chap. 8, William Barylo focuses on young British Muslim in London who have previously volunteered for a community mental health

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helpline. Based on his micro-sociological work, Barylo demonstrates that Muslim volunteers directly or indirectly exposed to experiences of trauma, such as racism or Islamophobia, develop an active practice of citizenship. Reading situations of intersectional trauma through the prism of faith, religious ethics, and practices, they consider it to be their responsibility as citizens to care for the vulnerable in the society—with long-lasting effects on their personal and professional trajectories. In Chap. 9, Maira critically discusses the possibilities and limits of civic engagement by Muslim American youth in the post-9/11 era and the political implications of volunteerism for Muslim communities subjected to scrutiny and surveillance in the War on Terror. Based on her ethnographic research on Arab, South Asian, and Afghan American college students in northern California, Maira explores ways in which Muslim American volunteer activities are embedded in the regulation of “good” (moderate) or “bad” (radical) Muslim political subjecthood. The research reveals how liberal civil rights, interfaith, and environmental activism projects are sanctioned as forms of civic engagement if they evade challenges to US militarism and foreign policy and uphold the tenets of neoliberal citizenship. In the conclusion, Kayikci discusses how the number of Muslims in the volunteering scene is increasing. Moreover, they are often much younger than most other volunteers. The desire to do something beneficial for their community and for the larger society is becoming a visible reality for many Muslims, and Muslim youth in particular. However, the inclination to volunteer is not only about doing good, as it is also an outcome of social and political demands. Muslim groups all over the Western world desire recognition of their cultural, religious, and ethnic differences, and volunteering in turn allows them to raise these demands in a civic-democratic platform. The trajectory is not as smooth-sailing as Muslims can be subject to surveillance and backlash for their public activities and activisms. Each chapter in this book deals with issues separately in different contexts and in an interdisciplinary manner.

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The Case of Muslims in Switzerland. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(10), 1593–1613. Hegghammer, T. (2010). The Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters: Islam and the Globalization of Jihad. International Security, 35(3), 53–94. Hirschkind, C. (2006). The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Jamal, A. (2005). The Political Participation and Engagement of Muslim Americans: Mosque Involvement and Group Consciousness. American Politics Research, 33(4), 521–544. Lambek, M. (2010). Toward an Ethics of the Act. In M. Lambek (Ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action (pp.  39–63). New  York, NY: Fordham University Press. Leiken, R.  S. (2005). Europe’s angry Muslims. Foreign Affairs, 84(July/ August), 120. Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety. The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McAndrew, S., & Sobolewska, M. (2015). Mosques and Political Engagement in Britain. Participation or Segregation? In T.  Peace (Ed.), Muslims and Political Participation in Britain (pp. 53–81). London: Routledge. McAndrew, S., & Voas, D. (2014). Immigrant Generation, Religiosity and Civic Engagement in Britain. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(1), 99–119. Mustafa, A. (2016). Active Citizenship, Dissent and Civic Consciousness: Young Muslims Redefining Citizenship on Their Own Terms. Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power, 23(4), 454–469. Peace, T. (2015). European Social Movements and Muslim Activism. Another World but with Whom? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Peucker, M. (2016). Muslim Citizenship in Liberal Democracies. Civic and Political Participation in the West. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Peucker, M. (2018). Muslim Community Volunteering: The Civic-Religious ‘Culture of Benevolence’ and its Sociopolitical Implications. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1543020. Peucker, M., Roose, J. M., & Akbarzadeh, S. (2014). Muslim Active Citizenship in Australia: Socioeconomic Challenges and the Emergence of a Muslim Elite. Australian Journal of Political Science, 49(2), 282–299. Pew Research Center (Pew). (2016). Religion in Everyday Life. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Read, J. (2015). Gender, Religious Identity, and Civic Engagement among Arab Muslims in the United States. Sociology of Religion, 76(1), 30–48.

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Rosenow-Williams, K. (2014). Organising Muslims and Integrating Islam: Applying Organisational Sociology to the Study of Islamic Organisations. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(5), 759–777. Roy, O. (1994). The Failure of Political Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sanadjian, M. (2002). Multiculturalist Discourse, Esoteric Representation of Islam and the Global Anti-terror Campaign. Social Identities, 8(1), 119–124. Schielke, S. (2010) Second Thoughts about the Anthropology of Islam, or How to Make Sense of Grand Schemes in Everyday Life. ZMO Working Papers, 2, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. Soysal, Y. (2000). Citizenship and Identity: Living in Diasporas in Post-war Europe? Ethnic and Racial studies, 23(1), 1–15. Turner, B.  S. (2013). Sociology of Islam: The Desiderata. Sociology of Islam, 1(1–2), 14–16. Vergani, M., Johns, A., Lobo, M., & Mansouri, F. (2017). Examining Islamic Religiosity and Civic Engagement in Melbourne. Journal of Sociology, 53(1), 63–78. von Essen, J., Hustinx, L., Haers, J., & Mels, S. (2015). Religion and Volunteering. In L. Hustinx, J. von Essen, J. Haers, & S. Mels (Eds.), Religion and Volunteering. Complex, Contested and Ambiguous Relationships (pp. 1–20). Cham: Springer. Wang, L., & Handy, F. (2014). Religious and Secular Voluntary Participation by Immigrants in Canada: How Trust and Social networks Affect Decision to Participate. Voluntas. International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 25(6), 1559–1582. Wilson, J. (2012). Volunteerism Research: A Review Essay. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 41(12), 176–212. Wilson, J., & Musick, M. (1997). Who Cares? Towards an Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work. American Sociological Review, 62(5), 694–713. Wuthnow, R. (1994). God and Mammon in America. New York, NY: Free Press.

2 Theologization of Volunteerism: An Islamic Perspective Zuleyha Keskin and Salih Yucel

O human beings, you are taught by God voluntarily, you must teach others voluntarily (At-Tabari)

Introduction Volunteerism in Islam is a God-centered practice. There is a strong ethic of volunteerism in the Qur’an and Sunnah, which encourages humanity to share their time, wealth, knowledge, and acts of kindness with others

Z. Keskin (*) Charles Sturt University, Somerton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Yucel Charles Sturt University, Somerton, VIC, Australia Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_2

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voluntarily. Volunteerism is a very broad concept in Islam; it includes whatever one does for the benefit of others for the sake of God, in other words, without expecting any return from those that one does good for. It encompasses a sheer endless variety of actions, ranging from a simple act such as removing a rock from the road to the establishment of major philanthropic, charitable organizations. It can be done individually or collectively. We argue in this chapter that Muslims feel a great responsibility to be involved in volunteerism, in the sense of doing acts of goodness for others without expecting any return. Thus, it is a fundamental principle of Islamic ethics and Islamic practice. Volunteerism is part of the identity of Muslims who practice the religion. That is, a normative-­ theological foundation guides many Muslims’ practice of volunteering in a variety of ways. This chapter first focused on the Qur’anic portrayal of humans as vicegerents of God (khalifa) on earth who are responsible for the well-being of everything and everyone on earth. This role of khalifa has played an important role in developing a sense of responsibility and volunteerism within Muslims (see also Hancock’s chapter in this book). Second, it analyzes volunteerism as a strong ethical principle of the sacred texts of Islam from theological and juristic perspectives. There are various Islamic concepts associated with volunteerism and these will be discussed in some detail. While this chapter does not address all the concepts, since there are too many to cover, it focusses on those that are most relevant. This includes a discussion on tatawwu (volunteerism), fi sabilillah (doing things for the sake of Allah), sadaqa (charity), and sadaqa jariya (perpetual charity). Each of these concepts better informs the understanding of volunteerism in Islam. Third, this chapter examines how volunteerism has become theologized, which has influenced practicing Muslims to view volunteerism as an important part of their faith so that it has been embraced at various levels. Examples are provided from the Australian context to demonstrate the theologization of volunteerism in everyday life.

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Khalifa (Vicegerency) Inspiring Volunteerism Khalifa is used in its different derivatives in 12 places in the Qur’an.1 A human being is capable of becoming God’s vicegerent (khalifa) on earth (Qur’an, 2:30). According to the Qur’an (33:72), humankind accepted the role of khalifa, undertaking and bearing the amana (trust), when the other creations declined to take on this role. This means human beings were given physical and spiritual capabilities in order to fulfill the responsibility of taking care of the earth and its inhabitants. In return, humankind is accountable for everything that it has been made a guardian over. This places a duty on humankind toward all of creation in protecting them and even serving them (al-Alusi 1975). Due to this responsibility, humankind is considered the highest position among all creations with the honorable task of inhabiting the earth in accordance with Divine guidance. Therefore, the role of vicegerent (khalifa) on earth is a role which is to be taken very seriously. According to Islamic tradition, human beings long for their original place of dwelling, paradise, and therefore try to imitate paradise on Earth. Each individual is accepted as having taken on the responsibility of attaining the status of khalifa, or vicegerent of God on earth (Qur’an, 2:30), and in doing so, must strive for peace and equality of justice for all of God’s creations in accordance with the Divine Law. Since humankind has a yearning to return to eternal paradise, there is resultant desire to make the temporarily dwelling earth, as much like paradise as possible (Yucel 2017a). This desire for a paradise-like dwelling necessitates acting voluntarily at the degree of ihsan (perfection of conduct). The perfection of conduct, in accordance with the Prophet Muhammad as the perfect of moral conduct (Qur’an, 68:4) and the teacher of higher virtues, means striving for excellence in all action. Volunteerism for the sake of God is one of the ways in which perfection of conduct manifests. An aspect of this is a constant taking of account of individual actions for the human and an effacing of self-centered conduct through a constant turning toward God through repentance when the ideal of ihsan is not abided by (maqam).  Qur’an 2:30, 6:133, 6:165, 7:69, 7:74, 7:129, 10:14, 10:73, 11:57, 24:55, 35:39, and 38:26.

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According to Islamic theology, the prophets are exemplary role models for humanity. This does not negate the sphere of being a khalifa on earth, which encapsulates volunteerism as mentioned above. All prophets are considered the embodiment of volunteerism based on the Qur’an’s narrative about their experiences and the way they approached their role as prophets. They were obliged to do all their tasks, including their prophetic mission, voluntarily without any expectation and worldly ambition. There are 12 Qur’anic verses stating that the prophets refrained from asking for worldly rewards when they served the community.2 This is extremely important; all acts of serving the community were done without expectation of worldly remuneration (see also Cebecioglu’s chapter). For the prophets, volunteerism was an obligation that is undertaken as part of the duty that was given to them by God in order to fulfill their role of being a khalifa on earth with excellence. Although the word khalifa has political aspect to it, this chapter is focusing on the spiritual and social aspects of this concept. The Qur’an details the extent of the volunteerism undertaken by each of the prophets explicitly. Although prophets are spiritually obliged by God to undertake their prophetic responsibilities, they do not receive any monetary benefits for any of the tasks they fulfill. Noah served for almost a millennium voluntarily. Moses took all types of risks to save Children of Israel without the request for remuneration. Abraham served for hundreds of years without any worldly ambition. Prophet Muhammad donated all his wealth voluntarily. Not only that, when the Muslim community was in a better financial position, they did not seek any salary as head of state. Furthermore, he did approximately two third of his prayer, three quarters of his fasting voluntarily, acts of worship, which fall under the category of nafila (superogatory). The voluntary worship of Prophet Muhammad not only demonstrates that he was doing more worship than is compulsory (fard), it also shows the broadness of volunteerism in Islam. Individual volunteerism spiritually prepares and motivates to act voluntarily for others. It also builds a character of volunteerism toward all cre Verses 10:72, 11:29, and 26:109 refer to Prophet Noah; 11:51 and 26:127 refer to Prophet Hud; 26:145 refers to Prophet Salih; 26:164 refers to Prophet Lot; 26:180 refers to Prophet Shuayb; 36:20 refers to two unnamed prophets or possibly disciples of Prophet Jesus; 6: 90, 34:47, and 12:104 refer to Prophet Muhammad with the words “I do not ask any reward for it.” 2

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ations in the human soul. Through the undertaking of voluntary acts of worship, the seed of volunteerism is planted in human nature, making it part of one’s character. This then leads to a natural state of bringing voluntary acts into every facet of one’s life as can be seen in the life of Prophet Muhammad; his volunteerism was evident with his financial generosity but also with the generous time and energy he exerted on society, all done with expecting nothing in return from society. Viewing oneself as a vicegerent on earth creates a particular mindset of responsibility toward all creation. Rather than having the perspective of “I will consume what I want and do what I want without thinking about the consequences” it changes the perspective to “I am a caretaker on this earth and therefore I need to do all that I can to ensure everything is taken care of as they deserve.” This, in turn, generates an impulse to get involved in volunteerism as it is seen as a responsibility that needs to be fulfilled. This would be one of the reasons that many Muslims are involved in volunteerism. A number of research studies demonstrate this. According to Dunn et  al. (2015: 37), for example, 80.7 percent of Muslims made a charitable donation and 36.2 percent volunteered for a faith-based organization. There are many other examples of volunteering mentioned in this research. These statistics illustrate how much volunteerism is an inherent part of Muslim societies. Some examples of such volunteerism will be discussed in the last section of this chapter. Before giving examples of organizations which comprise volunteerism, it is important to understand what kind of acts are considered to be volunteerism according to the Qur’an and Hadith, the two primary sources for Muslims.

 ifferent Qur’anic Concepts in Relation D to Volunteerism In the Qur’an, many expressions are used regularly in referring to volunteerism in various contexts. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to comprehensively address them all, four particularly relevant concepts will be discussed here; tatawwu (volunteerism), fi sabilillah (for the sake of God), sadaqa (charity), and sadaqa jariya (perpetual charity).

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Tatawwu (Volunteerism) The Arabic concept best translated to volunteerism is al-tatawwu or tataw’iyyah, a word which is etymologically derived from the verb of tawa‘a. Tawa’a means performing an action willingly without any financial reward (Ibn Manzur 1883). In the sunnah and Islamic jurisprudence, it is a term used interchangeably with nafila (optional), which highlights the voluntary grading of an action in distinction from obligatory (fard). According to Lafi (cited in Sulaiman 2012), al-tatawwu acts are centered around • • • •

al-tabarru (contribution or donating), al-takalluf (taking upon oneself ), al-lin (leniency), and al-ta‘ah (compliance) (Lafi cited in Sulaiman 2012).

As these four terms suggest, volunteerism is an act that an individual takes on because they feel it is their moral responsibility. Peucker (2018) found in his study on Muslim intracommunity volunteering that 85 percent of surveyed Muslims feel religiously obliged to volunteer. While voluntary, a Muslim feels morally compelled to do the voluntary acts when a need is felt. The need is felt when there is a gap the state is unable to fill at all or is unable to fill well enough (Wiktorowicz 2012). Volunteerism provides services which are needed for a more stable and socially harmonious society benefiting everyone, including those making the contribution. Volunteers are called al-mutawwi‘ah in the Qur’an, meaning those who are al-mutawwi‘un (those who volunteers). In the Qur’an, this is mentioned explicitly in chapter 9 verse 79. This Qur’anic verse can be seen as defining volunteerism: “(Those) who give charity willingly (tatawwu) and the ones who find nothing [to spend] except their effort.” That is, non-­ financial effort for good actions is also considered as volunteerism. As can be seen, tatawwu (volunteerism) is a broad concept which encapsulates many other concepts and acts in Islam, with fi sabilillah (doing something for the sake of God) being one of those concepts which falls under tatawwu.

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Fi Sabilillah (Doing Something for the Sake of God) The literal meaning of sabil is the utilization of the resources without any expectation of return aside from obtaining God’s pleasure (At-Tabari n.d.). It is to dedicate for charitable purpose (Wehr and Cowan 2012). Fi is a harf jar (pronoun) in Arabic grammar, which means “in.” Technically, fi (in) can include time, wealth, energy, building, and, to the extent, could be everything. Fi sabilillah, which means to do something for the sake of God without worldly gain, is mentioned 39 times in the Qur’an (Abdul Baqi 1990). It is interesting to note that fi sabilillah is mentioned more than zakat (obligatory alms), one of the pillars of Islam, which is mentioned 31 times in the Qur’an (Abdul Baqi 1990). Furthermore, in the authentic Hadith collections,3 fi sabilillah is mentioned 708 times (Sunnah.com n.d.). The abundant mentioning of fi sabilillah demonstrates a strong presence of volunteerism in Islamic sacred texts. To put things in perspective, volunteerism (fisabilillah and tatawwu) are mentioned 42 times in the Qur’an and 817 times in authentic Hadith collections, while the five daily obligatory prayers (salat) are mentioned 94 times in the Qur’an (Abdul Baqi 1990) and 3,294 times in the authentic Hadith collections (Sunnah. com n.d.). The frequent mention of voluntary acts in no way undermines the importance of the (compulsory) pillars of Islam, such as the salat (five daily prayers) or zakat (obligatory alms). Instead, it shows the importance and theologization of volunteerism in Islam, which is done through the emphasis and repetition in the Qur’an and Hadith. Through the various mentioning of the importance of volunteerism, there is an expectation that Muslims should be involved in volunteerism based on the needs of their society. Another motivator for volunteerism is the strong presence of sadaqa (charity) in the Islamic literature.

 The authentic Hadith collections are: Sahih Bukhari, Sahih Muslim, Sunan al-Nasai, Sunan Abu Dawud, Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Sunan Ibn Maja, and Muwatta ibn Malik. 3

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Sadaqa (Charity) Fi sabilillah falls under tatawwu, and sadaqa (loosely translated as charity) falls under fi sabilillah. Sadaqa (charity) is an integral part of the Islamic tradition. In the Qur’an and Hadith, the word sadaqa has a broad meaning and is seen as a source of kindness and benevolence. It involves both charity toward others and refraining from harmful conduct. Therefore, sadaqa encompasses more than charity as understood in today’s society, where the latter is often associated primarily with giving money. Sadaqa is any act that benefits creation, whether it is through doing act of goodness that will show its positive effect on broader society or refraining from doing any acts that will harm society. In a sense, volunteerism is a strong element of sadaqa and cannot be limited to the understanding of giving money as charity. The importance of sadaqa in the Islamic tradition can be understood by the 13 times that it is mentioned in the Qur’an (Abdul Baqi 1990) and 1,070 times it is mentioned in the authentic Hadith collections (Sunnah.com n.d.). While donating money is one type of sadaqa, which is regularly mentioned in the Qur’an and Hadith, other forms of beneficial acts are also mentioned. Those who give sadaqa are praised in the Qur’an: “… the charitable men and charitable women… for them God has prepared forgiveness and a great reward” (Qur’an, 33:35). As indicated by this Qur’anic verse, there is a strong spiritual incentive for those who are involved in sadaqa. Another Qur’anic verse states Indeed, the men who practice charity (sadaqa) and the women who practice charity (sadaqa) and [they who] have loaned God a goodly loan ­(interest free)—it will be multiplied for them, and they will have a noble reward. (Qur’an, 57:18)

There are also various Hadiths that highlight the importance of sadaqa with further spiritual incentives offered for doing good. One such Hadith states “The believer’s shade on the Day of resurrection will be his sadaqa” (Tirmidhi, in Sunnah.com n.d.). The following Hadith demonstrates the real broadness of sadaqa: “Your smile is sadaqa. Your removal of stones, thorns, or bones from the paths of people is sadaqa. Your guidance of a

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person who is lost is sadaqa” (Bukhari in Sunnah.com n.d.). On another occasion, when an individual stated that he had nothing to give and had no means to help others, Prophet Muhammad responded “One does good deeds and refrains from evil deeds” (Bukhari in Sunnah.com n.d.). The Hadith arguably takes volunteerism to a new level from an Islamic perspective. Not only is volunteerism about doing good, even if it is the removal of a stone from the road, it also encapsulates abstaining from doing wrong acts for the benefit of all of creation. In the contemporary context, this can come in the form of not harming the environment, driving safely on the road in order not to harm others, not taking part in corruption, and so forth.

Sadaqa Jariya (Perpetual Charity) While there are different categories of sadaqa, which have been highlighted by scholars, one that has particularly important positive social impact is sadaqa jariya (perpetual charity). This type of charity is mentioned in the Hadith “When a person dies [the benefit] of his deeds ends, except three: a perpetual charity, knowledge from which benefit is derived, or a pious child” (Ahmad and Muslim in Sunnah.com n.d.). Perpetual charity is understood as an act an individual does which remains active even after they pass away. These kinds of charities are greatly encouraged as they are seen as an investment in humanity, undertaking an act which is not about self-benefit, but rather all of creation, even if one is no longer there to benefit from this act of goodness. Sadaqa jariya takes selflessness to another level. This notion of selflessness and volunteering is also emphasized in the Hadith “lay in the ground the plant at hand even if it is the Last Day” (Ahmad, Bukhari, Abu Dawud in Sunnah.com n.d.). Again, this plants the seeds in the individual to think beyond today, beyond the self, and thinking about what is right to do for all creation. Some examples given of such perpetual charity include building wells, mosques, schools, hospital, animal shelters, and other institutions and organizations, essential for a stable and harmonious society. They are the structure and services that ensure all of creation is provided with the best

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services for them to thrive and realize their potential. Volunteerism is so embedded in Islam due to the theologization of volunteerism as per the Qur’an and Hadith and is reinforced through multiple examples of its practice throughout Islamic history. This point will be further expanded upon in the next section.

Theologization of Volunteerism There is a strong correlation between volunteerism and faith. Often faith and good deeds, which include volunteerism, are mentioned together in the sacred texts of Islam. A strong faith means a greater focus on volunteerism. That is, there is a spiritual drive to do volunteerism. From the discussion provided thus far, it can be seen that volunteerism is considered an act of worship in the Islamic tradition, since it is any offer, deed, or presentation where the spiritual payment is expected only from God. Volunteerism is one of the components of prophetic character, as well as a significant practice of the companions of all prophets, saints (awliya), and great leaders in Islamic history. Various Islamic concepts tie back to volunteerism in one way or another. Volunteerism is seen as a path of morality. It is a way of righteousness to help the weak and poor and to do any act of goodness which benefits others, whether it be humanity, animals, or the environment. Volunteerism has also found its way into Sufism, the interior part of Islam where voluntary acts are seen as steps that need to be taken for the purification of the heart, to realize the truth, and for spiritual ascension. Thus, its necessity for spiritual growth is widely accepted in Islamic ­theology and spirituality. It is well documented that Sufi Masters view serving others voluntarily as service to God and a means to spiritual development. According to al-Ghazali (d.1111), serving others voluntarily is the highest stage of generosity (Al-Ghazzali 1993). Mawlana Jalal Din Muhammad Rumi (d.1273) viewed volunteerism in his center in Konya as the first step of learning and gaining the inner purification (Yucel 2017b). Ali Hajwuri (d.1077) suggested that serving others volun-

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tarily is the safest and shortest way of reaching the Reality4 after having faith in God and worshipping Him (Michon 1987). Hajwuri viewed everyone as his master who is a means to reaching the Truth and therefore sought to serve everyone with this purpose in mind. Historically, most of the great Sufi scholars have had a similar view of volunteerism, such as Bahaud Din Naqshband (d.1389), who spent three years in the service of animals for his own spiritual purification at the request of his spiritual master Amir Kulal (d.1363). He would stand up when an animal passed by as a gesture of respect (Kabbani 2004). Through these examples, it can be seen that all of creation is given utmost value to the degree that they need to be served. This value of creation has a theological basis, which led to the theologization of volunteerism. Prophet Muhammed said God, the Exalted and Glorious, would say on the Day of Resurrection: ‘O son of Adam, I was sick but you did not visit Me. He would say: O my Lord; how could I visit You whereas You are the Lord of the worlds? Thereupon He would say: Didn’t you know that such and such servant of Mine was sick but you did not visit him and were you not aware of this that if you had visited him, you would have found Me by him (Muslim in Sunnah.com n.d.).

As a result of the theologization of volunteerism, it has been taken very seriously in Islamic history. Also, it has been seen to be an obligatory duty during disasters, crises, and wars. This ruling of necessity is based on various examples provided in Qur’anic verses and the practices of Prophet Muhammad. For example, giving sadaqa (charity) was not fard (compulsory) like zakat but during the Tabuk expedition,5 the Companions donated it as an obligation to address the crisis at hand. Therefore, at times of crises, a voluntary act becomes a needed act. While this sounds like a paradox, it is not. It shows that the acts of volunteerism become an essential respon In Sufism, reaching the Reality (a comprehensive understanding of the Unity of God) is considered one of the aims of one’s spiritual life. There are various views on how this is attained. For Hajwuri, this is achieved through volunteerism. 5  News reached Prophet Muhammad that Byzantines were coming with a big army to attack Medina in 630, so the Prophet mobilized his companions for an expedition. The Muslim army reached Tabuk. However, the army returned without any fighting. 4

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sibility at times of need. A further point to be drawn from the Tabuk expedition is that different people donated different amounts. While this type of giving was not zakat (obligatory alms), Abu Bakr donated his entire wealth, and Omar donated half his wealth. Uthman donated 600 ounces of gold (Haylamaz 2014). However, these were the Companions who had such wealth which they could give. The community felt such a responsibility to give that they were thinking of creative and somewhat desperate ways to give since they did not have substantial monetary wealth. Abu Aqil al-Ansari was such an example; he worked as a porter one night and brought a handful of dates with half of his earnings as this was all he could afford. Some were critical of all the giving that were taking place (At-Tabari n.d.). They questioned the intention of those who gave generously, like Uthman, suggesting that he was showing off with his donation. They also criticized those who gave little, like Abu Aqil al-­ Ansari, who was giving a handful of dates, claiming that God was not in need of such donations. In response to this criticism, the following Qur’anic verse was revealed (Sunnah.com n.d.): “Those who criticize such of the Believers who give charity voluntarily and those who could not find to give in charity except what is available to them” (Qur’an, 9:79). In above Qur’anic verse, God is acknowledging the giving of all, great and small; some were criticized for giving too little while others were criticized for giving as a way of show. The Prophet took Abu Aqil’s dates and scattered it as a blessing upon all charitable wealth which was donated for the expedition. This incident sends a strong message that the quantity of the charity is not what is important but the intention. This has led to charity becoming an inherent part of Muslims’ life, no matter what their financial situation or their capacity may be. It is not the quantity of money, time, and energy that is provided, rather how much one gives based on their capacity. Another verse which theologizes volunteerism is Mobilize whether you are equipped lightly or heavily (and whether it be easy or difficult for you); and strive with your wealth and persons in God’s cause. Doing so is what is for your good, if you but know it. (Qur’an, 9:41)

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An examination of more than 30 classical and modern scholars’ exegetical works on this particular verse shows an overall consensus agreeing that every individual Muslim regardless of age, health, wealth, knowledge, and position must contribute to the extent they are capable of for overcoming existing crises, whatever that crisis may be. According to Jassas (d.981) and many other Qur’anic exegetes, during times of great need or crises it is an obligation for each Muslim to help (Jassas n.d.). As Krafess (2005: 329) argues it can be seen that whenever faith is evoked in the Qur’an, an injunction to react immediately follows and charitable acts are especially encouraged. The expression ‘those who believed and who did charitable works…’ is cited a considerable number of times in the Qur’an.

Islamic sacred texts show that volunteerism actions count for all time. Charitable works are considered as part of the faith6 by Imam Shafi’i (d.820), Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d.855), and Imam Malik (d.795), who are the founders of three major Islamic jurisprudential schools. To further highlight the importance given to volunteerism, it is worth noting how Islamic jurisprudence deals with this matter. There are fatwas (rulings) about volunteerism. These rulings show is that, if the basic needs of a community are not met, then everyone in that community becomes accountable for the absence of that need. This is called fard al-kifayah, which means a communal obligation or social responsibility. In recent Islamic literature, this terminology is used to discuss social responsibility, such as feeding the hungry, commanding good, and forbidding evil (Oxford Islamic Studies Online n.d.). For example, if someone dies due to starvation, each member of the community will be spiritually accountable for that individual. The Prophet says “If a person dies of hunger in a community, then all the residents of that community have put themselves outside God’s and the Prophet’s protection” (al-Mustardak in Krafess 2005: 328). Based on this Hadith, ulama (Islamic scholars) decreed that in such a case all the residents of the community would be condemned and should  For more detailed information, see Mohd Rosmizi (2014: 157–196).

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be judged because they failed to give assistance (Krafess 2005). If a member of the community passes away and there is no one in a position to undertake the funeral prayer and the person is not buried due to a lack of finances by the family, the whole community will be accountable for not fulfilling their responsibility toward a member of the community (Shurunbulali 2010; Bilmen 2003). Visiting sick and providing emotional and spiritual support voluntarily is another communal obligation for which everyone is spiritually accountable if it is not undertaken (Ibn Taymiyya 1997). Through multiple examples the responsibility of an individual toward the community is greatly emphasized. The communal responsibility has been well captured in the ethics and morality Islamic literature where responsibilities toward neighbors, orphans, homeless, destitute, children, animals, and the environment are spelt out clearly. Depending on the degree of education and spirituality, conscious Muslims usually feel accountable if they do not help in case of individual or communal need. It can be said that those who practice their religion feel accountable if there is no local mosque wherein to perform the Friday and Eid (celebratory) prayer in congregation. One reason for this is that the mosque is seen as the community center in the Islamic tradition. Not only does the mosque play a spiritual role, it also has an important role for social and mental well-being, a hub where all can gather for praying together and connecting with one another. To demonstrate the importance of the mosque on the context of social well-being, it can be noted that when a member of the congregation did not come to the mosque for a few days, the Prophet would enquire about them, asking if they were okay, demonstrating the communal aspect of the mosque. It is not surprising that when Muslims migrated to Australia, one of the first things they did was build mosques. Although it is not possible to map out the exact migration process for every single ethnic group, the two most important stages of coming to a new country is survival and settlement (Ozalp and Keskin 2015). Most of the initial volunteering done by Muslims in Australia when Muslims first migrated involved survival and settlement into their new homeland in a way they felt comfortable as a Muslim.

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 ontemporary Examples of Theologized C Volunteerism After the Second World War, while the White Australia immigration restrictions were still in place, only small numbers of Muslims, mainly from as Albania and Bosnia settled in Australia; they were followed, in the late 1960s and early 1970s by tens of thousands of Muslims especially from Turkey and Lebanon immigrating to Australia. They faced many difficulties, including, but not limited to, lack of infrastructure for burials of deceased ones and for performing Friday and Eid prayer, finding halal food, housing, a local doctor who can speak their language, and finding a job (Jupp 2001; Yucel 2010). One of the many examples of how this lack of religious infrastructure affected the emerging Muslim community is that corpses of the deceased had to stay in morgues for two weeks because there were no imams who could wash the body and perform the funeral service. Muslim migrants who knew English helped those who could not speak English, which meant constant voluntary dedication of time and services. Early Muslim arrivals rented halls for Eid prayers, giving of their own money for rent. Volunteers taught the basics of Islam to Muslim children in residential houses, involving men, women, young, and old. Others helped find rental property for those who needed accommodation, take a newcomer to the doctors or hospital when needed, support new mothers by cooking for them, and caring for their children. Many of the Muslim migrants had no family, so they depended on each other for support to meet their basic needs. Volunteerism for them became an act of obligatory worship due to the needs of their fledgling community to provide services that were unable to be provided by the government or other institutions. According to the stories of early immigrants in the late 1960s, the need to build mosques was felt immediately. Since the early arrival of Muslims, and now with the emergence of second- and third-generation Australian Muslims, new types of volunteerism have been emerging. Not having the language barriers that their parents and grandparents experienced, Muslims are integrating into other

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civil society and community groups and establishing their own organizations in specialized areas in order to better serve the wider community. There is a growing number of youths who feel it is their obligation to volunteer for the community and by doing so to “give back” to the community (see also Peucker’s chapter in this book). This could be, for example, by volunteering at the school they graduated from, providing free tutoring for students, or offering advice and mentoring in order to better prepare them for life after they have completed school. Another example are the many Muslim student associations that have been established in almost every Australian university, run by university student volunteers with the purpose of providing social and spiritual support for Muslim students studying at those universities. The number of education-related community organizations, which are built on volunteerism, has also been significantly growing in response to an increasingly expressed need from Muslims seeking to better understand their faith in order to navigate through life as a better Muslim. Amath (2015) interviewed 15 leading people from different Muslim organizations which are built on volunteerism. These organizations provide different types of services to the Muslim community, demonstrating breadth and diversity of Muslim civil society groups responding to an array of needs. The Islamic Science & Research Academy of Australia (ISRA)7 is one of the many organizations that focus on education and being built on volunteerism.8 Seeing it as their moral obligation to educate members of the community, ISRA was established in 2010 to serve the community. While there are paid staff within the organization, it is a not-for-profit organization with currently over 50 volunteers. Without the contribution of these volunteers, many of the ISRA initiatives could not be undertaken.9 Another education organization which is, like most or even all Muslim community organizations, heavily dependent on volunteering is Benevolence.10 Being another not-for-profit organization, it is through a  Both authors are affiliated with ISRA.  https://www.isra.org.au/about-isra. 9  The website gives an indication of the type of events organized by ISRA. 10  http://www.benevolenceaustralia.org. 7 8

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whole volunteering system that the various initiatives such as courses, camps, talks, including school talks, and workshops are undertaken. The volunteers are the backbone of such organizations, as they give of their time and their finances to keep them running. A recent study of mosques and other Muslim community group in Victoria found that all surveyed Muslim community organizations relied on the support of volunteers (Peucker 2017: 27). One area of focus among Muslim volunteers is women-related issues, including support for victims of domestic violence, empowering Muslim women, and educating wider society about the misconceptions that exist about Muslim women. One of the oldest Muslim organizations in Australia with a focus on women is the Muslim Women Association (MWA), established in 1983 in Sydney’s west.11 MWA seeks to provide “Muslim women with the full opportunities to enable them to develop as full individuals with rights and responsibilities as a member of society” (MWA 2017). There is also a youth focus emerging as the needs of Muslim youth is becoming more and more apparent. They include, among many other youth work services, initiatives supporting Muslims with drug and alcohol issues, such as Hayat House Drug and Alcohol (HHDA) (Hayat House n.d.) in Sydney.12 HHDA is “designed to be a culturally appropriate, community-based drug and alcohol addictions rehabilitation program that meets the needs of Sydney’s diverse Muslim community” (Hayat House n.d.). There are also organizations that are specifically aimed at providing support for youth in order to better equip them for work and life skills. Muslim Professionals Association is an example of such an organization, which is also purely run by volunteers, offering professional and personal development services, including workshops and mentoring.13 While a majority of Muslim volunteering currently takes place within Muslim organizations, it may be that volunteerism will be taken to another level with the maturing of the Muslim community. It is not that  https://mwa.org.au.  http://www.missionofhope.org.au/HHDA. 13  http://muslimprofessionals.com.au. 11 12

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volunteering in non-Muslim organizations is non-existent. In a research done by Peucker (2018), Muslims who volunteer with a Muslim community group, simultaneously volunteer for a non-Muslim group (see also Peucker’s chapter in this book). However, the volunteering is not equally distributed between Muslim and non-Muslim organizations. More Muslims will volunteer in organizations and institutes that are not run by Muslims such as the feeding the homeless, helping refugees, firefighting, animal shelters, and support for the elderly. This may be because the basic needs of the Muslim community were a top priority and most volunteerism still happens in this space. There is a continuance of building mosques, establishing schools, establishing community organizations, and addressing women- and youth-related issues. Now that there are a number of organizations in these areas and there are large numbers of third-generation Australian Muslims emerging, the integrative volunteerism would be a space to observe. We suggest that it is only a matter of time that it will expand, since theologized volunteerism is a part of the Islamic tradition. While there are significant efforts in volunteerism in the Australian Muslim community, there is still a great deal missing in terms of governance, sustainability, and integration to the wider community. Much of the focus has been on volunteering on faith-based services and organizations. The Australian Muslim community is struggling to thrive and is constantly under the stress of caring or providing religious services for new immigrants. There may be a greater focus on general volunteering by future generations who are expressing desires to branch out. These could be successful if the socio-economic conditions of various Muslim ­communities improve and there is a greater nationwide acceptance of Muslims, which is one of the key elements to integration.

Conclusion Volunteerism is an embedded part of the Islamic tradition due to its strong presence in the Qur’an and Sunnah. There a multiples examples of teachings highlighting the importance of the various forms of volunteering. Common to the different types of volunteering is that they are

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undertaken with one’s time, money, and energy, based on the individual’s capacity without expecting anything in return from anyone but God. This makes volunteerism a theological and spiritual concept as there are no worldly benefits. Despite the “expect nothing in return from people” philosophy, the theologization of volunteerism compels Muslims to become involved in all types of services according to need, whether it be financial, social, educational, mental, health, animal, environmental, or any other type of service, which will enable Muslims to fulfill their responsibility as a khalifa (vicegerent). Volunteerism has such a strong presence in Islam with various Islamic concepts being directly and indirectly linked to the notion of volunteerism. These include tawattu (volunteerism), fi sabilillah (doing something for the sake of God), sadaqa (charity), and sadaqa jariya (perpetual charity). As emphasized, these four concepts are not inclusive of all aspects of volunteerism, though they do provide an entry point for a deeper understanding of volunteerism in Islam. However, the discussion of these four concepts along with examples from Islamic history would have provided an appreciation of how much volunteerism in its various forms is part and parcel of Islam.

References Abdul Baqi, M.  F. (1990). Al-mu’jamu’l mufahras li alfaz al-Quran al-Karim. Istanbul: Cagri Yayinlari. Al-Alusi, M. (1975). Ruhul ma’ani fi tafsir al-Quran al-‘azem [The Spirit of Meanings in the Exegesis of the Great Qur’an]. Vol. 11. Beirut, Lebanon: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya. Al-Ghazzali, A.M. (1993). The Revival of Religious Learnings: Imam Gazzali’s Ihya ulum-id-din (F. Karim, Trans.). Karachi: Darul-Ishaat. Amath, N. S. (2015). Australian Muslim Civil Society Organisations: Pathways to Social Inclusion. Journal of Social Inclusion, 6(1), 6–34. At-Tabari. (n.d.). Jamiu’l Bayan. Retrieved November 25, 2018, from https:// www.altafsir.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=1&tTafsirNo=1&tSoraNo=2&tAya hNo=108&tDisplay=yes&Page=4&Size=1&LanguageId=1 Bilmen, O. N. (2003). Buyuk Islam ilmihali. Istanbul: Kitas Kitap.

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Dunn, K. M., Atie, R., Mapedzahama, V., Ozalp, M., & Aydogan, A. (2015). The Resilience and Ordinariness of Australian Muslims. Sydney: ISRA/Charles Sturt University. Haylamaz, R. (2014). Prophet Muhammad: The Sultan of Hearts, Volume 2. Clifton, NJ: Tughrah Books. Ibn Manzur. (1883). Lisan al-Arab, matbat al-kubra al-miriyyah. Egypt: Bullag Misr al-Matb’ah al-Kubra al-‘Amiriyah. Retrieved January 6, 2019, from https://archive.org/details/lisanalarab01ibnmuoft/page/984 Ibn Taymiyya. (1997). Al-Ikhtiyaaraat. Yarmuk: Daru’l Asima. Jassas, A. (n.d.). Ahkam al-Qur’an. Retrieved December 1, 2018, from https:// archive.org/stream/Jassas001AhkamalquranJasasVol1/jassas001%20 Ahkamalquran%20Jasas%20vol%201#mode/2up Jupp, J. (ed.). (2001). Muslims. In The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People, and Their Origins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kabbani, M.  H. (2004). Classical Islam and the Naqshbandi Sufi tradition. Fenton, MI: Islamic Supreme Council of North America. Krafess, J. (2005). The Influence of the Muslim Religion in Humanitarian Aid. International Review of Res Cross, 87(858), 327–342. Michon, J. (1987). The Spiritual Practices of Sufism. In S. H. Nasr (Ed.), Islamic Spirituality: Foundations (pp.  265–293). New  York, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Mission of Hope. (n.d.). Hayat House. Retrieved August 10, 2019, from https:// missionofhope.org.au/hayat-house/. Mohd Rosmizi, A. R. (2014). Good Deeds in Christianity and Islam: Comparing the Perspectives of Augustine and al-Ghazali (Unpublished PhD thesis). Monash University. Muslim Women Association. (2017). 34th Annual Report 2017. Retrieved January 4, 2018, from https://mwa.org.au/site/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/ MWA-Annual-Report-2017.pdf Oxford Islamic Studies Online. (n.d.). Fard al-Kifayah. Retrieved January 7, 2019, from http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t125/e625 Ozalp, M., & Keskin, Z. (2015). Muslim Identity Threshold. In D.  Iner & S.  Yucel (Eds.), Muslim Identity Formation in Religiously Diverse Societies (pp. 208–230). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Peucker, M. (2017). The Civic Potential of Muslim Community Organisations for Promoting Social Cohesion in Victoria. Melbourne: Victoria University. Peucker, M. (2018). Muslim Community Volunteering: The Civic-Religious ‘Culture of Benevolence’ and Its Sociopolitical Implications. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1543020.

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Shurunbulali, H. A. (2010). Nur al-idah: The Light of Clarification (W. Charkawi, Trans.). Retrieved January 19, 2019, from https://archive.org/details/NurAlidah-TheLightOfClarification/page/n13 Sulaiman, K.  O. (2012). Volunteerism from Islamic Perspective. In A.  K. H.  Solihu (Ed.), The Islamic Worldview, Ethics and Civilization: Issues in Contemporary Interdisciplinary Discourse. Kuala Lumpur: IIUM Press. Sunnah.com. (n.d.). Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://sunnah.com/ Wehr, H., & Cowan, J. (2012). A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic. New York, NY: Snowball Publishing. Wiktorowicz, Q. (2012). Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Yucel, S. (2010). The Struggle of Ibrahim: Biography of an Australian Muslim. Clifton, NJ: Tughrah Books. Yucel, S. (2017a). A Life in Tears. Clifton, NJ: Tughra Books. Yucel, S. (2017b). Rumi: The Marriage of Heart and Mind in the Service of Spiritual Education. Transcendent Philosophy, 29(18), 141–161.

3 Volunteering, Charitable Work, and Muslims: Divine Inspiration, Parallel Networks, and Facts on the Ground Thijl Sunier

Introduction Already for quite a number of years there has been an ongoing debate in Dutch media about money flowing from charity funds in Gulf countries to Muslim organizations in the country and, vice versa, charity work of Muslims in the Netherlands for victims of the war in Syria. The debate centers on the question what motives there are behind these gifts and what intentions (or even “hidden agendas”) the benefactors as well as the beneficiaries have. There was particular concern about the Qatar-based Eid Charity fund that redistributes gifts from wealthy business men in the Gulf, who would fulfill their duty as pious Muslims in this way. One case was about a donation in 2016 of 1.5 million Euro allegedly to set up a Salafi center in the city of Rotterdam. According to critics, the center, under the disguise of charity work for the community, would become a hotbed of radical Islamic indoctrination. The building for the center was bought by the Al T. Sunier (*) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_3

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Nour foundation, which, according to the journalist who brought the case up, was a well-known Salafi organization in Europe. Local and national politicians expressed their concerns and declared to do everything to prevent the spread of “radical Islam” in the country. Worries about cases such as this one, also concern the Islamic organizational landscape in general, and often focus on the alleged existence of so-called parallel organizational structures with strong transnational links that function as channels for money flows, theological indoctrination, and political influence. In another recent case, the concerns centered on the possible motives of volunteers, collecting goods and money for victims of the war in Syria. A Turkish-Dutch man with good contacts in the border area between Turkey and Syria was accused of supporting Jihadi groups in Syria. In this case, the benefactors were charity organizations in Europe working for the well-being of refugees from Syria. The accused man acted as an intermediary for Dutch and German charity funds, set up by Muslims, with relief projects in refugee camps. Although the charity funds emphasized that they did not know about the alleged contacts of the man with Jihadi groups, and although the evidence supporting the allegations was rather weak, the event was framed in accusatory language full of suspicion and distrust toward charity work by Muslims in Europe. The main concern in this case was whether or not the charity funds did know where the collected help would go to. The cases are illustrative of the argument I want to elaborate in this chapter. Muslims are active in many different fields, but cases such as these reach the media and add to the insinuations that these charity organizations are not transparent and the supposedly “real” motives remain hidden. Consequently, motives behind voluntary work are often met with suspicion. To understand dynamics and debates concerning Muslims and volunteering in Europe, we need to contextualize activities of Muslims and perceptions of the surrounding society. These activities should be assessed against the background of the evolving organizational landscape among Muslims in Europe. Thus, voluntary activities performed by Muslims in Europe are always perceived and evaluated as part of an integration discourse. Perceptions about these activities are rooted in the formative years of national integration policies in European host

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countries. Although these policies have nation-specific characteristics, the idea that organizational activities of Muslims are primarily perceived as activities of migrants and that they hamper integration into the host society is to be found everywhere in Europe. Although the majority of Muslims involved in present-day voluntary work cannot possibly be called migrants, the influence of this line of reasoning is still strong. Especially the second case described above is exemplary of the concerns about “real” motives behind charitable work initiated by Muslims in Europe. Sincerity, genuine motivation, and procedural decency and transparency surround all charity work. Thus, goals, methods, and the modus operandi of the organization should be morally sound. Charitable work by Muslim organizations is particularly scrutinized in this respect. Charitable work is closely connected to notions of sincerity, inspiration, reciprocity, and inner drives. For a combination of reasons, these principles are particularly crucial in the case of Muslims. In unfolding this argument, I will take the Netherlands as a case.

 ivic Engagement, Parallel Structures, C and Shadow Networks Voluntary work and charitable activities can be assessed as modalities of civic engagement as the editors of this volume indicate in their introduction chapter. Wilson and Musick (1997) point at the integrative mechanisms of voluntary work and refer to Bourdieu’s notion of social and cultural capital (see also Peucker’s chapter). In his work on Italian and American civil society and political participation, Putnam (1994, 2007) analyzes how individuals are linked to state and society through informal networks and organizations. Community-building, organizational development, and the existence of social networks are necessary conditions for the functioning of a democracy. Thus, according to Putnam, active citizenship comes about predominantly through networks and organizations. It is the most common way in which citizens establish contacts and arrange things and connect to the formal institutions of the state. He introduced the concept of civic community. The closer the networks of

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organizational relationships are, the stronger this civic community becomes. Putnam argues that participation in society is dependent on the degree of confidence and trust that individual citizens develop toward the state. In situations where citizens are hardly or not at all connected to informal organizational networks, a fundamental trust in the functioning of the state cannot be developed, and so they are tempted to turn away from society (Putnam 1994, 2007). Putnam distinguishes two types of organizational development and introduces the conceptual pairing of bonding and bridging (1994, 2007). Bonding and bridging are seemingly opposing modes of engagement. Bonding refers to the degree to which individual citizens are active in their own networks and organizations, while bridging refers to the ways in which links with the wider society are developed and maintained. Putnam is not very explicit about the distinction between bonding and bridging, but his analytical frame suggests that the two modalities in his model cannot be separated. His analytical model seems to be “neutral” without a normative evaluation of activities. In practice, however, bonding and bridging have taken on a normative meaning. When applied to voluntary activities of Muslims, Putnam’s analytical frame brings about an intriguing puzzle: Is Muslim voluntary work predominantly bonding activity, or is it also bridging and constitutive of the texture of society? What kinds of activities are included in civic engagement? How to determine which activities are constitutive and which ones are not, and who decides about this? In 2005, the Dutch Ministry of Health and Welfare issued a report with the main question as to how to explain the differences in the proportion of people participating in voluntary work (Klaver et al. 2005). A couple of years later two authoritative Dutch government advisory boards, the Central Office for Statistics and the Social Policy Office, issued reports on voluntary work among Muslims, which also revealed lower levels of voluntary participation of Muslims.1 However, explanations about the figures are mostly absent. How voluntary work is defined and why Muslims are apparently volunteering less than non-Muslims is not explained in these surveys (see also Sunier  https://www.movisie.nl/feiten-en-cijfers/feiten-cijfers-vrijwillige-inzet (accessed 20 December 2016). 1

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2018). The outcomes of these surveys did not provide clear answers as to why the proportion of people with a migrant background who did voluntary work was lower than among the rest of society. The survey of 2005 also revealed that if participating in activities of religious organizations would be included in the calculation, the percentages of people doing voluntary work would hardly differ from the rest of society. This is precisely the observation that confirms the general image that Muslims are concerned with themselves rather than with society at large. And it raises another question, namely, what the wider implications of such figures are? What do they tell us about what? Civic engagement is by definition a participatory activity and a way of becoming citizen. On what grounds and with which criteria are activities of Muslims evaluated? Apparently, activities of Muslims are predominantly considered as “undesirable” bonding activities, creating parallel social structures and networks. A couple of years ago, I carried out research commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment on the state of affairs with regard to Turkish Islamic organizations in the Netherlands (see Sunier and Landman 2014). Islamic organizations are by definition voluntary organizations. Only imams are sometimes paid, but most of the work is unpaid. Politicians had asked the minister to commission this research after a number of incidents that took place in 2013. There was a general concern that the integration of Turkish Muslims into Dutch society was problematic. References and reactions regularly point at the possible role of Turkish religious movements and organizations and their influence on opinions and outlooks. Turkish Islamic organizations would openly reject Dutch basic values ​​and standards. They could be the cause of the fact that most Turks in the Netherlands live in their own community and pertain to values that are not in line with “Dutch values.” According to advisory reports, Turkish Muslims are “internally oriented” compared to other groups (SCP 2012: 12). Also, activities by volunteers in these organizations were said to be more focused on “the own community” than on society as a whole. In this context, the concept of “parallel community” was often used as a relevant criterion for integration. The concept appeared in the opinion pages of newspapers and in weeklies, in policy notes, and in public debates and turned into a “category of practice” (Brubaker and Cooper 2000) to express concerns about the

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Muslim communities and the allegedly undesirable practices of Muslim organizations. While “parallel community” is seldom clearly defined, it usually refers to supposedly closed communities that isolate themselves from society, use their own norms and values that are at odds with those of the majority, and also impose their own rules of conduct on their members (Ceylan 2010). In the debate, the term has often replaced segregation and functions as the opposite of integration. The definition of integration applied by the government is telling (italics are mine): A person or group is integrated into Dutch society when there is equal legal position, equal participation in the socio-economic field, and knowledge of the Dutch language and when current values, norms and behavioural patterns are respected. (…) In addition to the values and norms that are embedded in the law, there are also unwritten rules that make functioning in society easier and therefore important for newcomers to orient themselves. (Blok Commission 2004: 521)

Following this line of argumentation, the development of parallelism is not only perceived as a form of associational isolation; it apparently also leads to undesirable behavioral patterns and values. Parallelism has a number of dimensions; for the issue at stake in this chapter, I concentrate on social relationships, networks and organizations, and so-called value conformity. The socio-organizational dimension of parallel society relates to networks, connections, and informal structures and organizational forms. Parallelism in a socio-organizational sense refers to the relative autonomy and internal dynamics of social connections and networks. It also refers to the vertical and horizontal stratification of society on the basis of socio-­ economic, spatial, institutional and functional differences. In the latter respect, it is mainly reflected in the discussions on the situation in the labor market, in the living environment and at school, and mainly relates to the question of how great the segregation is between migrants and the indigenous population. The notion of parallel society also surfaced in 2007 in discussions and debates about the policy toward poor residential areas. Although the term

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that was being applied most often was segregation as a predominantly socio-economic issue, there was an implicit connection with activities of parallel organizational networks. The relationship between socio-­ economic factors and (ethnic or cultural) community-building is complicated. What begins as a complex of personal networks that have developed through migration to Europe can develop into a basis for ethnic or religious organization. The origins of the organizational landscape of migrants are related to the specific position they had in the 1970s and 1980s. The informal networks that developed in the 1970s had a strong personal character. A large proportion of the migrants were received here by compatriots who had preceded them. These pioneers played an important role as intermediaries between migrants and the host society. Werbner (1991) argues that organizational development among migrants goes through three crucial stages. In the first stage, there is what she calls “associational efflorescence” or the flourishing of associations (Werbner 1991: 15). There is a wide range of local, relatively independent organizations and associations. In the second stage, “ideological convergence,” common objectives and a common discourse are formulated and mutual cooperation is strengthened (1991: 16). In the third stage, mobilization of the organizational infrastructure is used in concrete objectives (1991: 17). A similar development took place among Islamic organizations. Processes of organizational development among Muslims as they occur in the Netherlands are historically specific phenomena that must be viewed in time and context (Sunier 1996). After 1983, the networks among Muslims got a more permanent character. On pragmatic grounds, the government gave them a mediating role in the integration process. This has given an important impetus to local organizational development among migrants. As far as Turkish Islamic organizations are concerned, the involvement of the Turkish government and various Islamic movements from the second half of the 1970s has given an important stimulus to the formation of the organization in Europe.2  Similar developments took place among Muslims of Moroccan background.

2

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The development of the organizational landscape and the socio-­ economic and social position of migrants were closely linked to one another. With regard to the Dutch context, interesting parallels can be observed with the way in which the pillarization came about in the Netherlands. The Dutch pillarized society and post-war disintegration of the pillars are often wrongly attributed only to religious diversity and structures imposed from above (see Lijphart 1968). However, the foundation of the pillarized religious order was the distribution of resources and services in which informal networks were crucial. The proverbial “Catholic pigeon association,” the “Protestant football club,” or the “Socialist friends of nature association” played an essential role in the distribution of resources in the absence of a central welfare state. Before the welfare state developed after the Second World War, the pillars formed an essential part of the mechanism of wealth distribution (Adriaansens and Zijderveld 1981: 98). Dutch pillarized society had two crucial characteristics. The first characteristic was the religionization of social life. A pillar was not just a religious community, but a system that was an integral part of the so-called welfare society, the forerunner of the modern welfare state. Education, welfare, and healthcare were a matter of the pillarized structure and of the pillarized private initiative. Also, voluntary activities were organized along the lines of the religious pillars. The pillars were also the basis for the distribution of power and influence and the shaping of democracy (Stuurman 1983). Until well into the 1960s, when welfare, healthcare, and education were almost entirely financed by the state, much of the pillar structure still remained. The Dutch pillar system could to a certain extent be perceived as a form of parallelism. Although the rise of the centrally led welfare state has largely disrupted the foundations of the pillarized society, this does not mean that the pillars lost their position and power immediately. They became part of the typical post-war civil society and as such were constitutive of Dutch political culture. A modern democracy is supported by a well-developed civil society that can function autonomously. In the Dutch case, Christian parties dominated the political scene well into the 1990s. For a long time, Christian political parties held the view that a contemporary form of pillarization is the best way for religious minorities to integrate into society,

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including Muslims (see, for example, Klop 1982). After 2000, they have gradually abandoned this position with respect to Muslims. The migrants’ own networks have also been used in various ways over the years in activities that took place at the interface between their own community and society. Böcker (1994) carried out research into informal self-help networks among migrants in the late 1980s (see also Ireland 2004). There were local networks of migrants who helped and assisted each other, but there were also people who had the necessary social, financial, and cultural capital and managed to acquire a central position in the community. In Rotterdam, Islamic organizations played an important role as communication channels between the municipality and the local population in urban renewal at the beginning of the 1990s (Sunier 1996). In various cities, there have been so-called neighborhood father projects for many years in order to prevent problems with young people. These initiatives also rest on informal networks. The relevance of the organizational networks among Muslims was the focus of a research project conducted by the Amsterdam-based Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies in 1999 and commissioned by the Ministry of the Interior on the political participation of ethnic minorities. In the study, the authors stated that an important cause for the higher degree of political participation among Turks (as compared to Moroccans) was related to their organizational strength. Organizational networks are thus an important condition for the integration process (Van Heelsum et al. 2001: 70; Penninx and Slijper 1999). This has been substantiated by other research as well (see, for example, Tillie 2006; Crul and Schneider 2010). In addition, migrants developed and maintained contacts and networks across national borders. Transnational networks and organizations are also seen as an impediment to integration. These types of networks are considered to be a relic from the time of migration and therefore no longer functional. Orientation on the country of origin is then almost the opposite of participation in the receiving society. Various studies have shown that this form of orientation has gradually decreased and that new forms of orientation have taken the place in the next generations (see Baumann and Sunier 1995; Lucassen et al. 2006). An important characteristic of these networks was certainly their strong connection with the

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country of origin, in the first phase of migration. These connections were of a personal nature, oriented toward the region of origin, and had important financial dimensions (property of estates, expecting to send money, etc.). In subsequent years and among the next generations, the nature of these transnational relations changed. Mügge (2010) conducted research into the nature of transnational activities among Turkish, Kurdish, and Surinamese migrants and their descendants. She argues that transnational networks certainly had a personal component in the first generation of migrants but not in subsequent generations. Many transnational activities have taken place on the basis of ties, from politics and culture to economics (see also Vertovec 2009). Moreover, Mügge states that the size and importance of transnational networks is often overestimated. Many studies on transnational activities are about highly developed and institutionalized practices that easily give the impression that every migrant is part of it and is working on it intensively, but that may not always be the case (Mügge 2010: 34). All these activities can be depicted as associational efflorescence to paraphrase Werbner. The question then is why initially these activities were perceived relatively positively, but took on a much more negative image around the turn of the century. This brings me to the second part of my argument that concerns religion as a motivational force for voluntary activities.

Motives, Inspirations, and Intentions As stated in the beginning, there are concerns about “real” motives behind charitable work initiated by Muslims in Europe. Two main reasons account for that suspicion. They are to a large extent related to the historical account about the organizational landscape I just sketched. An important aspect of these developments was the discursive shift that occurred in the 1980s in which migrants “became” Muslims. Elsewhere, I have called this shift the “Islamization of migrants” (Sunier and Van Kuijeren 2002). But these concerns are also grounded in the “subjective

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turn” that accompanied the gradual secularization of society in the 1960s and 1970s. There is an abundance of evidence that individuals do not have only one orientation, but many, depending on context and situation (Baumann and Gingrich 2004). Different value orientations and cultural frames of reference used by an individual may appear contradictory from the outside but are logically linked to one another for the person in question. Besides, behavior, action, and community-building cannot always be directly deduced from cultural orientations or ethnic loyalties (Baumann 1996). Despite this, politicians consider value conformity to be vital for the cohesion in society. Parallelism as a problem is closely linked with the discussion about value conformity. As a national political ideal worth pursuing, it has become a crucial aspect of contemporary integration policies and the increasing cultural underpinnings of citizenship (Duyvendak and Scholten 2012). The existence of different value systems side by side not only hampers integration but also brings society as a whole in jeopardy, it is argued. For this reason, the value aspects of parallelism are probably even more urgent for policy makers than the organizational aspects addressed above. Even though the idea that the world consists of a mosaic of clearly distinguishable cultural communities is analytically and empirically untenable and cultural values are situational and dynamic (Carrithers 1992), policy makers want measurable criteria for cultural and religious orientations in order to be able to judge organizations. In the academic debate on integration and value orientation, we generally see two positions. Critics of value pluralism argue that a society in order to function and to generate social cohesion needs consensus. Opinions differ on the level of cultural homogeneity, but there is a general consensus among critics of value pluralism that homogenization is necessary (see, for example, Schnabel 1999). Moral objectivism, as this is called in political philosophy, is considered to be counter to the principle of equality of cultures. Moral objectivism is based on the conviction that one’s own values have universal validity and prevail over other values. This can be modern liberalism (see, for example, Cliteur 2002), but moral objectivism can also be based on a religious doctrine.

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Against this moral objectivism, however, quite a lot has also been brought in from a philosophically liberal point of view. It is precisely the appeal to the universality of certain values that can lead to intransigence and easily degenerate into emphasizing cultural boundaries, which could endanger the open character of society (see Prins 2004; Trappenburg and Pellikaan 2003). Rorty (1979) has argued that it should not be about imposing a moral framework on others by condemning dissenting views but by jointly looking for what he calls “shared understandings” (see also Trappenburg and Pellikaan 2003). This is a procedural solution to emerge from the moral stalemate that implies value pluralism. Rawls chose a slightly different angle, although he also explored an approach that transcends ideological differences without becoming a morally normative straightjacket. He states that a society is always made up of people who think very differently about what the good life implies. In order to arrive at a “liveable” society in such a situation, the principle of justice must precede, according to Rawls, an endless discussion about who is morally right. Rawls wants to arrive at a “minimal basis of morality.” People who think very differently about all kinds of things must be able to deal with each other on the basis of justice and equality (Rawls 1971). In this respect, Rawls belongs to those philosophers, including Hobbes and Rousseau, who regard society as a social contract, a comparison on how to deal with each other. Against this equality principle, a lot has been argued (see Laden 2003). Especially Rawls’ “ontological emptiness” and his emphasis on procedure rather than content has made his ideas less applicable to the cases discussed here. In Germany, the debate on value consensus and parallel communities has been going on for some time. There, the concepts Parallelgesellschaft and Leitkultur are explicitly used in the debate. In Germany, too, the question whether value pluralism endangers social cohesion in a society is central to the debate. Schiffauer (2008) concludes that cultural homogeneity certainly never existed in larger social contexts, but that it is often used rhetorically as a characteristic of an earlier but now disappearing homogeneous society. He notes that it is important to strive for optimal participation of all citizens in society, but that value conformity is not a necessary condition for that.

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Critics of moral objectivism are certainly not all supporters of cultural relativism, but argue that value pluralism is an inherent characteristic of an open society. There are always parallel communities in a society, and the view that societies have a common system of core values ​​is empirically untenable. In recent decades, cultural diversity has not increased so much, but the receiving society has increasingly started to view that diversity as problematic. With this, moral objectivism has gained influence (Schinkel and Van Houdt 2010; Van Reekum 2012). As a result, cultural homogeneity is increasingly seen as a necessary goal. The discussion about value pluralism is closely linked to the discussion about multiculturalism. Duyvendak and Scholten question the dominant view that the Netherlands conducted a multicultural integration policy in the 1980s and 1990s. In practice, this policy was considerably more complex and pragmatic (Duyvendak and Scholten 2012; see also Bowen et al. 2014). They also argue that the criticism of the alleged multicultural integration model of the Netherlands often serves as a legitimation for a policy that places greater emphasis on cultural assimilation (Duyvendak and Scholten 2012). The concept of citizenship has rendered a cultural interpretation in the past two decades. What is the relevance for the analysis of motives behind voluntary work among Muslims? In the previous section, I indicated that voluntary activities of Muslims, including charitable work, are being monitored more rigorously that activities of other volunteers including those who are religiously inspired. One important reason for that is parallelism. The growing emphasis on cultural assimilation in integration policies in European countries in the past decade has not only generated an increasingly culturalist understanding of citizenship (Duyvendak and Scholten 2012), with concomitant participatory practices but it also favors only one specific conception of how individuals are connected to society, and how and through what channels, networks, and trajectories they engage with society and identify with the common good. This is generally linked to a set of core values that are presumed to constitute society. Forms of engagement that do not fit these assumptions are deemed irrelevant or even counterproductive and are virtually delegitimized in the dominant integration discourse. This mono-cultural approach to societal ­engagement that can be observed in policy documents ignores, and even

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rejects, the increasing diversity within society and the complex dynamics at play. This ties in with the critical discussion about the normative underpinnings of the concept of social capital, civic engagement, and the meaning of trust. Trust in this understanding is constitutive of the dominant social order (see Tonkiss 2004). The strong normative underpinning of what “proper” civic engagement and social capital entails generates criteria of what legitimate voluntary work is. This is not just a matter of formulating criteria about levels of participation, engagement, and commitment to the common good; it implicitly solicits one single moral frame of reference. Not only does it delegitimize alternative forms of engagement, but it also makes Muslims who take part in general initiatives of social engagement such as voluntary work suspicious in advance. To put it differently, the insinuation goes like this: “if a Muslims does voluntary work, there is probably a double agenda.” It touches implicitly, and in many cases explicitly, on what is considered sincere and unconditioned dedication. By implication, it in fact delegitimizes other forms of engagement and reciprocity. I will come back to that further on. In short, concepts such as social capital, civic engagement, and trust refer to participatory mechanisms and motivations into a dominant social order and this renders certain practices and activities as legitimate and constitutive of social cohesion and other as illegitimate or at least not functional. In the best case, it makes certain grounds for motivational inspiration “outdated,” not of this era anymore. A discussion I witnessed illustrates this. During a public seminar on voluntary work and neighborhood participation, a representative of an umbrella organization of Muslims in the Netherlands and a local politician had a conversation about the concerns raised by Dutch politicians on the alleged emergence of parallel societal structures among Muslims. The politician expressed his worries about the idea that many Muslims (i.e., people with a migration background) hardly participate in mainstream society but instead live almost exclusively in networks, associations, and societal structures that function relatively independently from society and are controlled by community leaders, religious leaders, and organizational structures that are for a large part beyond the control of the state. The more services and

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support these networks provide to their constituency, the more dependent individual Muslims become on these structures, and the more isolated they tend to live from the rest of society. Not only does this kind of dependency hinder individuals to exert their agency in societal matters and to take their own decisions, so the argument goes, it also makes integration into society (in this case of Muslims) increasingly difficult. During the discussion, the politician expressed his worries about the activities of local Islamic associations which may verbally express their willingness to participate in mainstream society, but in fact spend most of their energy and time in religious activities for their own community, which, according to the politician, could not possibly be considered as very integrative. Instead of stimulating young people to socialize with non-Muslims, to take part in society, and to develop their own opinion, they lock them up in a socially and discursively closed community. They teach them all about Islam, but do not in any way prepare them for society at large. The Muslim representative on his part tried to explain that “being in this world” and actively engaging with the surrounding society is of course the duty of every good citizen, but it is also the duty of a virtuous Muslim, ordained and sanctioned by God. He explained that care for the needy, doing charitable work, voluntary activities, building local networks, and actively engaging with society is essential for being a good Muslim and a moral obligation. In other words, the representative expressed an alternative conception of the common good and social justice. This argument did not impress the politician in any way because he considered activities developed by Islamic organizations as religious activities. Religious activity is a broad generalizing and unspecific policy category used in policy reports to denote those activities that pertain to religion and thus should be separated from activities that are considered secular. Religious activities are principally not eligible for subsidy because of the separation of religion and state. The unwillingness on the part of the politician to accept the explanation of the community representative about their religious motivations should partly be explained by the continuous depiction of Muslim associations as migrant organizations and by the concerns about the separation of church and state, but there is yet another factor at play. An

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underlying argument against Muslim conceptions of the common good is rooted in the assumption that adherence to Islam is by definition not constitutive to the Dutch imagined community. This implies that the religious motivations of Muslims to express and act out societal engagement, unlike those of Christians, are not considered very valid. To the extent that they do engage socially, it is assumed that they engage mainly with fellow Muslims and are predominantly inwardly motivated. By implication, charity activities by Muslims for needy people with an Islamic background are proof the argument.

Religious Motivation as an Anachronism There is another cause for suspicion or at least doubt about motives of Muslims doing charitable work. This doubt has to do with the post– World War II secularization of European societies. Voluntary work and charity in Europe was historically connected to the church and based on principles from the Scripture about compassion and love for others. In addition, charitable work was a necessity to meet the needs of the poor at the time when the state did not provide for that. The history and the workings of Dutch pillarization as I have explained earlier cannot be properly understood without taking that into account. Along with the secularization that took place after World War II and the growth of centralized welfare states, voluntary work took on a new function and a new meaning. It became an activity that is said to originate in an authentic inner self rather than from a divine command, based on theological texts, a shift that resonate with Charles Taylor’s approach that the self as a moral subject has been readdressed and brought into relation with human agency in a new way. Religious doctrines are about ethics and morality, about particular conceptions of the good. At an individual level, doctrines are evaluative tools. If humans act according to a moral frame of reference, they strive for “the good,” they act virtuously. Ethical improvement means becoming a better person in the moral sense of the word. It was to a large extent through the work of Charles Taylor, notably Sources of the Self, published in 1989, that the self as a moral subject has been readdressed and brought

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into relation with human agency in a new way. According to Taylor, identity is a human disposition, something in between cultural and social context, on the one hand, and human subjectivity, on the other. A crucial aspect of Taylor’s approach to modern selfhood was the centrality of human agency and his contention that the self is not an independent natural human property that precedes morality, as mainstream enlightenment thinking would have it, but something that is constituted by acting morally, that is aspiring to the good. Thus, morality and ethics are not external normative rules imposed upon the (free, unconstraint) individual but are located within the self. Keywords in Taylor’s approach are “commitment” and “evaluation.” By acting virtuously, by continuously evaluating and taking decisions about the good, one positions him or herself in a moral landscape. Identity is a sense of “inwardness,” a moral topography that unfolds through acting (Taylor 1989: 111–143). It is the evaluative understanding of identity developed by Taylor that is relevant for the exploration of how (“secular”) motivations for voluntary work come about. Morality develops through virtuous acting and moral self-cultivation in everyday encounters and situations. Acting morally is thus totally interactive and embedded in the social texture individuals are part of. Hence, it is processual and principally situational. Human acting is always based on partial perspectives and experiences of what is considered virtuous. Taylor argues that under modern conditions, in which superimposed ethical regimes, such as religious ones have gradually disappeared, acting virtuously has become enormously complex. Taylor argues that in this complexity, human beings go about through “trial and error.” This makes moral acting principally transitory and temporal and rests on the fundamental ambiguity that characterizes modern conditions. Although Taylor’s approach, especially his emphasis on reflexive and deliberate acting, is relevant, there is no reason to make a sharp distinction between “old” superimposed motivation and “modern” subjectivity. It assumes that Muslims who phrase their motivations in religious language would not have inner motivations generated by everyday experiences, and ties in with the recent shift in focus in academic literature on religiosity from ideology and structure to practice. Religious conviction and religious identity are not a priori and established facts but develop in

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concrete action, practices, and associational processes (see, e.g., Ammerman 2007; McGuire 2008; Orsi 2005). This applies equally to Muslims as to other religious groups (Dessing et  al. 2013; Hirschkind 2006; Yıldız and Verkuyten 2012). Therefore, the cultural and/or religious frame(s) of reference of an individual or community cannot simply be derived from “generally valid” knowledge about a culture or from religious principles but is generated from practice. This is what Talal Asad (1986) refers to with the notion of Islam as a “discursive tradition,” with which he means the internal debate about preservation and adaptations of the religious practice handed down from the past, and also shows that the distinction often made between religion and culture is too abstract and has little to do with the daily practice in which people live (Asad 1986). Voluntary work is a crucial example in this respect. It is impossible to disentangle personal from divine inspiration, or to determine what comes first. Compassion is the underlying mental motivation of voluntary work. Compassion is about social relations and is shaped by the multiple ways in which people are situated in society. Charity, reaching out, and other forms of engagement are always culturally informed and motivated. As I have argued, to consider charity as something pertaining to the autonomous inner self, ignores this embeddedness. As Mauss has argued in his seminal Essai sur le Don in 1923, there is no unconditional one-way free gift. Every human act is conditional and culturally informed and implies reciprocity. The way in which we conceptualize the moral underpinnings of this reciprocity is thus also culturally embedded (see also Laidlaw 2010). For virtuous practicing Muslims, charity, engagement, and compassion are inextricably linked with Islamic ethics. Being in the world cannot be separated from moral imperatives formulated in Islamic sources as they are applied by acting Muslims. Apart from the well-known examples such as the zakat (alms giving, one of the pillars of Islam), there are numerous references in the Islamic sources to compassion and engagement. In his research into societal engagement among Muslims in the city of Amsterdam, Yar (2018) shows how active volunteers in mosque associations legitimize and motivate their engagement by referring to an Islamic ethical frame of reference. He introduces the concept of “Islamic social reasoning” and argues that this reasoning implicates an ongoing r­ eflection

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based on experiences. Besides the more legalist language of duties and obligations that operates in Islam, in which a concept like maslaha refers to the notion of public interest, or sadaqa, which is connected to zakat (see Keskin and Yucel’s chapter), there are several other principles such as ehsan (referring to an inner spiritual motivation) or niyyah (the principle that charity should come straight from the heart) that deal with the ethical underpinnings of being with and in the world (Benthall 2015). But also, in the mystical dimensions of Islam, there is the idea that the quest for God contributes to the moral improvement of the practitioner. In the Gülen movement, the ideal of a “Golden Generation” precisely captures this idea of a morally good person actively engaging with the world.3 Benthall (2015: 365) proposes to consider the act of giving and charity as “an act of devotion” with which he refers to the space in between an inner moral drive and outer moral obligations put down in rules. One of the charity organizations that I mentioned in the beginning has put the following “who are we?” description on their website: Racha is an Arabic term that stands for a young gazelle with a strong perseverance. Just like the gazelle, we are a young organization that does not stand still. We immediately started working on the preparation and execution of projects. We continue, think in solutions and not in limitations. We believe that we can make a difference for the victims in conflict areas by providing them with support and help, in particular by promoting sustainable developments in the field of medical care and nutrition. Behind the Racha Foundation there is a group of volunteers who share the same passion. We are a young team, with members who either have a medical background or who have always been involved in volunteering. Each of us has his specialism in which he/she excels for the benefit of the foundation. Together we form a close-knit team with the same drive: our faith which teaches us to help the weak and to respond to their call. The Racha Foundation strives for a merciful and loving society in which the main needs of the refugees and residents of conflict areas are fulfilled. We distinguish ourselves from the existing charitable organizations by focusing on the need for medical care. We do this by supplying a­ mbulances,  The website Productive Muslims provides interesting examples of how voluntary work is connected to ethical principles. http://productivemuslim.com/benefits-of-volunteering/ accessed 5-1-2019. 3

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medical equipment and mobile operating units, among other things. Inspired by Islamic core values, humanity and mercy, we offer help to everyone regardless of religious background, ethnicity, race, class and gender. He should help the needy when he asks for help.—[Sahih Bukhari]4

The text is a combination of contemporary language typical of modern young activists. They cast their motivation in an individualized discourse of personal drive and an understanding of subjectivity and moral fulfillment reminiscent of what Charles Taylor calls the “moral subject” (1989). Through their work as active citizens, they learn about the conditions of the really needy people and this triggers their moral sensitivity. Only in the last sentences of the statement there is an explicit reference to Islamic principles that have inspired the members of the organization. All these examples bear reminiscence of Weber’s concept of Innerweltliche Askese, which refers to a moral disposition that instead of turning away from the world implies an active engagement with that world. Weber shows that personal reflection, moral disposition, and divine inspiration cannot possibly disentangled (Weber 1930). Normative religious principles should not be considered as simply normative frames imposed upon Muslims, but rather as referential categories, or as moral registers that make acting meaningful. A rather artificial separation of religious and inner motives by referring to sincerity and genuineness falls short of understanding the field in which actors operate.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have addressed the question how to understand the double standard when it concerns volunteering and charity initiated by Muslims in Europe, especially when they refer to Islamic principles in explaining their motives; and the suspicion about the “real” motives behind their charitable work. I have argued first that this has to do with the contextualization of Muslims and voluntary work in Europe. These activities should be assessed against the background of the evolving  The quote is from a Hadith. Website accessed 5-1-2019.

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o­ rganizational landscape among Muslims in Europe. Thus, voluntary activities performed by Muslims in Europe are always perceived and evaluated as part of an integration discourse. Second, I have shown how the post–World War II secularization of society has made religious motives for charity into anachronisms. Muslims in Europe are trapped in an integration paradigm that is based on outdated assumptions about their engagement with society. But they are also trapped in a secularist discourse that renders their motivations anachronisms. What I propose here is to reconsider the otherwise useful concepts of bonding and bridging and to take on board different underlying conceptions of compassion and different ways of understanding the common good. This implies finding different conceptions of what pertains to bonding and what to bridging. For a country like the Netherlands, with its history of pillarization, this is historically common ground. In the heyday of the pillarization structure, society was deeply divided at the level of everyday interaction, but different ways to the common good were acknowledged and political leaders worked together. Along with the secularization that took place after World War II and the growth of centralized welfare states, the system disappeared almost completely, but what remained is what I would call a “pillarization register” among a part of the population in the Netherlands. This register still influences debates and opinions on charitable work and apparently that does not always work out favorably for Muslims.

References Adriaansens, H.  P. M., & Zijderveld, A.  C. (1981). Vrijwillig initiatief en de verzorgingsstaat. Deventer: Van Loghum Slaterus. Ammerman, N. T. (2007). Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Asad, T. (1986). The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Baumann, G. (1996). Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London. London: Cambridge University Press.

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Baumann, G., & Gingrich, A. (2004). Grammars of Identity/Alterity. A Structural Approach. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Baumann, G., & Sunier, T. (1995). Post-Migration Ethnicity. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Benthall, J. (2015). Charity. In D.  Fassin (Ed.), A Companion to Moral Anthropology (pp. 359–376). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Böcker, A. (1994). Turkse migranten en sociale zekerheid: van onderlinge zorg naar overheidszorg? Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Bowen, J., Bertossi, C., Duyvendak, J.  W., & Krock, M.  L. (Eds.). (2014). European States and their Muslim Citizens. The Impact of Institutions on Perceptions and Boundaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brubaker, R., & Cooper, F. (2000). Beyond Identity. Theory and Society, 29(1), 1–47. Carrithers, M. (1992). Why Humans Have Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ceylan, R. (2010). Die Diskussion um ‘Parallelgesellschaften’. In B.  Ucar & R. Ceylan (Eds.), Die Rolle der Religion im Integrationsprozess. Die deutsche Islamdebatte (pp. 335–348). Frankfurtam Main: Peter Lang. Cliteur, P. (2002). Modern Papoea’s. Dilemma’s van een multiculturele samenleving. Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers. Commissie Blok (Tijdelijke Commissie Onderzoek Integratiebeleid). (2004). Bruggen bouwen, TK 2003–2004, 28 689, no. 8–9, Den Haag. Crul, M., & Schneider, J. (2010). Comparative Integration Context Theory: Participation and Belonging in New Diverse European Cities. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(7), 1249–1268. Dessing, N., Jeldtoft, N., Nielsen, J. S., & Woodhead, L. (2013). Everyday Lived Islam in Europe. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Duyvendak, J., & Scholten, P. (2012). Deconstructing the Dutch Multicultural Model: A Frame Perspective on Dutch Immigrant Integration Policymaking. Contemporary European Politics, 10(3), 266–282. Hirschkind, C. (2006). The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Ireland, P. (2004). Becoming Europe: Immigration, Integration and the Welfare State. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Klaver, J., Tromp, E., & Oude Ophuis, R. (2005). Allochtonen en vrijwilligerswerk. Amsterdam: Regioplan. Klop, C. J. (1982). De Islam in Nederland. Angst voor een nieuwe zuil? Christen Democratische Verkenningen, 11(82), 526–533.

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Yar, H. (2018). Moskeewerk in de Buurt. Een casestudy in Amsterdam. Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij. Yıldız, A. A., & Verkuyten, M. (2012). Conceptualising Euro-Islam: Managing the Societal Demand for Religious Reform. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 19(3), 360–376.

4 Why Do Muslims Engage in Intra-­ community Volunteering? Insights from a Multi-method Study in Australia Mario Peucker

Introduction People’s motives and reasons for volunteering have been among the most extensively analyzed subjects in volunteer research over the past few decades. There is a broad consensus that these reasons are multi-­ dimensional (Dolnicar and Randle 2007: 138), and that each person who volunteers is driven by his or her own individual combination of motives to do so. One of the key factors—if not the most central one—is some form of altruism; this features centrally in many conceptualizations of volunteering. Wilson (2000: 215), for example, proposes in his much-­ cited article in the Annual Review of Sociology the rather minimalistic definition of volunteering as “any activity in which time is given freely to benefit another person, group, or organization” (see also von Essen et al. 2015). Altruism is not the only reasons why people volunteer. Expectations of personal gain, including extended social skills, networks, or experiences M. Peucker (*) Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_4

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and enhanced employment opportunities (Smith et al. 2010), have also been recognized as drivers for volunteering. Some scholars have recently identified a trend, especially among young people, toward a “growing instrumentalization of volunteering by volunteers themselves” (von Essen et al. 2015: 4; Walsh and Black 2015). Given the complexity of individuals’ decision to volunteer, a plain differentiation between intrinsic–altruistic, on the one hand, and more extrinsic, instrumentalist reasons, on the other, appears poorly suited for capturing the nuances of volunteers’ motives. The problematic nature of this dichotomy becomes apparent, for example, when analyzing the motives for volunteering among religious people whose faith call on them to do good as an almost paradoxical form of “voluntary duty,” as this is the case for many religious denominations around the world, including Christianity and Islam (Hustinx et al. 2015). Are these people simply following external obligations and responsibilities by helping others in need? Have they internalized these religious norms and are now guided by them without explicitly thinking about them? Or would they volunteer anyway and their religious responsibilities are just additional reminders, or possibly even entirely irrelevant for their community engagement? In this chapter, I present selected empirical findings from a multi-­ method study on Muslim community volunteering in Australia, exploring as to why Muslims decide to volunteer, and why they do so specifically for a Muslim (faith-based) or Islamic (religious) community organization (Torry 2005). I examine the goals that these active community volunteers pursue through their engagement and the motivational drivers behind their decision to volunteer, and why they choose a Muslim community context as the primary (but often not only) site for their voluntary engagement. This analysis is embedded in Wilson and Musick’s (1997) general theoretical framework of volunteering and draws on the empirically established functional approach to volunteering motivations, the Volunteering Functions Inventory (VFI), developed in the 1990s by Clary et  al. (1998). This combined theoretical–conceptual framework proved to be well suited, despite—or maybe because of—its generic nature, to capture Muslims’ motives and drivers for their community community-based volunteering.

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Theoretical Framework Verba et al. (1995) choose an original starting point to outline their Civic Voluntarism Model on political participation, asking the inverted question as to why people do not become politically active. Verba et  al.’s (1995: 269) illuminating yet simple answer is “because they can’t; because they don’t want to; or because nobody asked.” These three factors resonate with the sociological theoretical framework, developed by Wilson and Musick (1997) for the analysis of volunteering, which rests on the interplay between three forms of “capital”: human, social, and cultural. Wilson and Musick (1997: 695) describe volunteering as a “productive activity” that usually requires certain skill sets and qualifications. The centrality of this “human capital” relates to one of the few undisputed facts of volunteering research: People with higher education levels or school attainments are more likely to volunteer (Smith 1994; Musick and Wilson 2008; for official statistics in Australia, see ABS 2011: 14)— although the ways in which educational resources and propensity to voluntary civic–political participation interact are complex and remain contested (Berinsky and Lenz 2011; Rosenstone and Hansen 1993). Volunteering typically encompasses “collective action” (Wilson and Musick 1997: 695), and it often relies on social connections (“weak ties”; Granovetter 1983) and networks of trust (Putnam 2000), which “supply information, foster trust, make contacts, provide support, set guidelines and create obligations” (Wilson and Musick 1997: 695). Volunteering research and scholarship on civic engagement and active citizenship more broadly (Verba et al. 1995; Peucker 2016) generally confirm the importance of social capital factors, in particular for the recruitment of volunteers. Religious community organizations and places of worship often play a key role here due to their capacity to mobilize their community members into civic and political activism (Wang and Handy 2014; Wilson and Musick 1997; von Essen et al. 2015; see also Hancock’s chapter in this book). “[R]eligious organizations tell people of opportunities to serve, both within and beyond the congregation itself, and provide personal contacts, committees, phone numbers, meeting spaces, transportation, or

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whatever it may take to help turn good intentions into action” (Wuthnow 1994: 253). This seems to also apply to mosques as recent research has consistently found a statistically significant positive association between mosque attendance (“organizational religiosity”) and Muslims’ civic and/ or political participation in various Western Muslim-minority societies (Vergani et al. 2017; Read 2015; Fleischmann et al. 2016; van Londen et al. 2007; Jamal 2005; Dana et al. 2017, Giugni et al. 2014; Ayers and Hofstetter 2008). While a certain level of educational resources, qualification, and skills as well as social ties and networks are important facilitating factors for volunteering, human and social capital alone are usually insufficient to explain why someone decides to volunteer. What is missing is the motivational trigger, a reason for investing time and effort. This factor is the key focus of this chapter. Wilson and Musick (1997: 696) locate this motivational impulse in moral–ethical considerations, which they refer to as “cultural capital,” referring to, but significantly broadening Pierre Bourdieu’s work by emphasizing “moral components” of cultural capital. They argue that volunteering involves not only the productive and usually collective action of providing a service but also “the consumption of a symbolic good,” which is the belief in the moral value of doing good and helping others. “Those who volunteer usually consider their voluntary engagement to be the right thing to do, and through their volunteering they seek to demonstrate that they are the good and decent person they aspire to be” (Peucker 2018a, original emphasis). This “culture of benevolence” plays an important role in explaining people’s inclination to volunteering (Wilson and Musick 1997: 696). Moral disposition as a form of cultural capital can manifest itself in many ways and have various origins, including one’s religious beliefs. Wilson and Musick (1997: 697) explicitly “treat religiosity as an indicator of the cultural capital necessary for volunteering” (see also Hustinx et al. 2015). Empirical research confirms the importance of religiosity, also among ethno-religious minority groups, which has consistently found to correlate positively with volunteering (von Essen et al. 2015; Wang and Handy 2014; Putnam and Campbell 2010; Wuthnow 1994; McAndrew and Voas 2014; PEW 2016).

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For my own analysis of Muslim community volunteering, I propose a corrective enhancement to Wilson and Musick’s theoretical framework. The purpose of this corrective is to also acknowledge less ethical–moral considerations in someone’s decision to engage in volunteer work. Clary et al.’s (1998) theory of volunteering is well suited to serve as such a corrective. Clary and collaborators developed this theory in the 1990s to find answers to a basic question: “What … are the functions served by volunteerism” (Clary et al. 1998: 1517). Or more specifically, what are the “underlying psychological and social needs and goals” people seek to satisfy through their volunteering, as Dolnicar and Randle (2007: 138) ask. Clary et al. (1998) identified six motivational functions, which they used to develop the Volunteer Functions Inventory (IFV), a well-established and empirically tested survey instrument to measure people’s multiple motivations for volunteering. The six functions of volunteering are briefly outlined in the following. • Values: This function is the one most closely aligned with Wilson and Musick’s (1997) “culture of benevolence.” Volunteering offers the opportunity to an individual to “express values related to altruistic and humanitarian concerns” (Clary et al. 1998: 1517). People volunteer because, by doing so, they can demonstrate these values. • Understanding: The second function of volunteering is that it provides a chance to acquire new knowledge, make new experiences, and “exercise knowledge, skills, and abilities that might otherwise go unpracticed” (Clary et  al. 1998: 1518). Various surveys among volunteers show that the desire to learn new skills plays an important role for many, especially young people (Low et al. 2007; Muir et al. 2009; see also von Essen et al. 2015). • Social: Clary et  al. (1998: 1518) argue here that people volunteer because it offers “opportunities to be with one’s friends or to engage in an activity viewed favourably by important others”; this social function involves volunteering because one expects “social rewards” by a third party. This should not be confused with the social capital dimension in Wilson and Musick’s (1997) theory on volunteering, where social networks are conceptualized as a facilitating factor.

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• Career: Volunteering may be seen as a way to gain “career-related benefits” (Clary et al. 1998: 1518), be it social networks or certain skill sets. This fourth function is related to the above-mentioned opportunity to expand one’s skills and knowledge (Understanding) with a specific focus on one’s career. • Protective: Another function volunteering may serve is to “protect(…) the ego from negative features of the self ” or, more specifically, “to reduce guilt over being more fortunate than others and to address one’s own personal problems” (Clary et al. 1998: 1518). • Enhancement: The sixth function of volunteering also revolves around what Clary et al. (1998: 1518) refer to as the “ego’s relation to affect,” similar to the protective function. However, while the latter is about eliminating negative aspects surrounding the ego, people may also be driven by a motivation that “centres on the ego’s growth and development and involves positive striving of the ego.” Here, volunteering serves the function of fostering positive emotions of, for example, self-­ esteem, self-worth, and personal development. People’s motivation for volunteering is typically based on the combination of several functional drivers, with each one of them playing a more or less important role for the individual. Several research studies that deployed the 30-item VFI survey tool found similar patterns. Stukas et al. (2016) recent study is particularly noteworthy as it was conducted in the same national context as my own work on Muslim community volunteering.1 According to Stukas et  al.’s (2016: 119) findings, the expression of altruism (Value, Median (M) = 5.26 on a 7-point scale) was identified as the most prevalent motivation for volunteering. This was followed by the motive to gain or practice new skills (Understanding, M = 4.55); Enhancement-related motives (M = 3.95) ranked third, followed by Social functions (M = 3.39), Protective motives (M = 3.14), and Career-related functions (M = 2.65), which were the least prominent. My own study on Muslim community volunteering did not deploy the same methodological instrument (for reasons outlined in the m ­ ethodology  Stukas et al.’s research was carried out in Victoria, the second largest Australian state in terms of population. 1

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section below), but its results can be analyzed against the backdrop of Stukas et al.’s (2016) more general findings on volunteering motives: To what extent are Muslims who volunteer for a mosque or another Islamic/ Muslim community organization driven by different sets of reasons and goals? In addition, the empirical analysis below investigates more specific facets of the motivational consideration, goals, and aspirations of Muslims who choose to volunteer within a Muslim community context.

Methodology While Muslims’ civic and political participation have attracted increasing scholarly attention in Australia in recent years (Peucker 2016; Vergani et al. 2017; Harris and Roose 2014; Mansouri et al. 2017; Harris and Lam 2018, see also Chap. 1 in this book), there is very little robust research that examines Muslims’ civic engagement explicitly through the conceptual–theoretical lens of volunteering. While previous studies on civic and political participation did not systematically examine the goals and motives behind Muslims’ active citizenship, some of this emerging scholarship found that the Islamic faith is often a motivational driver rather than a civic barrier (Harris and Roose 2014; Peucker 2016, 2018b). The present explorative study used these initial empirical insights as a starting point for a more systematic, in-depth analysis of the experiences of Australian Muslims who engage in volunteer work specifically for Muslim community organizations. The study deploys a multi-method approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to examine, among others, Muslims’ personal goals and motives for their volunteering, their reasons for choosing a Muslim over a secular, non-Muslim organization, their pathways to community volunteering, and the personal implications of their community engagement. I conducted 16 qualitative in-depth interviews with eight Muslim men and eight Muslim women in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Participants were selected based on their volunteer commitment in Muslim community organizations. Their role within the organization differed broadly from leadership to providing basic services to support the organization in its daily operation.

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Parallel to this qualitative research component, an explorative national survey was conducted. The survey was completed by 138 self-declared, adult Muslims who were currently volunteering for a Muslim community organization. Due to the sampling approach and the limited size of the sample, the findings are not statistically representative. The questionnaires were completed anonymously, in most cases via an online platform; around 20 participants filled in the questionnaire offline (pen-and-paper). The survey sample had an equal gender balance (51 percent men) and was ethnically very mixed (Pakistani background was the largest group); a majority of 70 percent were born overseas, and overall educational levels were very high, with a majority holding a tertiary degree (over 70 percent had a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree). The recruitment of participants for both the interviews and the survey was guided by the rationale to include volunteers from a broad variety of Muslim organizations. The aim was to avoid, or at least minimize, a sampling bias toward more accessible Muslim organizations, which often tend to have a more “integrationist” outlook (the “good” Muslims to use Mamdani’s [2004] words). This objective was achieved as the realized interview and survey samples encompass volunteers from a range of what may be tentatively described mainstream as well as fringe Muslim community groups. This included, among others, self-declared “progressive” Muslim group and Hizmet affiliated organizations as well as groups informally associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi organizations, and the radical Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir. The samples also reflect a great diversity in terms of types of organizations, ranging from Muslim university student associations and youth groups, to mosques, Muslim community umbrella organizations, Islamic educational organizations, Islamic welfare organizations, and advocacy groups. The interview guidelines and the survey items covered a range of themes related to the participants’ volunteering history and experiences. Due to this thematic breadth, and to ensure that the survey questionnaire was not unwieldy, the 30-item VFI was deemed too comprehensive—as well as too unspecific—to be incorporated into the survey as a tool to examine Muslims’ volunteering motives. However, the survey items covered most of the six functions of volunteering according to Clary et al.’s (1998) model.

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The following sections present selected empirical findings on goals and motivational drivers of Muslim community volunteers, drawing from the qualitative interviews and the survey data, with the latter also including qualitative insights taken from the open-text survey responses.

 he Ordinariness of Muslims’ Volunteering T Motives Volunteering is generally regarded as a form of community activism that has the potential to achieve a range of outcomes. In the survey, respondents were asked: “Why do you volunteer at all? What motivates you?” Participants could indicate their agreement or disagreement with 11 statements on a 4-point scale (Fig. 4.1). Almost all of the 138 survey participants reported that they simultaneously pursue three goals by volunteering for a Muslim community organization. First, they seek to “contribute to society at large” (M = 3.86); second, they want to “support the Muslim community and/or their fellow Muslims” (M = 3.81), and, third, they seek to “help people who are disadvantaged and/or need help” (M = 3.77). These three goals resonate strongly with Wilson and Musick’s (1997) “culture of benevolence” and the Value function of volunteering related to the desire to express altruism and “humanitarian concerns” (Clary et al. 1998: 1517). The salience of altruistic values as key drivers for Muslims’ community volunteering was also evident in the interviews. A female interview partner from Brisbane (aged 40–45), for example, stated: “I’m very concerned about human rights, civil rights, social reform as well as Islamic awareness or inter-communal relations…[my volunteering] is really for the wellbeing of the community…the wider community.” Another woman from Melbourne (aged 25–30) described her motivation very pointedly: “I’m a sucker for humanity.” Such statements about serving and contributing to the society at large were very common in the interview data. The personal stories of interview partners and the survey responses underscore the finding that Muslim community volunteers usually see no tensions between their common good orientation that contributes to the

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…I want to contribute to society at large.

88%

…it is an Islamic obligation to do good deeds.

10%

85%

12%

…I want to support the Muslim community and/or fellow Muslims

81%

18%

...I want to help people who are disadvantaged and/or need help.

80%

19%

…it gives me a sense of personal satisfaction.

70%

…it is in my nature to help others where I can.

67%

...it gives me a chance to do something about the negative perception of Muslims in Australia

68%

27%

27%

6%

23%

6% 3%

…I want to learn new skills.

37%

47%

13% 3%

…I can spend time with nice people there.

35%

44%

14% 7%

…it is fun and an enjoyable way to spend my spare time. …it might be useful for my career and/or future employment strongly agree

somewhat agree

26%

53%

16% 5%

19%

38%

Somewhat disagree

23%

20%

strongly disagree

Fig. 4.1  Motives for volunteering

wider society and helping those in need, on the one hand, and their communitarian aim of supporting the Muslim community, on the other. Rather than perceiving these goals as being in conflict with each other, many participants considered these as two inherently intertwined sides of the same coin. While these three altruistic motives or goals were the most dominant ones, reasons beyond the Value function were also frequently mentioned. For example, most survey respondents agreed that volunteering gives them “a sense of personal satisfaction” (M = 3.65), which is aligned with the Enhancement function in Clary et al.’s (1998) model. Social reason, such as having “the opportunity to spend time with nice people” (Social function; M  =  3.08), motivations that related to learning new skills (Understanding function, M = 3.18) or career or future ­employment-­related

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motives (Career function; M  =  2.55) were less commonly mentioned drivers behind Muslim community volunteering. The questionnaire did not directly address Protective motives. However, interview partners and survey respondents, who used the open-ended text boxes in the questionnaire to elaborate on their motives, appear to be driven, at least partly, by factors related in some ways to this Protective function. A young Muslim in Melbourne, aged in her mid to late 20s, for example, explained how volunteering has helped her overcome serious self-doubts. She stated that once she started volunteering, “I no longer had the same negative feelings towards myself.” Here, Protective- and Enhancement-related motives appear closely connected. A number of interview partners and survey respondents also elaborated on their sense of being privileged and/or grateful for the support they have received in the past from the Muslim community or the society at large. This position of privilege has urged and motivated them to “give back” by helping others in need. This motive also resonates with the Protective function in Clary et al. (1998) functional model. One survey respondent, for example, wrote: Volunteering allows me to contribute to society and help the disadvantaged. As a person who considers herself to be brought up with privilege and in comfort, it saddens me to see people who don’t have access to the same privileges.

In a similar vein, a Muslim woman (aged 25–30) from Melbourne stated that during her overseas travels with her family she “saw first-hand poverty.” Relating these experiences “back to home” in Australia, she felt “pushed … to be more proactive and showing how grateful I am about living here and being able to help more vulnerable communities,” which in her case did not only refer to Muslim communities. This motivational notion of “giving back” had a strongly religious dimension for some, as they volunteer to express their gratefulness toward God. One survey respondent, for example, explained her motives for volunteering by saying: “it is [about] giving back from what MY CREATOR gave me of health and skills and knowledge and time” (emphasis in the written survey response).

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Notwithstanding that the survey data are not statistically representative, the analysis demonstrates that reasons and motives for Muslims’ to volunteer in a Muslim community organization bear strong resemblance with the motivational pattern Stukas et al. (2016) found in their representative study of Victorian volunteers. Value-related motives are ranking highest, and Career-oriented reasons were least prominent. One important divergence is that the reason of learning or using new skills (Understanding function) appeared clearly less central among Muslim community volunteers compared to the volunteering (Victorian) population in general. This motivational ordinariness of Muslims community volunteering was an important finding of this study, but at the same time, their Islamic faith and Muslim-ness often play a central role for the decision to volunteer.

Muslim-specific Volunteering Motives One element of this set of motives that is more Muslim-specific is the commonly mentioned argument that volunteering in general, and for a Muslim community organization in particular, offers opportunities “to do something about the negative perception of Muslims in Australia” (see also Peucker 2016, 2019). Nine out of ten survey respondents stated that this was part of the reasons why they volunteer at all (68 percent agreed strongly; M  =  3.56). This motivational driver is difficult to categorize along Clary et al.’s (1998) functional model, as it is rooted in altruism but also in a desire to support one’s own minority community and to reduce intercommunity tensions for the greater good of a more harmonious society. The survey findings demonstrate the highly religious nature of most Muslims’ motives behind their community volunteering. This was also confirmed by the analysis of the qualitative interviews and written survey responses. Ninety-seven percent of survey respondents agreed (among those 85 percent strongly; M = 3.79) that they volunteer “because it is an Islamic obligation to do good deed.” This prevalence of a “culture of benevolence,” based on the Islamic faith, confirms previous research studies from Australia that have highlighted the importance of Muslims’

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subjective religiosity for their civic engagement, which is regarded as an almost paradoxical form of voluntary duty (Peucker 2016, 2018b; Harris and Roose 2014). The study also revealed the multitude of ways that Islamic faith drives and shapes the community volunteering of many Muslims. These findings go well beyond the dominant view expressed by many survey and interview participants that helping others in need, doing good deeds, and “serving humanity” (a phrase used by several participants) was an Islamic obligation and “a big part of practicing our faith” (female, 20–30, Melbourne). There have been many nuanced differences in how study participants elaborated on this. Some emphasized the obligatory nature of this Islamic principle of serving and helping others through charity and good deeds, while others spoke more about the “spiritual reward” they will get, here and in the afterlife. Both perspectives are closely intertwined, and several interview partners raised both the duty and the reward aspect. Some described their eagerness to do good less in terms of a religious duty or spiritual reward and more as something inherently rooted in their Islamic upbringing, and who they are, their identity, their personality, and their belief in social justice. As previously discussed, these different lines of arguments overlapped in some instances and are not mutually exclusive. One Muslim woman (20–30, Melbourne), for example, explained in the interview that …for us, religion is life, life is religion. It’s all the same. So the reason why you innately feel better as a human being to do something for someone else is because that innate happiness in you is inside your heart because of the Creator….The Creator puts that happiness in you that you’re able to enjoy …volunteering.

Several interview partners, elaborating on the role of their faith for their volunteering, emphasized that good intentions were ultimately more relevant than achieving a positive outcome. This stands in some contrast to the implicitly more outcome-orientated understanding of volunteering as a voluntary activity fundamentally aimed at the benefit of others, where people volunteer in order to contribute to change other people’s lives for the better. Arguing along Islamic faith lines, some

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Muslim interview partners, however, played down the importance of actually making a difference through their volunteering. For them, achieving a positive outcome was desirable but secondary; what counts more are their good intentions. A Muslim man (aged 45–55) from Melbourne explained the motivational drivers behind his intensive volunteering and community engagement as follows: Ok, you get the reward according to your intention…So what do I do? I make that intention, I get the reward. I go and help that person. Even if I don’t help the person but I made the intention, I still get the reward.

Similarly, another male Muslim interviewee (aged 25–30) from Melbourne stressed that the spiritual reward for his volunteering does not depend on whether or not he has actually contributed to “necessary changes”: “I think you can only try and the rest is out of your hands, really.” A Muslim man (aged 40–50) from Sydney also emphasized the importance of intentions rather than outcomes of his community volunteering, which is aimed at “serving humanity” and accepting “responsibility for the less fortunate.” He stressed that “the less fortunate are more a test for us because God could make everybody equal.” Based on this view, he explained I’m not driven by somehow thinking I’m going to bring about change. I’m not driven by that. I am driven by the fact that the difficulties of the world allow me to become the best human in can be…I might not bring any change….Of course, I need to make that as an effort…but that’s not my driving force. My driving force is to do the best I can so that I can be the best with God.

Overall, the study findings suggest that the volunteering of many of the surveyed and interviewed Muslims is driven by a form of “divine altruism,” performed without expecting any worldly remuneration but for the sake of God, seeking God’s spiritual reward for both the life on earth and the afterlife. In this sense, volunteering, and acts of compassion and good deeds more broadly, are also a means to an end. This does not

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turn their civic engagement into a mere instrument or strategy to pursue God’s approval; usually, it seems to rather add a deeply spiritual layer to practicing Muslims’ volunteering, which simultaneously is performed within the secular parameters of active citizenship.

Opting for a Muslim Organization While the previous section discussed Muslims’ volunteering motives in general, the second key question this chapter seeks to answer revolves around the reasons behind the decision to choose a Muslim community organization for their voluntary engagement. Previous research into active citizenship of Muslims in Australia and Germany (Peucker 2016) has shown that many are actively engaged in several, often Muslim and non-Muslim, organizations simultaneously. This present study confirms this. Although, according to the sampling rationale, it included only those who were currently volunteering for a Muslim group, it was only a minority of 41 percent of all 138 survey respondents who stated they were at the time active only within a Muslim community context. One third stated their current volunteering takes place “mainly but not only” in a Muslim community organization, and a further 23 percent said their current volunteering was evenly split between Muslim and non-Muslim groups. The survey findings as well as the interview data strongly suggest that the vast majority of study participants make a very conscious decision about where they invest their volunteering time and effort. Almost all survey respondents (99 percent, of which 74 percent agreed strongly) stated that they deliberately chose the particular organization because they “find its general work … particularly important and … want to contribute to it.” The religious nature of the organization, however, is secondary for most surveyed Muslims. Eight out of ten agreed (50 percent agreed strongly) with the statement “I just wanted to do something positive for others, whether I can do that within a Muslim community group or elsewhere is not so important.” This was also reflected in the interviews; a Muslim woman (aged in her 20s) from Melbourne, for example, said: “If I see a need somewhere, I don’t look at what faith is the

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organisation.” Only a minority of 23 percent of survey respondents seemed to prioritize a Muslim group for their volunteering as a matter of principle, stating that they “just want to volunteer within the Muslim community” (only 7 percent subscribed “strongly” to this view). Those who volunteered mainly or only for a Muslim community group were specifically asked about their reasons for choosing a Muslim over a non-Muslim organization (Fig. 4.2). The most common reason is related to participants’ communitarian goal of helping fellow Muslims and the Muslim community (see above), and 79 percent (61 percent agreed

My main goal is to help fellow Muslims and the Muslim community; I can do that better at a Muslim community organisation. ...because I feel very comfortable when I'm around other Muslims. ...because among Muslims I do not have to explain my religious duties/practices.

11%

...because I'm worried that I might not experience the same level of respect in a nonMuslim organisation.

10%

...because volunteering for non-Muslim groups often seems quite bureaucratic and/or too formal.

7% 8%

...because I feel like my English language skills are not good enough for volunteering in a nonMuslim group.

4%

No specific reasons, it just happened Very important reason

18%

41%

29%

31%

I'm not sure how and where to volunteer for a non-Muslim organisation.

31%

33%

35%

21%

18%

61%

61%

29%

68%

22%

84%

94%

24%

Somewhat important reason

58%

Not important/does not apply

Fig. 4.2  Reasons for choosing a Muslim over a non-Muslim organization

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strongly) were of the view that they “can do that better at a Muslim community organisation.” In addition, respondents mentioned reasons related to their sense of comfort or respect that have influenced their decision to volunteer within a Muslim community context. Over two thirds explained that they “feel very comfortable when they are around other Muslims”; 60  percent stated they chose a Muslim organization because among Muslims they “don’t have to explain their religious duties or practices”; and almost one third express concerns they “might not experience the same level of respect in a non-Muslim organisation.” These three reasons point to (perceived) cultural barriers within non-Muslim community organizations. Two survey participants more blatantly referred to racism and discrimination in their written response: One mentioned “racism… towards Muslim volunteers by non-Muslims”; the other one stated that “[volunteering in a Muslim organization] reduces the fear of being discriminated against and abuse;…therefore it is safer on the whole to volunteer within Muslim organisations that in effect help the wider community.” Another reason why some surveyed Muslims end up volunteering for a Muslim organization relates to a lack of information. Around four in ten respondents mentioned they didn’t know “how and where to volunteer for non-Muslim organisation.” The perception of volunteering in these organizations as being too bureaucratic or too formal was hardly raised, nor were concerns about not having sufficient English language skills (Fig. 4.2). Analyzing these findings, in conjunction with the written responses in the survey and the qualitative interview data, suggests that participating Muslims’ decision to volunteer for a Muslim group tends to be a very deliberate and conscious one, typically based on pragmatic considerations. Most participants do not reject the idea of volunteering for a non-­ Muslim organization as a matter of principle. This is generally regarded by most participants as a viable option, but certain cultural and information barriers, pragmatic reasons, and the view that one’s goals can be pursued more effectively in a Muslim community context make these volunteers currently gravitate toward Muslim groups and focus their volunteering efforts more on the Muslim community.

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The qualitative analysis of interviews and the written survey responses reveal two often interconnected rationales behind the decision to volunteer for a Muslim community group: First, for many it is a matter of prioritizing and using their limited time resources effectively. One survey respondent, for example, simply wrote “Time is limited” and another one stated: “With family, work and current volunteering position, it’s hard to squeeze in more things on the plate.” Second, respondents often see a greater need and/or demand for their particular skill set within what many describe as an under-resourced Muslim community. The following quotes from four survey respondents are illustrative examples, with some of them also highlighting the interconnectedness between limited personal resources (time) and the perceived pressing demand in the Muslim community: [I] feel lots of help required in Muslim community [at the moment] I’ve generally volunteered for both in the past, and recently I’ve had to limit my volunteering and for convenience stuck with Muslim organisations. I also think there is a lot of important work to be done in the Muslim community. Lack of qualified volunteers in the Muslim community It is where I feel my skills and experiences can be most beneficial

The analysis underscores the multifaceted civic engagement of civically engaged Muslims, often enacted both with Muslim and non-Muslim groups. The findings point strongly to Muslims’ pragmatism as they decide where to focus their volunteering efforts, rather than an ideological rejection of non-Muslim organizations as a site worth volunteering for.

Conclusion The study findings presented in this chapter contribute to an emerging body of empirical research that challenges prevalent binary thinking about Muslims’ civic engagement in Muslim-minority societies in several ways.

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Research tells us that people who identify as belonging to ethno-­ religious minority communities, especially marginalized communities, such as Muslims, tend to gravitate, for various reasons, toward volunteering within their ethno-religious community context (Bhasin 1997; Dunn et al. 2015; Monash University 2009). This is, however, only one element of an often complex and multifaceted picture of Muslims’ civic engagement. There are a series of factors that need to be considered. Many Muslims volunteer in both Muslim and non-Muslim civil society organizations. For them it is not an either–or decision but a matter of prioritizing and finding a balance between both (Peucker 2016, 2018a). A number of recent studies on Muslims’ civic and/or political engagement confirm that those who are active within their ethno-religious community are more likely to also be engaged outside their community context (Fleischmann et al. 2016; van Londen et al. 2007). Volunteering scholarship similarly found that “religiously active individuals are more likely to volunteer in both religious and secular domains” (Wang and Handy 2014: 1575; Wuthnow 1994). People who volunteer within a religious (minority) context—and Muslims are no exception here (see Peucker 2018a)—gain intra- and cross-community networks and develop new skills and experiences, and heir enhanced social and human capital (Wilson and Musick 1997) facilitates volunteering also outside their specific community context. This is not to suggest there is anything problematic about intra-­ community volunteering within a Muslim or any other ethno-religious community context. Muslims’ volunteering in religious or faith-based community organizations is not something that takes place at the margins of society, as these organizations and community groups constitute an inherent part of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious civil society. Seeing certain urgent social needs within any community group and deciding to invest volunteering efforts that help address these needs is a basic motivational principle of volunteering—regardless of the social, cultural, or religious nature of that community. The study findings presented above clearly demonstrate that the vast majority of those who volunteer for a Muslim group do not turn their backs to the broader society, despite the study also including a significant number of Muslims who volunteered for religiously very orthodox and

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politically quite radical groups. Their community engagement is usually not a sign of a narrow focus on their Muslim community. Although this communitarian form of active citizenship plays an important role for almost all of them, it is embedded in a personal (republican) agenda of contributing to society at large, pursued usually with a strong Islamic ethos as a key driver. Simplistic binaries fail to capture the civic engagement of these Muslims in Australia’s post-secular society.

References Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). (2011). Voluntary Work (4441.0). Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Ayers, J. W., & Hofstetter, C. R. (2008). American Muslim Political Participation, Following 9/11: Religious Beliefs, Political Resources, Social Structures, and Political Awareness. Politics and Religion, 1(1), 3–26. Berinsky, A.  J., & Lenz, G.  S. (2011). Education and Political Participation: Exploring the Causal Link. Political Behaviour, 33(3), 357–373. Bhasin, S. (1997). My Time, My Community, Myself: Experiences of Volunteering within the Black Community. London: National Centre for Volunteering. Clary, E. G., Snyder, M., Ridge, R. D., Copeland, J., Stukas, A. A., Haugen, J., et al. (1998). Understanding and Assessing the Motivations of Volunteers: A Functional Approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1516–1530. Dana, K., Wilcox-Archuleta, B., & Barreto, M. (2017). The Political Incorporation of Muslims in the United States: The Mobilizing Role of Religiosity in Islam. Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 2(2), 170–200. Dolnicar, S., & Randle, M. (2007). What Motivates Which Volunteers? Psychographic Heterogeneity Among Volunteers in Australia. Voluntas (International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations), 18(2), 135–155. Dunn, K., Atie, R., Mapedzahama, V., Ozalp, M., & Aydogan, A. (2015). The Resilience and Ordinariness of Australian Muslims. Sydney: ISRA/Charles Sturt University. Fleischmann, F., Martinovic, B., & Böhm, M. (2016). Mobilising Mosques? The Role of Service Attendance for Political Participation of Turkish and Moroccan Minorities in the Netherlands. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(5), 746–763.

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Giugni, M., Michel, N., & Gianni, M. (2014). Associational Involvement, Social Capital and the Political Participation of Ethno-Religious Minorities: The Case of Muslims in Switzerland. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40(10), 1593–1613. Granovetter, M. (1983). The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited. Sociological Theory, 1(6), 201–233. Harris, A., & Lam, K. (2018). Youth Participation in ‘Post-Secular’ Times: Young Muslim and Buddhist Practitioners as Religious Citizens. The British Journal of Sociology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12368. Harris, A., & Roose, J. (2014). DIY Citizenship Amongst Young Muslims: Experiences of the “Ordinary”. Journal of Youth Studies, 17(6), 794–813. Hustinx, L., Van Rossem, R., Handy, F., & Cnaan, R.  A. (2015). A Cross-­ National Examination of the Motivation to Volunteer. In L. Hustinx, J. von Essen, J.  Haers, & S.  Mels (Eds.), Religion and Volunteering. Complex, Contested and Ambiguous Relationships (pp. 97–120). Cham: Springer. Jamal, A. (2005). The Political Participation and Engagement of Muslim Americans: Mosque Involvement and Group Consciousness. American Politics Research, 33(4), 521–544. Low, N., Butt, S., Ellis, P., & Davis Smith, J. (2007). Helping out: A National Survey of Volunteering and Charitable Giving. London: Cabinet Office. Mamdani, M. (2004). Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York, NY: Pantheon. Mansouri, F., Lobo, M., Johns, A., & Turner, B. (2017). Islamic Religiosity in the West: Belonging and Political Engagement in Multicultural Cities. Melbourne: Deakin University. McAndrew, S., & Voas, D. (2014). Immigrant Generation, Religiosity and Civic Engagement in Britain. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(1), 99–119. Monash University. (2009). Mapping Employment & Education among Muslim Australians. Caulfield East: Monash University. Muir, K., Mullan, K., Powell, A., Flaxman, S., Thompson, D., & Griffiths, M. (2009). State of Australia’s Young People. Canberra: Australian Government, Office for Youth. Musick, M., & Wilson, J. (2008). Volunteers. A Social Profile. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Peucker, M. (2016). Muslim Citizenship in Liberal Democracies. Civic and Political Participation in the West. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Peucker, M. (2018a). Muslim Community Volunteering: The Civic-religious ‘Culture of Benevolence’ and Its Sociopolitical Implications. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2018.1543020. Peucker, M. (2018b). On the (In)Compatibility of Islamic Religiosity and Citizenship in Western Democracies: The Role of Religion for Muslims’ Civic and Political Engagement. Politics and Religion, 11(3), 553–575. Peucker, M. (2019). Islamophobia and Stigmatising Discourses: A Driving Force for Muslim Active Citizenship? In J.  Esposito & D.  Iner (Eds.), Islamophobia and Radicalization (pp. 245–264). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pew Research Center (Pew). (2016). Religion in Everyday Life. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Putnam, R.  D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Putnam, R.  D., & Campbell, D.  E. (2010). American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Read, J. (2015). Gender, Religious Identity, and Civic Engagement Among Arab Muslims in the United States. Sociology of Religion, 76(1), 30–48. Rosenstone, S.  J., & Hansen, J.  M. (1993). Mobilization, Participation, and Democracy in America. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company. Smith, D. H. (1994). Determinants of Voluntary Association Participation and Volunteering: A Literature Review. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 23(3), 243–263. Smith, K., Holmes, K., Haski-Leventhal, D., Cnaan, R.  A., Handy, F., & Brudney, J.  L. (2010). Motivations and Benefits of Student Volunteering: Comparing Regular, Occasional, and Non-Volunteers in Five Countries. Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social Economy Research, 1(1), 65–81. Stukas, A. A., Hoye, R., Nicholson, M., Brown, K. M., & Aisbett, L. (2016). Motivations to Volunteer and Their Associations with Volunteers’ Well-­ Being. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 45(1), 112–132. Torry, M. (2005). Managing God’s Business: Religious and Faith-Based Organizations and their Management. Aldershot: Ashgate. Van Londen, M., Phalet, K., & Hagendoorn, L. (2007). Civic Engagement and Voter Participation among Turkish and Moroccan Minorities in Rotterdam. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33(8), 1201–1226. Verba, S., Schlozman, K.  L., & Brady, H. (1995). Voice and Equality. Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vergani, M., Johns, A., Lobo, M., & Mansouri, F. (2017). Examining Islamic Religiosity and Civic Engagement in Melbourne. Journal of Sociology, 53(1), 63–78.

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von Essen, J., Hustinx, L., Haers, J., & Mels, S. (2015). Religion and Volunteering. In L. Hustinx, J. von Essen, J. Haers, & S. Mels (Eds.), Religion and Volunteering. Complex, Contested and Ambiguous Relationships (pp. 1–20). Cham: Springer. Walsh, L., & Black, R. (2015). Youth Volunteering in Australia: An Evidence Review. Braddon, Canberra: ARACY. Wang, L., & Handy, F. (2014). Religious and Secular Voluntary Participation by Immigrants in Canada: How Trust and Social networks Affect Decision to Participate. Voluntas (International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations), 25(6), 1559–1582. Wilson, J. (2000). Volunteering. Annual Review of Sociology, 26(1), 215–240. Wilson, J., & Musick, M. (1997). Who Cares? Towards an Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work. American Sociological Review, 62(5), 694–713. Wuthnow, R. (1994). God and Mammon in America. New York, NY: Free Press.

5 Charity as Civic Participation for Dutch– Turkish Muslims Yağiz Cebecioglu

In the beginning of her foreword to Mauss’s seminal book The Gift, Mary Douglas writes, “Charity is meant to be a free gift, a voluntary, unrequited surrender of resources” (Douglas 1990). Since its initial publication in Essai sur le don (Essay on the Gift), Mauss’s theory of “no pure gift” has received a substantial level of attention; whether opposing or endorsing it, all of the responses pointed to the same conclusion: voluntary giving has been critical for social participation ever since ancient eras. Regarding religion’s role in volunteerism, the literature has demonstrated that religious affiliations strongly impact participation in voluntary work, particularly where the individual is part of a diaspora1 (e.g., Wilson and Janoski 1995; Wang and Handy 2014; Driskell et al. 2008).2

 For a broader discussion on the interplay between religion and diaspora see Vertovec and Cohen (1999). 2  Most of these studies focus on the church communities in diaspora. Involvement of non-white immigrants and Muslim minorities appears to be understudied. 1

Y. Cebecioglu (*) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_5

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In this regard, researchers have provided evidence on the involvement of Turkish Muslims’ living in Europe in formal and informal volunteer activities (Bekkers and Carabain 2011; Yukleyen 2012; Sunier and Landman 2015). As Lara Deeb (2006) emphasized, institutionalized religious volunteerism in modern Muslim societies connects its followers to the broader public. Researchers focusing on Islam in the Western countries also mostly argue that organized Islam is an effective means to become involved in volunteer work for the diaspora of Turkish Muslims. Turkish Islamic movements have been reported to form successful volunteering organizations to mediate between the needs of their constituencies, the state, and society (Sunier and Landman 2015; Yukleyen 2012). In this chapter, I explore the role of the pious trajectories of followers of two Turkish religious movements in relation to charity and volunteering. These two movements are the Millî Görüş and the Gülen (Hizmet) movement. I investigate how the discourse of piety of these movements constructs the daily engagement of their constituencies within the larger society. I argue that, while the articulated ultimate aim of individuals involved in volunteer activities is God’s approval (Allah Rizasi), the discourses of the movements they affiliate with have a significant impact on how they attempt to achieve this aim in their everyday lives (Yukleyen 2012). I first provide an analytical background to facilitate a better understanding of the dynamics of charity work among Muslims. While previous scholarship has analyzed the charity of Muslims (e.g., Benthall 2016; Mittermaier 2019), I start by discussing some key concepts to better analyze how discourses on charity and volunteer work are understood by practicing Muslims who voluntarily give money, time, and effort for the betterment of others. In my analysis, piety (taqwa) and the afterlife (akhira) play a significant role in comprehending how God’s approval is understood by Muslims. In a second step, I analyze the charity and volunteering activities of the two Turkish–Muslim movements based on the ethnographic data I collected during my fieldwork between 2014 and 2017 in the Netherlands and Turkey. Most of my informants are Dutch–Turkish Muslims affiliated with one of two Turkish religious movements: the Millî Görüş or Gülen Movement. I have participated in events and activities organized

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by these movements, including kermes, fundraising, and informal lecturing circles (sohbet). I have also conducted loosely structured interviews with followers of these movements. Based on the point that volunteering is neither a one-time act of goodness nor an occasional free-time activity for my informants, I aim to draw scholarly attention to the relations between the types of piety and the movements they offer to their followers to pursue throughout their lives as well as the informants’ life-time commitment to the task of taking care of others, which in other words is a religious duty—a form of ibadah. Discourse is a critical tool that contains and carries elements that shape the self-crafting trajectory of Muslims. For that reason, I focus on the discourse in which my informants reflectively engage in to pursue their personal aim to be a “proper” Muslim who is approved by God. I attempted to do this by examining the informal religious sohbet groups and daily conversations of my informants in various places such as mosques, associations, language courses, business organizations, student dormitories, and cafes. I focused not only on the informants’ discussions of religious topics but also their emotional expressions, and how they assert their opinions on daily affairs such as politics, the economy, or sports. These conversations helped me understand how the informants reflect on their piety in everyday life as well as on issues not immediately recognized as religious.3 The sohbet circles, where 5 to 20 men gather to discuss a religious topic based on a text or that revolves around an occasion, largely contributed to my understanding of the construction of volunteer work and the dynamics of the discursive environment. In these meetings, many religious topics are discussed and many lectures on religious topics are given; additionally, emotions, opinions, skills, experiences play significant roles, and the established norms and authorities are sometimes contested at sohbet sites. In sohbet meetings, people, including myself, make new friends, organize volunteer tasks, and receive feedback about the completed projects and reflect on them. Thus, the purposes of these meetings include cultivating piety and building relationships that strengthen their voluntary works. I met people in these sohbet circles who later became  I don’t want to use the word “secular” as it is open to be challenged.

3

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gatekeepers for my research but also close friends. The nature of these meetings is to provide intimacy for the participants, which is useful for anthropological research despite some pitfalls.

 eaning of God’s Approval: Seeking taqwa M (Piety) and Believing in akhirah (Afterlife) The literature has made evident that the fundamental debate regarding charity is the nature and significance of the act of giving. Applying a social and economic perspective, Mauss’s seminal work on giving (Mauss 2002 [1954]) asserts that the act of giving is a self-interested act playing an important role in the construction of societies and that even the most ostensibly charitable gift is meant to result in something in return. This assertion pertains not solely to relationships of individuals with other individuals but also to relationships between communities. Among the critics of his work, Douglas (1990) argues that Mauss’ theory needs to be tested in the contemporary world, in which solidarity mechanisms are regulated by government bodies, diminishing mutual obligations among individuals. She states that in the twentieth century, the notion of honor did not play as important a role as it did in the past and asserts that Mauss’ “own positivist method would require a great deal more patient spadework, both on theory and in collecting new kinds of data” (Douglas 1990: xix). As for religion-inspired voluntary giving, Keane (2016: 208) argues that although Mauss does not define morality, he does not rule out the role of moral obligations “constraining” the acts of people based on self-­ interest. Inclusion of the moral codes in the process leads Keane to consider the role of religion. He asserts that a religion’s role as an organizer of moral codes is necessary to improve the understanding of the practices of its followers, including the practice of charity. In this regard, researchers who study the phenomenon of giving from the perspective of religion have to manage questions of the expectation of return and hierarchy, which may result in the use of gifting as a means of exerting power over other people (Bataille 1991; Guinea-Martin 2014; Mittermaier 2014).

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Amira Mittermaier (2014) explores the paradoxes of the “pure gift” and “hierarchy” between givers and recipients in Muslim-majority societies and emphasized the role of a sense of duty, instead of focusing solely on the role of compassion, to develop a more effective means to conceptualize charitable acts in Muslim societies. Fazlur Rahman (2009) provides a comprehensive analysis of charity and piety in an Islamic context that overlaps with Mittermaier’s observations. Rahman (2009: 39) categorizes the act of giving as an act that makes an individual responsible toward the society and illustrates how giving is critical for an individual to be able to reach true taqwa (piety), which he defines as a moral responsibility. According to him, taqwa represents moral righteousness that ultimately results in salvation. Rahman (1983) defines taqwa in a manner that requires an individual to take care of others to cultivate a moral Muslim subject. In this sense, every act of a Muslim to take care of others is a religious duty, compared with the notion of compassion, which is claimed to hierarchize givers and recipients. Rahman (2009: 40) cites the following chapter of the Qur’an to underline that the ethical and religious dimensions of giving are inseparable: Did you see the one who gives the lie to the Faith? It is he who maltreats orphans and works little for the feeding of the poor. Woe betide, then, those who pray, yet are neglectful of their prayers—those who pray for show and even deny the use of their utensils [to the poor]. (Qur’an, Chapter 107; Rahman’s own translation)

He asserts that the denial of responsibility toward the needy, which is an ethical decision in the daily life of a Muslim, can invalidate worship. Similarly, in her study with Egyptian women, Mahmood (2005) defines piety as “not only an inward spiritual state” but also “a disposition and a practical conduct.” Both Mahmood and Rahman have attributed substantial agency to the Muslim subject, performed by giving responsibility, referring to performativity, and outlining a believer’s devotion to acting out their responsibility in the construction of their ethical agency. As a scholar who has thoroughly explored the underlying meanings of religious texts to make sense of the lives of modern Muslim societies,

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Rahman’s analysis on the conceptualization of taqwa may contribute to the anthropological work on the charity of Muslims. Rahman (1983) does not distinguish Islam, in the sense of overt acts such as praying, zakat, and fasting, from Iman (faith), in the sense of believing in entities such as God or angels. He argued that Islam, not only in terms of fulfilling the five pillars of Islam but also as a mode of practicing that permeates all aspects of life, is the concrete expression of Iman. In other words, faith is nothing more than an individual practicing everything that that individual believes. Taqwa, in his opinion, is a larger concept that encompasses the meanings of both. Furthermore, Fazlur Rahman underlines the importance of akhirah (afterlife) as central to providing greater insight into why Muslims’ moral responsibility against society is a complementary part of their piety. According to him, “it is the akhirah that provides the necessary vision and brings taqwa into operation” (Rahman 1983). Since the akhirah is a continuation of this life, an individual should always be wary of ending up suffering the eternal loss and should instead strive for salvation. Apart from the Weberian other-worldliness (Weber 1963), Rahman (1983) brings a different perspective to the topic by elaborating on the role of akhirah in an ordinary Muslim’s life. According to him, akhirah is critical not only because it envisions a distant future for Muslims in which they can harvest what they sow in this life but also because it widens the worldview of Muslims regarding their two-fold relationship with society and God in their daily lives. He argues that the most important aspect of taqwa is an individual’s recognition of physical and cognitive impotence against God and the universe. Rahman (1983) asserts that physical impotence means no individual’s power can last forever and that cognitive impotence means that humans are narrow-minded and cannot understand what is right and wrong in the long term. He argues that humans can make wrong decisions as a result of this narrow-mindedness and harm themselves. This argument relates to the meaning of taqwa, which literally means an individual protecting himself or herself. Rahman (1983) asserts that such impotence regarding distinguishing right from wrong requires investing in good deeds to obtain God’s help with securing eternal happiness, which one cannot attain by relying on an individual’s own power. His analysis can

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provide insight into why the discourse of Allah rizasi (God’s approval) prevails in the field of Islamic activism more than compassion, particularly in the field of volunteerism. This is in line with statements often used by the informants in my research such as, “I have already committed lots of sins. I am trying to make up for them with good deeds,” and “the ultimate owner of all I have is my Lord [Rabbim].” Statements such as these indicate their feeling the need to make a contribution to God’s creatures to gain God’s approval against their own shortcomings in becoming good Muslims. As Keane (2016) explains in reference to Hirschkind’s (2001) study on Cairo men, akhirah is central to the daily practices of Muslims in terms of monitoring themselves in relation to God’s perspective. To improve the understanding of the role of the other-worldliness in gift giving without the expectation of something in return, we may examine Laidlaw’s (2000) analysis of Jain renouncers and Mittermaier’s work on Egyptian volunteers. Laidlaw (2000) shows that Jain ascetics and food givers strictly follow the guidelines to ensure that the gift is not given in the interest of both parties. He applies Derrida’s (1992) four conditions to reach a pure gift in the case of Jain renouncers to show that the giving is not necessarily based on mutual expectation. The Jain recipients and givers apply ascetic principles to themselves to eliminate any reciprocal expectation in the ritual of almsgiving. The aim is to improve karma in the pursuit of spiritual perfection. In a similar manner, Mittermaier (2014) quotes from a Muslim volunteer in Egypt, “The poor don’t need us; we need the poor. They’re our gate to paradise.” Although her interlocutors express their feelings toward charity in a “multilayered” fashion, she notes that they commonly emphasize that their effort is aimed at receiving God’s pleasure (lillah). Although needing individuals who have a low income in itself implies a form of reciprocity, considering them as a gate to paradise clarifies that the interest is not worldly and that the reciprocation is not from the recipient or the society. The whole effort is an investment in the otherworld, that is, from God. Mittermaier (2019: 44) notes that the word for volunteering in Arabic is tatawwu’ (see also Keskin and Yucel’s chapter in this book). Ironically, she argues, tatawwu’ is etymologically closer to “rendering oneself obedient,” which is in contradiction with the modern approach to volunteerism derived from

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voluntas, which refers to individual’s own will. In other words, the act of giving for these people aims at no return from other people but the expectation is from God. Earning rewards in an afterlife including paradise and salvation from hell are different forms of articulation of God’s approval (lillah). As Mahmood (2005) emphasizes in Politics of Piety, Muslims’ commitment to pious life by crafting their selves in accordance with God’s desires and their use of agency can make the analysis even more complicated for the modern secular analyst. In her latest book, Mittermaier (2019: 17) starts with a quote from Madame Salwa, a wealthy and pious Muslim woman in Egypt who dedicates much of her life to feeding hungry people with low incomes. Madame Salwa says to Mittermaier, “I do not care about the poor. I do all this for God (lillah).” According to Mittermaier, her informant’s motive “collapses common critiques of charity—precisely because it is neither ‘charity’ nor ‘charitable’. Rather it is dutiful and directed at God.” Mittermaier asserts that “People like Madame Salwa give because God ordered them to do so and they want to make it into paradise.” She rephrases Fassin’s (2012: 251) statement “we love to feel pity” to “they love to accrue points” in their accounts of the akhirah. These examples show how giving is a duty for many religious Jains and Muslims that has to be strictly practiced and emanate from the belief in an afterlife. What distinguishes Jain ascetics from the Egyptian volunteers is civic engagement. Several authors have asserted that the other-worldliness of Jain asceticism prevents renouncers from engagement with society, although it renders the pure gift possible (Laidlaw 2014: 126; Vallely 2002); Mittermaier (2014) demonstrates how this is the opposite for the Egyptian Muslims she worked with. To obtain God’s approval in the Day of Judgement, an individual must take care of others in this world; this, as Rahman (1983) emphasizes, requires a high level of awareness regarding the state of God’s creatures, fosters a sense of responsibility toward communities, and provokes a sense of obligation to civic engagement in the quotidian context. I would like to critically engage with the argument of Mittermaier (2014) in relation to Rahman’s viewpoint. Mittermaier (2014) states that “the believer’s ethical relationship to God” is far more important than “social ethics, i.e., the believer’s ethical relationship to other human

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beings,” in reference to the definition of Izutsu (2007: 17). She emphasizes her informants’ rhetoric of duty against God to show the weakness of the notions of love and compassion. She also links her informants’ rhetoric to Qutb’s interpretation of zakat within the framework of social justice. Mittermaier (2014) argues that when the volunteers engage in charity but rhetorically insist that the act was only for God, it serves to disorient and reorient them from the social context by urging them to find alternative modes of giving beyond compassion and love. According to Rahman, by contrast, God’s orders regarding taking care of others indicate God’s togetherness with all humans everywhere. Rahman (1983) explains that God always watches and interferes with the affairs of his subjects. Therefore, there is no distinction between interacting with others and interacting with God, but there is a tripartite relationship between taqwa, man, and society. Rahman (2009: 42) argues that taqwa is meaningful only in social contexts. This definition of taqwa might be a solution for the problematic analysis of Mittermaier by pointing out that God’s omnipresence does not allow a distinction between serving the community and serving God. One of Mittermaier’s (2014) informants refers to a hadith that remarks that when an individual gives to people who have low incomes, the act brings God before them; this suggests that the Egyptian volunteer is aware of God’s continuous togetherness and relates to Das’ (2014) objections against Laidlaw (2014) regarding Jainism’s impossibility in the discourse of ordinary householders. Das (2014) argues that Laidlaw’s claim “Jainism is impossible” is anthropologically contradictory to the “reality of ordinary.” One needs to distinguish what ordinary people’s allegiance to a higher ideal means and what the reality of ordinary implies in everyday life, according to Das (2014). Likewise, Mittermaier fails to solve the dilemma of God’s pleasure as an abstract concept and her informants’ desire to engage with other humans as part of their everyday religiosity. Rahman (1983, 2009), by contrast, effectively communicates that the idea of pious performativity and emphasizes the ethical dimension in a social context, along with the commitment to reward and punishment in the afterlife, which are complementary parts of the same puzzle.

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 eligious Movements in Europe R and the Reinterpretation of Charity According to recent research conducted in the Netherlands, practicing Muslims tend to show more pro-social behaviors, are often part of a religious organization, and are more engaged in volunteer activism than others (Huijnk 2018). In addition, Muslim movements organized in Europe have been able to reach the broader public more effectively than individuals, which explains the shift from a mosque-oriented Islam to an opening up to larger society over the last few decades (Azak 2009). This shift is also emphasized by Henkel (2004), directing attention to discussions revolving around integrational attitudes of German Muslims. These studies suggest that volunteer participation and engagement with religious movements are correlated, which makes it possible to argue that religious movements make significant contributions to the reconstruction of the Muslims’ task of giving in a European context. In this regard, Rahman’s (2009: 42) criticism of traditional Muslim societies as a result of the defunctionalization of charity, and the zakat, in particular, is highly relevant. He explains that charities in the Qur’an suggest a wider sense of social aid that covers areas such as diplomacy, education, and defense. For instance, the Qur’an states that zakat can function as a “heart winner” in relationships with non-Muslims; however, Muslims have narrowed its functions within a hidebound tradition (Rahman 1989: 28). Rahman argues religious movements in Europe have been reinterpreting the idea of charity for decades and reshaping the field of global Islamic activism. In my fieldwork, the sample of informants often praised the efforts of their respective movement to correct their approaches to charity for two main reasons. First, as Putnam (2000) indicates for the population in the United States, joining a group makes an individual nearly ten times more generous with their time and money than those who do not. In my case, almost all the participants I met underscored that they used to believe that donating coins (uc bes kurus) after Friday prayer was sufficient before they joined the particular religious movement. They said that the ­movements they affiliate with taught them to dedicate more time, money, and effort to others.

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Second, Bluhdorn (2006) describe contemporary social movements as loci of the “reconstruction of the self.” In the same vein, I argue that the contemporary Muslim movements that I focus on contribute to the reformation of the lay Muslims’ “sense of self.” I deliberately use the term locus to emphasize the role of movements as intermediaries rather than agents imposing a top to bottom religiosity on their participants. The movements with transnational characters do not necessarily have to contradict the elements of the so-called European Islam with the integration policies of the host states as it has been perceived by the governments over decades (Sunier and Landman 2014, see also Sunier’s chapter in this book). Instead, these movements represent the reality of organized Islam in a European context and help provide a means for Muslims to engage with the state and society by reinterpreting the Islamic activism that they inherited from their country of origin—Turkey, in my case (Yukleyen 2012; Sunier and Landman 2015). Ordinary people in the movements negotiate society and the movement that they are in, undertaking a self-­ transforming journey instead of receiving direct instructions from either entity. In this regard, many of the informants admitted that they used to believe that zakat or other aids should be sent to Turkey to support the people with low incomes residing in their own previous hometowns or villages because donating aid in a non-Muslim society was a waste. After the movements expanded their network of participants, this approach has been replaced by a wider sense of responsibility for human development in the world, according to many informants. This process of negotiation is not a one-way interaction. By conducting simultaneous negotiations with volunteer movements and society, Muslims also reflect on their encounters with European society and their relations with religious movements. This reflection enables them to restructure the discourse of the movements and the character of their activities.

Millî Görüş and the ummah Millî Görüş is an Islamist political movement established in Turkey by Necmettin Erbakan. Millî Görüş gave birth to many factions including the current ruling party, but the core cadres of the movement deliberately

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distinguish themselves from Turkey’s ruling party in the public sphere. The movement’s main goal is to raise awareness of being ummah (Leman 2010), represent the ummah, and defend its rights in the public sphere (Yukleyen 2012), and many of the informants from Millî Görüş insist that the movement’s priority is to work toward realizing this goal. I argue that the nature and extent of the movement’s voluntary activities have been very much shaped by this goal until recently. As a result of intensive debates revolving around the movement’s activities in Europe and the involvement of younger generations in the decision-making mechanisms, a change toward a civil society organization from a religious movement has been taking place in recent years. The desire to be a voice of the ummah as a definitive characteristic of Millî Görüş is clearly declared on the website of Millî Görüş Nederland: The “Federation of North Holland Millî Görüş pledges itself to play a representative and determinant role on behalf of Muslims in the societal, cultural and political fields.”4 A few years ago, when Israel launched one of its many bombardments on Gaza, many Muslims across the world protested Israel’s attack, but Dutch–Turkish young people affiliated with Millî Görüş started fundraising for the victims. They asked people to buy stickers they had made to contribute to the Palestinian victims’ well-being. Notably, the young people wanted to collect money for the Palestinians and use the charity to express their frustration to the public. They wrote “stop bombing Gazza” on stickers and asked those who bought them to stick them on bills and coins, which would eventually be circulated. By doing this, they created a means to help Palestinians and interact with society in a political fashion. I would like to stress that involvement in political activism does not necessarily aim at achieving a political result but can be a means of embodying an individual’s religiosity. Members of Millî Görüş in Turkey have become accustomed to getting involved in political protests such as sit-ins and rallies against headscarf bans, the US occupation of Iraq, and the coup in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood party. In each case, their political stance is intrinsic to how they interpret and prac I have retrieved this statement from the official website of the Millî Görüş Netherlands’s Turkish version (http://www.milligorus.nl/nl/home) on November 10, 2016. At the time of writing, this statement had been removed from the website. This removal is linked to the above-mentioned change toward a more integrational route. 4

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tice piety. Göle (1999), for example, in The Forbidden Modern, thoroughly analyzes the struggle of women who wear veils against the headscarf ban of the laic Turkish state. While Göle successfully illustrates how Muslim women who wear the veil express their piety through a form of political discourse, she does not properly analyze the relationship between the women and their faith in their daily lives (Kuru 2001). In a similar manner, if the actions of Dutch–Turkish young people are considered from a political perspective, without paying attention to their effort to become responsible Muslims, the analysis would be inadequate. They attempt to show and cultivate their piety by engaging in political activism. Their use of charity as a medium for expressing their frustration against oppression of Muslims is not merely a political movement; the informants told me that they did so to fulfill their responsibility toward their oppressed Muslim brothers. Muhammed (23) stated, “how could we remain silent while ummet-i Muhammed (People of Mohammed) is suffering?” The motive, therefore, is to be a good Muslim by supporting Palestinian Muslims and to show that Muslims are organs of the same body: when one of the organs suffers, the others cannot remain silent and happy. This sentiment is inspired by the idea that Islam is not individualistic and local but communitarian and transnational. Being Muslim requires feeling responsibility for the whole Muslim community and taking action to solve its problems. In this sense, the members of Millî Görüş mostly criticize Muslims who live in a mosque-centered Islam, namely, Diyanet, or some Sufi orders reluctant to become involved in public debates, by blaming them for being too passive (Yukleyen 2012: 83). In this context, Selim’s (22) remarks are particularly relevant: Erbakan Hoca told us that we should not overvalue the mosques. What we can do in the mosques is limited. Erbakan said ‘You can leave the mosque-­ running business to Diyanet. You must focus on tablig (spreading God’s words among people). Tablig is able to reach a lot more people and make them aware of our cause.’

This type of piety, which is embedded within political discourse, is also evident in the majority of peoples’ choice of the IHH5 (Humanitarian  IHH Netherlands website https://ihhnl.org/nl/

5

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Relief Foundation) as the main representative of Millî Görüş in the field of charity, even though Millî Görüş has its own relief organization called HASENE.6 IHH was established in 1992 during the Bosnian War to provide help for Bosnian Muslims. The most prominent activity of the IHH is running the aid flotilla raided by Israeli soldiers on the way to Gaza in 2010. Nine activists were killed in this raid, and it led to a breakdown of Turkish–Israel relations that has continued until recently. After that incident, the IHH became a symbol of political Islamist charity. For that reason, and despite the fact that the founders of the IHH Netherlands have left Millî Görüş to start a new charity based on their own initiatives, the Millî Görüş community makes more donations to IHH than to HASENE, especially in the kurban season, according to the informants. Many Millî Görüş members support it because they claim that it reaches wherever the ummah is in difficulty. Although, according to the foundation’s website, the organization’s aim is to reach all of humanity, the supporters also express their gratitude to IHH’s contribution to the Islamic community and to raising awareness of the problems of other Muslims. HASENE is also extremely active in linking Dutch Muslims to their brothers and sisters living across the world, especially in Muslim countries. HASENE’s activities are parallel to the Millî Görüş’s discourse of ummah. The discourse emphasizes the poverty in Muslim countries and encourages the Muslim community to take responsibility. The key word in HASENE’s propaganda publications is mazlum, which means downtrodden or oppressed. Some examples of mazlum include their motto, “Hand in hand for the oppressed and victims”: the slogan of the kurban campaign, “Be the one who sacrifices with kurban and be the hope for the oppressed”; and the slogan of the food campaign, “Let the meals be blessed with your lunch boxes and the oppressed be happy.” The use of mazlum to refer to Muslims who live in poverty and with oppression is inspired by the narrative that Muslims are oppressed by (neo-)colonialist and capitalist non-Muslims, namely, Western powers (Seufert 1999). That is why this charity prioritizes Muslim-majority countries or Muslim minorities in non-Muslim-majority countries, such as Muslims in Bosnia and Myanmar.  HASENE website https://www.hasene.org/#

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The members of Millî Görüş have started in recent years to express concerns with louder voices about the integration of younger Muslim generations. In this regard, they are aware that education is the key to success in the social lives of their children. Volunteers organize tutoring classes in addition to religious classes to support the Turkish youth, promote their success at school, improve the representation of Islam in the public sphere, and organize debates in the election periods for the political candidates to meet young Muslims. In these meetings, volunteers confront different political opinions and discuss various topics including migration, economics, racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. This shows how Millî Görüş members attempt to be active in the Netherlands and across the world to make contributions to the well-­ being of humanity, especially to Muslims in need. How they organize their charity and their volunteer activities demonstrates that Millî Görüş’s discursive references play a significant role in its constituencies’ participation and encounters with society. These discursive references have been driven by Erbakan’s desire to shape a strong ummah in Turkey and in the world in general and they have evolved in the European context over several decades (Sunier and Landman 2015: 71). As Mandaville (2001) asserts, Muslims’ relationship with society cannot be understood if the transnational dynamics are overlooked. For example, why did young Muslims in the Netherlands choose to engage with Dutch society by organizing a sticker-selling campaign to spread the word of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians? This can relate to some scholarly explanations (e.g., Odmalm 2009: 153) for German Muslims’ endeavors in civil society organizations. From this perspective, the lack of opportunities to formally participate in German politics is the impetus for members of Millî Görüş to develop alternative methods of civic–political engagement in civil organizations. However, this argument cannot be applied to the Dutch context because they have political opportunities that they already use to make claims regarding Muslims’ concern. What I argue here is that how they become involved in charity and volunteering is political in nature even though they do not think that it is political; instead, they argue that this is how a Muslim should act to be a “true Muslim” who feels responsibility for the current state of the ummah. In other words, God’s pleasure can be attained by taking care of

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the troubles of other Muslims and by engaging with the world to provide improved service for the whole Muslim community. That act makes an individual truly pious and helps them to choose the path of righteous servants of God in the afterlife. The commitment to build a better community by making claims for Muslims is not only an essential way of living their piety but it is, more importantly, also a method to acquire their piety. Thus, they consider that getting involved in political debates and raising voices on behalf of other Muslims is a fundamental part of being a responsible Muslim. In the broader context, this results in Millî Görüş spreading a sense of victimization among Turkish Muslims by building on the social and political marginalization of Muslims. By doing so, Millî Görüş engages with society by challenging its values, rules, and norms to make room for those of Islam (Tol 2009). This challenge paradoxically opens a door of dialogue between the society and the movement that reflects its changing character most saliently among the younger generations. Young people who show their piety by engaging with the host society and speaking for the ummah also become the agents of the internal change of the movement by challenging the norms set by the senior members, especially those from Turkey.

The Gülen Movement: Education and Dialogue Are Key to Piety When I stepped into the room, a chapter of the Qur’an was being recited. Approximately 15 to 20 men were sitting on Turkish style couches and listening silently to the recitation. After me, a few more men joined the group. Of the men, two were imams of the Gülen Movement responsible for the organization of activities in Amsterdam, and the others were ­businessmen. All these people knew why they were invited on that night: It was himmet night, which in this context means fundraising (Yavuz 2013: 80). One of the two imams, Mehmet Ali, said that “they were invited to show their generosity for the sake of future generations.” After the Qur’an recitation, a short video clip was shown. In the video,7 Fethullah Gülen, the spiritual head of this global movement, was speak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYxiNo7__oQ

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ing to an audience in Istanbul in the late 1990s. He urges them in his speech to work hard to spread the word of Allah and the name of the Prophet throughout the world. He frequently burst into tears in his speech, saying “your friends have reached all the way to Siberia and African deserts,” referring to the schools and dialogue centers of the movement, but also saying “still the great majority of the world does not know the glory of the name of your prophet.” He was referring to the need for establishing more of these institutions to realize the Prophet’s project for Muslims. After Gülen’s speech, which lasted around 10 minutes, an imam started preaching. He praised the Hizmet for its effort in spreading God’s name all over the world. In his speech, he tried to emphasize that volunteers of the Hizmet are the heirs of Sahabah (Prophet’s Companions). According to the imam, Sahabah was highly successful in spreading Islam throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Today, Hizmet volunteers carry out the same work across the globe. According to him, Hizmet volunteers believe that financing schools, dialogue centers, student houses, and education centers is the most efficient method to reach the goal set by the Prophet. He also stated that those institutions will provide high-quality education for future generations and make them cosmopolitan citizens able to build peaceful coexistence on Earth; that is what God orders and what the Prophet intended. He also argued that Islam means peace and can be understood by only those who have peaceful minds; thus, he claimed, every cent donated to this cause would be rewarded with multiple returns by God either in this world or in Heaven. The speaker supported his argument with excerpts from the Qur’an that praise generosity. The imam spoke for a long time and provided many examples of the parallels between the works of Sahabah and the Hizmet volunteers to encourage the audience to increase their generosity. In this manner, he attempted to explain that the volunteers’ pursuit of Sahabah’s method of volunteering makes them prominent contributors to the larger society they live in. After his speech, each participant was asked how much he would donate to the movement within the coming year. The numbers varied between 2,000 and 30,000 Euro. Participants sometimes gently encouraged each other to give more by saying “abi [brother], I know you can give more. Raise a little more.” A similar observation is made by

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Yavuz (2013: 81), who argues that participants of himmet pressure each other to give more money, and sometimes this amount is more than they can afford. This himmet night was organized by the Gülen Movement in Amsterdam. The Gülen Movement is one of the most debated Islamic groups. The movements’ sympathizers view its focus as the education of modern sciences in combination with moral-based piety, interfaith dialogue, and community service (Çelik 2011; Agai 2007). Its opponents consider the movement to be a clandestine movement that aims to take control of the state in Turkey and expand the power of Islam insidiously throughout the West (Krespin 2009). In such fundraisings, a complex type of power relationship occurs. Individuals who donate money are also entitled to monitor the projects that the donations were collected for. This monitoring is conducted usually by a group representing the whole community. Through the monitoring, agency of the followers is incorporated into the relationship, and leaders of the movement are held accountable regarding their management by these followers. Sometimes, indoor disputes about the management of donations emerge between the leaders and businessmen responsible for the management of the donations. In these situations, I have witnessed that higher-ranking imams and the most respected businessmen intervene to solve the conflict. However, another complexity in these situations is that individuals experienced at collecting and managing donations have a type of religious authority over others; they are accepted as a reference regarding religious topics even if they have no knowledge. Because of their involvement in volunteer work and dedication to Hizmet projects, their opinions on religious topics can also be respected. When asked, the participants call such people sincere samimi and attribute them authority. This authority sometimes causes conflict between imams who have actual religious knowledge and these figures who have gained authority over time. Gülen (2006) rejects the idea, developed by many Muslim scholars, that the world is divided into two parts: Dar’ul Islam (House of Peace) and Dar’ul Harb (House of War). According to Gülen, categorization of the world as Dar’ul Islam and Dar’ul Harb is no longer relevant. Instead, he suggests that the whole world is Dar’ul Hizmet (Land of Service).

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Serving others without paying attention to their ethnicity, religion, and gender, in his opinion, enables a Muslim to be one of God’s beloved servants (Gülen 2006: 90). He preaches two key concepts to promote his projects among the grassroots: dialogue and education. The discourse regarding the importance of education and dialogue between people from different backgrounds is prevalent among the participants and used to shape and structure their piety. The movement is successful in attracting businessmen to financially support its projects. Its success in recruiting well-educated Muslims to mobilize for its volunteer work is also significant. In the European context, the movements’ main investments are education institutions and dialogue organizations that aim to construct fruitful relationships with the host societies and enable them to fulfill their utmost duty: to represent Islam in its best form to non-­ Muslims. The most prevalent rhetoric of the movement is that everyone should contribute to educational projects that can make the dialogue meaningful. As Nur (33) told me, without education, dialogue cannot result in social cohesion. Educated people who are not in dialogue with others will end up egocentric and such isolated egoists will make peaceful coexistence impossible. With this logic, the movements’ volunteer activities have a close link to its normative framework, which is largely influenced by Fethullah Gülen’s opinions and has been reformulated by his followers based on their daily encounters in various contexts (Kuru 2003). Many Gülenist businessmen give their annual zakat to the movement, knowing that the money is spent on a science Olympiad, building a secular school in a low-income country, or funding an intercultural dialogue meeting. Regardless of the nature of the event, the idea of promoting dialogue and education is part of a Gülen follower’s relationship with God. The Muslim who is responsible for the community, as described by Fazlur Rahman (2009), is interpreted by Gülen followers in this manner. However, critics of the movement argue that this is a tactical investment of the movement to find its own way in the pragmatist environment. Many of the opponents I interviewed claim that Gülenists recruit intelligent students by providing financial support and using them for its own goals. In this regard, the movement is criticized for being an elitist organization that cares about only smart students or wealthy businessmen who can help the movement achieve its ultimate aim. Regardless of the

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movements’ organizers’ goal for volunteer work, the participants show their interest in how the movement presents volunteerism as a part of a program of ethical agency that contributes to establishing their piety. For them, giving in this manner connects them with the movement, Islam, and humanity. Action is a concept frequently employed within the movement to urge volunteers to contribute further. Himmet, one of the main financial sources of the movement, reflects this action (see for detailed elaborations, Ebaugh 2010). Himmet literally means giving effort. Gülen often uses the phrase himmetur’ rical taklau’ l jibal, which means “men’s effort can uproot mountains,” and himmeti ali tutmak, which means that always aiming to attain the top is prevalent in the discursive field of the movement. In that sense, volunteers work hard to have success. The money the participants donate every year is also called himmet, and they are always asked to be generous because there is a lot of work to be carried out with limited financial resources. Participants are also encouraged to seek means to be rich to be able to give more to the movement. To help them to do this, the movement has organized various match-making meetings for their sympathizer businessmen to determine how to expand their businesses. For that reason, scholars such as Yavuz (2013: 121) and Hintz (2018: 142) have compared the Gülen Movement with the Calvinists. I have participated in such meetings in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Istanbul several times. Whereas the businessmen seek opportunities in these meetings to expand their businesses on international platforms, the organizers aim to harvest more financial resources for the movement’s operations from those growing businesses by convincing them to donate to the movements’ projects. Charity organizations are not passive recipients of cash. Instead, they mostly identify individuals whose specific skills, experience, and social capital they can deploy effectively (Bryant et al. 2003). For people in the Gülen Movement who cannot give money there are platforms to give time and effort, as volunteers, including kermes organizing, tutoring younger students, helping at dialogue events, and finding new subscribers for the movements’ periodicals; these volunteer contributions are not considered less valuable among the participants that donate money (Kayikci 2016). Thus, a follower who plays a critical role in organizing

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such events might even be more respected than a follower who donates tens of thousands of Euro yearly. The community is aware that dedicating time and effort is as important as donating money. Leading figures of the Gülen Movement that I talked to are less willing to emphasize the oppression of Muslims by Western powers than the Millî Görüş members are, either in a European context or elsewhere. Instead, they argue that they promote a mutually constructive dialogue with non-Muslims by claiming that oppression is an abstract concept created in Muslims’ minds. Many of the informants mentioned that Muslims could be good members of their societies by obtaining good education, working hard without complaining about oppression, and getting involved in concerns of the larger society. Education and dialogue play significant roles for the participants of the movement to realize this goal. Educated young people will know the society that leads them to attach to its agenda, according to participants of Hizmet.

Conclusion Whether to give, to help, or to care for others involves ethical decisions individuals have to make every day in their lives. Although Muslims refer to the same normative frames, they develop different ethical schemes due to different experiences, for example, context and time. In this chapter, I argued that piety is a key concept to explore the ethical agency of Muslim individuals. I examined the discourses and interpretations of piety of Millî Görüş and the Gülen Movement and their impacts on charity activities conducted by their followers in their everyday lives. It is evident that each movement offers its own interpretation of piety to its followers. Millî Görüş prioritizes taking care of the ummah and focuses its volunteer work on the well-being of the global Muslim community. By starting a political movement in Turkey, Millî Görüş has become a prominent civil society actor organizing people to volunteer for the good of Muslims. Although, recently, a change has been taking place, the oppression of Muslims around the world and the concept of a brotherhood of Muslims continue to be commonly used as an appeal to promote people’s involvement in the charities of Millî Görüş.

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The Gülen Movement, by contrast, preaches dialogue and education as the key components of their service to humanity. Despite the questions regarding the ultimate aim of the movement, the Gülen Movement’s presentation of piety as a program that includes modern education, engagement with the whole society, and taking care of humanity is accepted by its followers; it enables them to invest in the world that they currently live in and the world that they will experience in after this life. For that reason, even if a Gülen project is secular, it is a complementary part of their piety for its followers.

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Kuru, A. (2003). Fethullah Gülen’s Search for a Middle Way: Between Modernity and Muslim Tradition. In H. Yavuz & J. Esposito (Eds.), Secular State and Islam in Turkey: The Gülen Movement (pp. 115–130). New York, NY: Syracuse University Press. Laidlaw, J. (2000). A Free Gift Makes No Friends. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6(4), 617–634. Laidlaw, J. (2014). The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leman, J. (2010). The Flexible and Multilayered Character of ‘Hizmet’ (Social Service) Movement in Immigration. A Case Study in Belgium. In Mapping the Gülen Movement. A Multidimensional Approach (Conference Papers) (pp. 81–100). Amsterdam: Dialoog Academie. Mahmood, S. (2005). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Mandaville, P. (2001). Transnational Muslim Politics. Remaining the Ummah. London: Routledge. Mauss, M. (2002 [1954]). The Gift: Forms and Functions in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. Mittermaier, A. (2014). Beyond Compassion, Islamic Voluntarism in Egypt. American Ethnologist, 41(3), 518–531. Mittermaier, A. (2019). Giving to God Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Odmalm, P. (2009). Turkish Organizations in Europe: How National Contexts Provide Different Avenues for Participation. Turkish Studies, 10(2), 149–163. Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone. The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Rahman, F. (1983). Some Key Ethical Concepts of the Quran. Journal of Religious Ethics, 11(2), 170–185. Rahman, F. (2009). Major Themes of the Quran. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seufert, G. (1999). Die Millî Görüş Bewegung (AMGT/IGMG) zwischen Integration und Isolation. In G. Seufert & J. Waardenburg (Eds.), Türkischer Islam in Europe (pp. 295–321). Istanbul: Steiner. Sunier, T., & Landman, N. (2014). Turkse islam. Actualisatie van kennis over Turkse religieuze stromingen en organisaties in Nederland: Een literatuurstudie in opdracht van het Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid. Retrieved October 10, 2018, from https://www.fsw.vu.nl/en/Images/TRSO_rapport_ SunierLandman_2014_tcm250-421419.pdf.

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6 In Between Two Traditions: Female Muslim Volunteers in Belgium Merve Reyhan Kayikci

Spending several years of close interaction with Belgian female Muslim volunteers since 2012 allowed me to witness sweeping changes in their daily lives. What began as a curious interrogation of their volunteering activities in small local associations evolved into living and experiencing deep social and political changes over the years. As Muslims they were both subjects and objects of this change. My own research started out with the question of the ethical and to what extent volunteering informs their ethical aspirations (and vice versa); our years working together have led me to understand that the ethical is never detached from everyday realities and endeavors. The changing social and political context has had a significant impact on what they understood as ethical. In recent years, Belgium—and the world in general—has witnessed some very traumatic events. The Brussels attacks in 2016 and the discussion that followed concerning “Muslim radicalization” and “terror hubs,” that are supposedly prevalent in some Muslim-majority neighborhoods, intensified, both locally and on a global level. These discussions however, M. R. Kayikci (*) Department of Semitic Studies, University of Granada, Granada, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_6

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are not new, as the presence of Muslims in Europe has always fueled resentments and controversial debates one way or another. Even before the recent concerns over terror attacks, Muslims have been in the spotlight. Most of the public in European countries are familiar with the questions: can Muslims truly be European? Is the Islamic religion compatible with (Western) society? Can Muslims really be loyal to “our” (European) values? These questions have followed Muslims closely as they have gradually become a not only temporary demographic reality in Europe, rather than merely groups of “guest-workers.” There seems to be an undeniable question mark looming over their presence and visibility. Many studies have addressed this question mark, debating over and again the extent to which Muslims can or cannot adjust to the Western context (Cesari 2005). Some of these studies focus especially on the ways in which the context is influenced by its Muslim populations. These studies examine the dialectic relationship between Muslim presence and European cultures, observing that Muslims also “affect and change” the European context (Cesari 2003; Vertovec and Peach 1997; Salvatore 2004; Joppke 2009). Here, change includes policy changes in order to accommodate the cultural particularities of Muslims. Spending time with these female Muslim volunteers has urged me to shift perspective. I found that it is not only the society, the politics, and policies of a country that change as the demographics of a society changes. Muslims and their embodiment of Islam are not as “rigid” as it is maybe assumed, and it is not only governmental and societal institutions that accommodate their religious and cultural needs. Muslims’ religious lives are also shaped by the social context. The question is not whether one tradition is compatible with the other. The question is not even what the “host country” can do to accommodate racial, cultural, religious differences without assuming a national sameness. The question of this chapter pertains to how my interlocutors, the Muslim volunteers, are informed by national, secular, and liberal discourses as a reference point while living and advancing their religiosity in the public sphere. I unpack how this consciousness of the public sphere with all its normative baggage orients my interlocutors, as they embody ethical dispositions in multifarious ways and reflect constantly on these public norms. Ultimately, my question in this chapter examines the ways in which Muslims’ perception of piety and sartorial practices are in con-

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versation with contextual norms and discourses about Muslim communities. This research aims to contribute to the ethical turn in the anthropology of Islam My greatest interest is to grasp a more nuanced idea of lived Islam instead of re-articulating existing discussions that set traditions— Islamic and liberal—at binary opposition. The sartorial practices of my interlocutors are grounded in a notion of appropriateness. Such appropriateness is carefully unpacked in this chapter as to what it means in the paradigm of Islamic ethics and contextual acceptability. In the larger framework of this book, I aim to understand what begins when the “tension” ends; the tension between Islam and the “West.” What happens when Muslims overcome that imagined threshold not only negotiating between them, but bringing them into coherence? The first section of this chapter presents a critical conceptual overview of the secular and the religious as discursively separated entities. Drawing on to the work of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, it traces how these categories have been categorically separated but present parallels in their techniques of subjectivation. The next section provides a contextual description and methodological overview of this research. The third section examines the phenomenon of volunteering as trajectory that is religious in essence but secular in form. It discusses how the volunteers embed mundane daily endeavors with Islamic intentions. Essentially, this dialectic relationship becomes a spiritual exercise that does not adhere to strict Islamic formalisms. In turn, this provides us with knowledge on how the volunteers interpret being a “good Muslim” as inextricably linked to the well-being of the larger society. The final section of this chapter critically discusses how bodily performance informs belonging and belief. The volunteer’s embodiment of cultural norms is a demonstration of how they discern dominant discourses, public and religious regulations without having to experience social marginality or religious exceptionalism.

The Religious and the Mundane Talal Asad (2003, 2006) argues that in the Islamic tradition, religion cannot be thought independently from the rest of life. Unlike Christianity, in Islam din (religion) is embedded in every aspect of life, and it is not possible to make a distinction of the religious and the secular entities.

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Even in what we call “the West” secularism is the reality of historical, political, and social developments. According to Asad’s genealogy of secularism, it is a political doctrine that has its origins in the sixteenth century wars of religion (Asad 2006: 497). After these wars, the Western Christian world adopted the “cuis region, eius religio principle” in order to handle the political problems that hung above them in early modernity (Asad 2003: 2; Bangstad 2009: 189). Moreover, Asad (2008: 582) claims that “in European Christendom, it was only gradually, through continuous conflict, that many inequalities were eliminated and that secular authority replaced one that was ecclesiastical.” The secular, however, predates secularism as a concept. While the separation of religion from power is a modern Western development, Asad asserts that the secular as a concept always existed. He renders the secular as a “variety of concepts, practices and sensibilities” which over time have come together to form the “the secular” (2003: 16). Thus, the secular is not a complete break from religion but a certain set of “behaviors, knowledges and sensibilities in modern life” (2003: 25). It is noteworthy to unpack what Asad means by this assertion. Secularism in an “enactment by which a political medium (representation of citizenship) redefines and transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated through class, gender and religion” (Asad 2003: 5). Moreover, “secularism presupposes a particular construction of religion based on Protestant Christian understandings of religion as disembodied and individual faith” (Asad 2006: 508, see also Bangstad 2009: 190). It regards religion to be an inner state more than outward practices (Asad 2006). Islam being a religion of both inner dispositions and outer practices (Mahmood 2004) breaks from secularism’s endeavor to keep religion private, individual, and separate from power.1 The visibility of Islam—together with other political and social reasons— has made it a point of contestation in the debates of Islam’s inability to fit quite squarely in the secular context.  Mahmood lengthily describes the meaning of faith—taqwa—for her Muslim interlocutors. Taqwa is the perfection of faith (iman), and the trajectory of perfection is the process of ethical self-making. Thus, the Muslim subjects are always in a very conscious state of perfecting their bodily performances and inner affects to reach the highest level of faith (see Mahmood 2001). She traces this practice of ethics to Aristotelian virtue ethics, which locates ethics in practice and action (Mahmood 2001; Lambek 2010). 1

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Neither religion nor secularism is “transhistorical” and both are shaped by the conditions of the social world (Asad 2002). According to Asad (2002: 116), “there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes.” Additionally, secularism itself is not a fixed category (Asad 2003). What religion and secularism do is that they create subjects through linguistic articulations, bodily performances, and affective reflections. Secularism, like religion, creates its subject through a modern-liberal discourse of “self-discipline” and “participation.” Assad conveys that there is “neither compulsion (force) nor negotiation (consent) but the statecraft that uses ‘self-discipline’ and ‘participation,’ ‘law’ and ‘economy’ as elements of a political strategy” (Asad 2003: 3; original emphasis). The liberal secular tradition asks for reasonable people that are participatory in the economic, social, and political scenes of the modern state, and as it does so it marginalizes religion and aspects belonging to religion apart from itself as a separate category (Asad 2004: 285). This chapter takes off from this point: the argument that both religion and secularism have their particular set of practices and affects to cultivate good subjects and that religious self-cultivation is categorically separate from secularism. I examine how pious disciplinary practices take form in everyday mundane settings. Disciplinary self-techniques are not restricted to rites and rituals; they are present in the slightest detail of life. It is important to note that even such micro-mundane practices are founded on discernment and reflection of historical discourses and ­religious tradition. They are a continuum of a religious tradition, but are also in propriety with the contemporary (modern) context. While Asad and Mahmood lay the theoretical (and ethnographical) foundation to these discussions, this chapter adds to it by unpacking how embodied knowledge, discourses, and practices of Muslim volunteers mark a “creative way of life.” It interrogates how the pious subjects tap into this information on a daily basis, to make ethics become the whole of life, even in contexts of tension, challenge, ambiguity, and conflict. It asks what happens to micro-ethical practices when the subject is conscious

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not only of piety but also of society, politics, and global discourses, which may be contentious to their religious tradition. I used the term mundane instead of secular as I describe my interlocutors’ daily activities, keeping in mind that the secular is not always detached from the religious. Moreover, the secular is a very vast concept that has political, social, and economic implications. Hence, I feel more comfortable defining the practices of my interlocutors as “mundane.” The term here is used to denote the most seemingly unimportant circumstances of everyday life (see de Certeau 1984). We must also dismiss the mundane as a space of supposed neutrality. As de Certeau rightfully argues, the mundane is still a site of the “operation of power in its daily enactments and re-negotiations” (Fadil and Fernando 2015: 66; see also de Certeau 1984). Although I use the mundane, I give an analytical description of the secular, because it is exactly this liberal disciplinary aspect of the secular that I find compelling when observing my interlocutors’ practices. It is the norms of citizenship and participation they ascribe to in relation to their ethical aspirations. The mundane cannot be thought as something apart from this liberal project. Mundane here means a space, place, or act that is not inherently or formalistically religious.

Sketching the Scene In 2014, I met Aynur, the 35-year-old engineer who has been volunteering for most of her life. We met in Brussels at a women’s association for which she volunteered at the time, and an organization I had been somewhat familiar with. I was about to start my fieldwork, and Aynur was a gatekeeper who agreed to introduce me to some of her friends and provide me with access to the events and meetings. So there we were, sitting in the glossy dining hall of the association drinking our Turkish tea, deciding on some events I could attend, some women I could meet and talk to, and some meetings I could observe. Aynur was only one of many women who volunteer for the women’s association, set up by Belgian women of Turkish descent. The women who established the association did so in order to create a formal space through which they could carry out their charitable projects and tackle

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communal problems. Indeed, during their events they reiterated that the association aimed to promote “social cohesion, recognition of multiculturalism, dialogue, education, and women’s social participation.” Their association was established in 2009 but even before that the women were engaged in small projects among their informal friendship networks. The women currently have established several associations in Belgium today, including Antwerp, Gent, Charleroi, and Liege. The different associations are local branches of the same network of women. In this paper, I only focus on the Brussels association. In general, the association specifically targets local issues. The founders of the association are second-generation Turks. The people who founded the association had the necessary material means to do so, hence they are usually among those who are economically and financially better off. These people often ran businesses in Belgium, and their social and political concerns were oriented toward Belgium. This being said, their events and agenda nearly always address issues pertaining to diversity and especially Turkish (and frequently also Moroccan) minorities. Moreover, my interlocutors are volunteers, and while sometimes their charity work includes helping others in far less wealthy countries, their target group are primarily other ethno-religious minorities in Belgium. Their agenda is based on improving the situation of minorities in Belgium, specifically their education, social integration, and employment. After my first interaction with Aynur, I started visiting the association and attended many of their events, which often involved a large variety of organizations, such as a panel discussion at the EU Parliament, a symposium on migrants and education, a cartoon competition on migration and the “art of living together” at the Flemish parliament. Some of these events were rather informal and open to everyone in the neighborhood, like Turkish coffee nights, culture nights (where the folklore and traditional food of certain migrant countries are presented), or music evenings. All the events had a specific audience and aim, and are mostly organized according to globally or nationally important days, such as Mother’s Day. My interlocutors also had weekly meetings, which they refer to as sohbet meetings. Sohbet literally means discussion. These were weekly religious meetings, which involved religious self-education.

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None of the women were formally trained in Islamic theology through any mosque institution, and they were not connected to any mosque. They did, however, regard themselves as pious and practice the tenants of their religion. They also regularly gathered with their group to read the Qur’an or other religious books and discuss what they have read. These discussions also engaged with daily actualities (e.g., events, socio-political debates), their personal struggles, aims and aspirations. It also engaged heavily with their Muslimness, and their context, thus influencing the most of what constitutes their volunteering.

 olunteering, the Road to Being a Proper V Muslim Without Formalisms It was on one of the evenings we were having tea together with a sohbet group, when one of the women suggested we go to a spa together. It was December and we were at the house of one of the women, Tulay, in a Flemish suburb of Brussels, enjoying a light religious discussion along with some Turkish pastries and tea. Tulay had found out about a spa resort in Antwerp that could be privately rented and where we could all enjoy a day of swimming, the Turkish bath and a sauna. Tulay proposed this not only for recreational reasons; she explained: We don’t have many options for swimming and wellness, and it would be great to take some people we know to this event … you know it’s an opportunity to build stronger bonds with those people … maybe later we can invite them to a sohbet.

The women seemed to like the idea of taking their friends to a spa resort and saw it as a genuine chance to bond with their friends in the process of taking care of them. “Remember ladies,” said Tulay, “this is not a treat for ourselves; it is for our friends and the real aim is to become closer with these women.” I observe this intention coming up time and again with my interlocutors. On the one hand, these are women whose volunteering institutions have a loose organizational structure, but on the other hand, they have very

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strong emotional ties with each other. By organizing such leisurely activities not only do they rejuvenate the bonds among one another, but they also see it as an opportunity to invite other people in their networks and eventually also inspire them to volunteer. Later that week, Tulay set up a Whatsapp group, to which she also added me; although I was not in a position to bring a friend, she still wanted to include me. During the week, they discussed this event elaborately, like who and how many women they could bring, as well as what they should wear in the resort. The volunteers are all observant women, who do not feel comfortable wearing revealing swimwear. They decided to wear something that closely resembles a burkini, but then the problem arose as to what their guests would wear. How could they tell them, without telling them, that a bikini would not be a decent type of swimwear? In the end my interlocutors decided that they would not intervene in what the other women decided to wear, but themselves would be very careful to not be too revealing. At the end of the week before the big day, the whole event had to be canceled. All of a sudden, everyone had something to do and could not make it to Antwerp. My interlocutors were supposed to meet the next Wednesday evening, and they did. I noticed that Tulay, who usually stands out, was quiet all through the evening; during the sohbet, she did not ask a single question or make any remarks. At the end of the sohbet, the volunteers started to talk about their future projects and their goals for the following week. Tulay suddenly interrupted them and said: This is like a joke! We were supposed to take our friends out last weekend, but no one could be bothered to participate. I don’t understand … if we can’t get these women to come to a fun event, how are we going to persuade them to come to a sohbet. I wonder, all of you, one by one, what were your reasons to cancel?

The atmosphere naturally became tense, as the women looked down at their feet, not commenting. “Of course, it was our mistake,” said Esra. “We did promise … you are right; we should be able to at least bring our friends to recreational events.” “Yes but that is not enough,” replied Tulay still looking very agitated:

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It’s always the same thing: we try to do something, everyone jumps in, but then it gets cancelled because somehow, on the last day, everyone jumps out. We are so selfish, that we think we can cancel these events because we don’t have time. Who said it was about us? It is about them, the people we want to reach, and the fact that we are not engaging with them enough. And then, if we have an event or a campaign, or if there is a sohbet, then it is just us who participates, and no else, because we did not engage with them enough beforehand, and we didn’t spend time with them. So why should they come and feel the need to participate?

Tulay’s words, coming from a very uncomfortable angle, can be unpacked from several perspective and suggest that apparently mundane, recreational, and leisurely activities register to complicated moral rubrics. While on the surface going to a spa with a group of women is quite mundane, on a deeper level it is also a carefully deliberated event with a very specific aim. The planned spa event is not detached from the volunteering project in general, it is designed to create a space for these women to interact with others and share an informal platform to articulate the moral principle of volunteering (e.g., peace, coexistence, dialogue). It is clear that the first place of such articulation is not the sohbet, which is actually the space where religious knowledge is discussed in relation to volunteering. The women choose a more neutral space, and what we see here is that religious intentions are seeping into mundane (not-­ religious) spaces. During my time with the female volunteers, I recurrently observed these negotiations conversed and on occasions contested. On one instant, there was a concert proposal that was intensely deliberated by the volunteers and that conjured opinions from all fronts. We were having tea in the association with five or six women, trying to plan the next event. It was March, and the women wanted to organize an event in May, something like a spring festival. This three-day event would take place in a large outdoor space; there would also be an indoor display of artwork and a crafts table. Outside would be large food stalls with different examples of Turkish cuisine. While most of the food would be made at the festival, many of the volunteers also planned to prepare sweet and savory delicacies at home and bring them to the venue to sell. The money that was raised would help finance upcoming events and cover parts the association’s operational costs.

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The women wanted to plan the event to be as fun and vibrant as possible, so that many people would come with their children and extended families. The aim was to attract as many people as possible from the Turkish community, especially those living in Brussels; the activities had to be pleasing and attractive enough that people would choose to spend a weekend in May at the event. But there was one concern voiced quite bluntly by one of my interlocutors, Asiya: “Don’t you think a concert is …a bit too much? I mean, people may criticize it. You know, boys and girls together… You can’t control them if they start dancing.” The problem was obvious: Would a concert be an appropriate event to initiate for people like them who are self-identified as muhafazakar dindar (religious and conservative)? We had this specific discussion with Elif and her sohbet group, which consisted of university graduates. Elif herself is an economy graduate, and has been volunteering for many years. The statement “boys and girls jumping up and down together” referred to what might happen at the concerts scheduled for the evenings of the festival’s three days. The organizers had planned for three well-known Turkish singers to come from Turkey to perform on each of the three evenings. These concerts would draw many people from the Turkish community, since the singers are relatively famous among Belgian Turks. Naturally, these concerts attract interest and are thus an efficient way for volunteers to encourage attendance at their events. Yet, the dilemma persists. Is organizing a concert an appropriate choice for these women, who volunteer to pursue what they consider as a properly Muslim way of living? Elif, who is generally calm and easygoing, replied to Asiya in the same calm manner, Yes, of course we don’t want to see anyone doing anything inappropriate at our event. But, I mean, they could be spending the same weekend drinking somewhere. At least they won’t be doing those kinds of things with us. I mean, what really matters is our niyya (intention). Are we trying to do something good here? Yes, we are … And who knows, ahh, maybe we will be able to inspire someone to do good themselves with these events.

In the end, the concerts were organized in May, and some girls and boys did “jump up and down together.” But what is important is Elif ’s

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assertion: “What really matters is our niyya.” Niyya comes up frequently in my respondents’ discussions, and its use in this context is significant. The concept of niyya is one my interlocutors refer to many times. It translates as intention (see also Peucker’s chapter); obligatory (or, in some cases, non-obligatory) Islamic practices are preceded by a declaration of intent by the performer (Wensinck 2012). Without this declaration, the practice is rendered Islamically invalid (Wensinck 2012). William Tisdale claims that the emphasis Muslims place on “ceremonial observance,” such as fixed prayers and fasting on certain days, tends to make them “formalist,” in that the subject is not expected to have a “pure heart” (Tisdall 1910: 80, 88). As such, Tisdale makes the point that since Islam reduces ritual to mere acts, it is not a priority for the believer to feel that spiritual experience. I argue strongly against this point by introducing the concept of niyya, and assert that it is this exact formalism my respondents confront in their daily lives by de-Islamicizing their practices. To understand how the volunteers confront and negotiate the conundrum of being religious in the secular public sphere, it is essential to understand how they unpack this phenomenon and reflect on it in their daily lives. By embedding their practices within the notion of niyya, the volunteers counter what can be defined as formalistic religion. If their pious subjectivity can be unpacked to reveal multiple levels of commitment; in this case, perfecting bodily acts of worship (see Mahmood 2004; Hirschkind 2006) or sticking to bodily formalisms are not the ultimate routes to a pious self but only one part of the dynamic that constitutes it. Several studies have been conducted on Islamic intentionality (Powers 2004; Denny 1990; Messick 2001), but their scope is limited, in that they focus on ritual or legal norms (Denny 1990). Rituals, which are at the heart of Islamic ethics, are a way for the believer to come closer to God, and the niyya is the declaration of that intention (Denny 1990: 209–210). While such studies aim to signify niyya in a way that clearly shows Islam as a non-formalist religion (Denny 1990; Powers 2004), I suggest that their arguments reinforce this image. These studies confine intentionality to the ritual and legal norms of Islam, and their attempts to study the social dynamic of this matter are quite narrow. Ethnographic encounters with my respondents indicate that niyya is a complex phenomenon that does not just entail the declaration of intention prior to

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ritual or the subject’s self-assessment of whether their intentions are religiously in order. It is at the heart of my respondents’ volunteering, which allows them to engage with multiple narratives and reclaim their religious subjectivity, and it is a form of negotiation that my respondents carry out collectively. Here, I would add that Powers’ description of niyya as an individual, internal act carried out by the heart and mind “unavailable for direct assessment by anyone other than the actor him- or herself ” (Powers 2004: 436) is quite narrow. While this may be true for the declaration of intent before individual worship, we need to take into account how niyya evolves as a social phenomenon when the religious act (like the events that comprise volunteering) take on a social form. In such cases, intentionality becomes a collectively reasoned process. This is where the sohbet meetings become important, because it is at these meetings that the volunteers discuss together whether an event or activity has pure niyya behind it. This is not just an individual establishment of pure intention, as described in the literature (Powers 2004), but a collective reasoning over whether the content and form of a practice is Islamically permissible. While it may be difficult to understand how a concert can be religiously relevant, at this point my respondents refer to what was discussed earlier as the common good. They embed their niyya in this precarious notion, which intersects with ideas of contextual appropriateness, reaching out to a larger number of people, and initiating them into a cause that is inherently Islamic and Islamically good. Hence, the niyya is seldom pre-determined, but is a product of active reasoning and group conversation. In 2012, education and unemployment in migrant communities were much discussed, and, as I have noted, my respondents directly addressed these issues at their events. Similarly, in 2016, after the ghastly terror attacks in Paris and Brussels, Islamic radicalism and extremism became a hot button topic in politics, the media, and society. The events my interlocutors organized or partnered with other organizations to stage explicitly addressed “countering violent extremism.” In this case, they explained that their niyya was to show that Muslims were also participating in this debate and wanted to combat forms of violence that came out of their communities. Many of the sohbet meetings I attended addressed the theological grounds of jihad and how that cannot be confused with

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violence. During these years, between 2015 and 2016, their self-­ understanding as “good” Muslims was newly positioned as Muslims who do not carry out violence, work for and with society, and hence work for God’s grace. Consequently, I observe how the discourses of jihadi violence became narratives that my interlocutors defined their pious subjectivity in relation to, i.e., as something that they are not. By embodying niyya in practices of volunteering, they challenge what they believe are formalistic and simplistic approaches to piety. Prophet Mohammad said in a hadith that, “actions are defined by intentions, and to every person what he intends” (Powers 2004: 427). Niyya is thus interpreted as what gives an act spiritual depth (Powers 2004: 427). While intentionality is important in approaching acts of worship, it is also significant in “Muslim approaches to acts in general” (Messick 2001: 153). The appearance of a practice as seemingly secular does not indicate that my respondents regard it as such. By reflecting on the niyya that inspires their practice, my respondents negotiate the conundrums of what are “acceptable” practices, what are not, and the restraints of formalism. Consequently, the debate about whether a concert is an ethically good idea becomes a debate about how pure the volunteers’ niyya is. Intentionality creates its own authority by consent (Messick 2001: 162). While Messick traces this consent between two parties in some form of social or legal transaction, I argue that in the case of volunteering consent is between the volunteers and God. The volunteers offer assurances that their events are intended for God’s consent, and invest in that endeavor. What Messick describes as the “internal formulation of intentionality” is separate from but more decisive than “expressions, forms, and signs” (Messick 2001: 162). Hence, the volunteers reflect on this notion of intention over form when struggling with ethical dilemmas. By deconstructing Islamic formalisms, and by taking pious practices out of designated religious spheres and reconstituting them in public, the volunteers not only reimagine their pious subjectivity but also challenge secular formalisms. Deconstructing what is a religious practice and what is not does not indicate that the volunteers are secularized Muslims, or that they have perfectly assimilated into the secular liberal public sphere. As individual Muslim women, their place in secular Belgian society is often contested. But as a community of volunteers, these apparently sec-

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ularized events allow them to take part in public life. The volunteers actively take part in the secular public sphere by re-imagining both their religious self and the secular imaginary. On the one hand, they challenge Islamic formalisms, but on the other, they actively challenge secular formalisms, and the distinction between private and public. This is somewhat different than the examples we usually see in contemporary scholarship. Saba Mahmood’s (2001) elaborate research describes the trajectories of women in Egypt who are part of the Islamic revival, but is limited to practices in the mosque space. There is little mention of how these practices are carried out in ordinary daily life within a secular Western context. Similarly, Lara Deeb (2006), whose work is grounded in the specific and in many ways different context of Shi’a Lebanon, limits her study of how her respondents become “proper” Muslims to a religious space. That is, the ethnographic content explores how a female volunteers’ practices are defined by participating in events that are accepted as religious (e.g., commemoration of the Ashura event) but in a re-defined and modernized fashion. While both studies are valuable contributions to the anthropology of Islam, in that they recognize an ethical trajectory as a constant engagement with Islamic tradition in order to overcome the challenges of everyday life (Fadil and Fernando 2015: 63), Deeb and Mahmood do not explore how a selffashioning trajectory is formed and re-formed in larger society, out of the religious sphere. Moreover, their research is based in Muslimmajority societies. My interlocutors’ very conscious and deliberate endeavors to plan and organize their daily lives along with events according to this principle of intentionality are worthy to unpack. It deserves careful analytical ­attention. First, there is a critical positioning of these women toward religious bodily formalisms as in the segregation of genders, the restriction of bodily movement in open, public spaces, and the use of space for reasons other than worship. Second, there is a blurring of lines between the religious and the mundane. In a sense, formalisms on both sides are deconstructed and there is an ambiguity as to where one ends and the other starts. Adding to this, there is also a constant deliberation when it comes to the rules of engagement with these spaces and the bodily dispositions that constitute their entities. The mundane and the religious enti-

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ties are very much temporal, relying heavily on the circumstances that necessitate their becoming. Third—and I will discuss this in the following section—by embedding the mundane with intentionality, my interlocutors demonstrate a relational awareness of the context they inhibit. The postulates of this relationality are grounded in the ethical traditions of both spaces; the mundane (liberal, modern) and the religious (Islamic). By performing in the moral rubrics of both traditions, my interlocutors perform a belonging to both traditions.

 elieving, Belonging, and Everything That B Makes a Good Muslim Abby Day (2010: 18) suggests that “the social context in which beliefs are performed will influence what beliefs are expressed and identities are shaped.” Her work focuses on the religious experiences of people who grew up with the Christian tradition, but are not practicing Christians. She examines how practices of belief such as attending Christmas dinner, attending a funeral, or wedding at a church or Easter celebrations brings about a sense of belonging to a religious faith without actually conjuring a disposition to believe in that faith (Day 2010). Suggestively, belief is performative and enables people to adjust to “social contexts, expectations and aspirations” (Day 2010: 26). Day (2010: 19) further argues that, non-religious people sometimes claim a religious affiliation to demonstrate their “believing in belonging” to certain self-perceived family or “ethnic” social groups. The demonstration of belonging can (…) be read as a performance that occurs in other specific social situations arises from social relationships and results in socially mediated behaviors.

According to Day, performances of belief are largely shaped by the sense of belonging and propriety. The individual does not necessarily have to believe in order to belong as their performative participations are highly relational. To reiterate, communal practices can integrate a person into a faith community without them having to actually believe in the theological tenants of that specific religion.

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Reflecting on my interlocutors, Islam is a religion where belief and performance are inextricably bound together (see Mahmood 2001). An individual cannot be a “self-perfecting” Muslim without performing their belief and vice versa. However, similar to Day’s assertion, how they engage with piety is highly relational and leans on social norms and codes as much as it leans on the Islamic tradition. The volunteers engage with piety in relation to their community. This indicates what kind of piety is informed and how it is imbricated in feelings of belonging to a pious community (of volunteers) and to their social environment in Belgium. The idea of being a pious Muslim is centered on the expectations and aspirations that, as Day argues, are articulated by the social. The social and political atmosphere of Belgium, and Brussels specifically, has an undeniable impact on how my interlocutors fashion piety in relation to civic ethics. Brussels is a city where Europe as an institution is very apparent and real. While being “Belgian” as a national unified identity is not a very prominent discourse, participation, cohesion, Europeanness, and integration, are all discourses that figure into their ethical pursuits. Being a good Muslim cannot be detached from any of the requirements of beings a good member of the liberal society. All the events that my respondents organize are consciously formatted in a certain way, in that they have a secular outlook. This is also of scholarly significance. Volunteering is experienced as an ethical endeavor by my respondents; that is, it is something they commit to in order to become a “proper” Muslim. But the events they hold and the ­organizations they serve as volunteers appear mundane. The events have no religious content or form, and this, as I have learned while attending many preparatory meetings, is done intentionally. My respondents are very careful not to organize anything religiously pamphletic, or even suggestive. When I asked Elif about this during the early years of my field study, she told me that they were not a religious association. But, I said, “You say that you are inspired by your faith, and you say you do all of this for God’s consent. So even though your events are not religious, you are.” “Look, if you want to make progress, you have to integrate into the environment,” Elif told me. I cannot count the number of times Elif or another executive told me that their events do not contain religious content. By religious, they do not refer to ritual content per se, but to even

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small details, such as not organizing events that refer to Muslimness as an identity, or a challenge in that case. My respondents believe that what they are doing is as religious as fasting, pilgrimage, or prayer. I see them carry out the most basic tasks with such spiritual intensity that they have tears in their eyes. Even the simplest, most seemingly mundane act of volunteering, such as baking a cake to sell for charity, offers them a great religious experience. Again, the events do not have religious form or content.2 But instead of perceiving these practices as non-religious, I explore them as a form of religious subjectivity that complicates positivist understandings of how religion is experienced in everyday life. It is important to understand who is meant to benefit from these events, and to explore how the audience influences their formation. As I have mentioned, most of the volunteers’ events target a specific audience. In Belgium, this audience can include politicians or people working in politics in one way or another. Sumeyye, a woman in her early 30s then volunteering at the association, stated that it is easy to get a politician to attend your event in Belgium because of the federal state structure, which ensures that the country has nothing more plentiful than politicians, and that they are willing to make themselves visible.3 Additionally, Brussels’ networks of non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and other European institutions allow my interlocutors to get in touch with people in the public arena. It is not uncommon for volunteers to partner with such institutions and initiate panel discussions, roundtables, or events to raise awareness of certain social issues. For example, in 2016, the association partnered with UN Women in Brussels as part of their He4She campaign. I was with Fatima, who coordinated the association at this time, when she proposed the project to the UN. Essentially, Fatima explained, they wanted to “be  Other Turkish-Muslim communities in Belgium, such as the Suleymanci or Millî Görüş, are embedded in explicit religious narratives. They organize mavlud sessions, Ashura days, and charities for war-torn or impoverished Muslim countries. My volunteers stay away from such events. If they do organize Ashura days, it is usually framed as an “interfaith” event, and the objective is still to incorporate larger segments of society. 3  When Sumeyye told me this, she added that it was important to reach as many politicians as possible, so as to indicate that as Muslim they are also proactive citizens; this echoes the previous section’s analysis of how a good Muslim is also a good citizen. 2

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there,” “there” being the public scene where these discussions concerning gender and equality took place. Fatima asserted that they wanted to partner with the UN group for its name, as it added “seriousness” to their own name as a women’s association. “We need to present as Muslim women,” she told her assistant during a meeting. Brussels, a politically active city with many institutions and platforms, provides a space for my respondents to reclaim their Muslim identity by re-imagining their position and responsibilities in the public sphere. They articulate their practices and events in dialogue about what they understand as important in their context. Such deliberation creates a sense of belonging for the volunteers. Although these Muslim women may subscribe to certain non-liberal (Islamic) moral rubrics, they are all Belgian and the ways in which they do religion fits squarely into how they understand a Belgian citizen should perform. On the one hand, de-formalizing religious practices allows my interlocutors to develop a broader sense of piety. On the other hand, their conception of living in Belgium and being part of the larger society informs a variety of ways of piety. Often, their idea of piety is imbricated in propriety with public norms. Quite like Day’s assertion, the more they perform being Belgian, the more they feel part of society. In this context, piety becomes part of public connectedness and propriety. In turn, their performance of being Belgian reflects on their public visibility as Muslims. Their visibility as Belgian Muslims becomes a way of dealing with negative attention and the stigmas that Muslims are unable to fit into the expected “good citizen” profile.

Conclusion This chapter’s starting point is where the boundaries between the religious and the secular blur. It begins where the boundaries between citizenship and pious devotion blur. It begins exactly where subjectivation is interwoven among categories and they are inscribed on the subject’s body, affects and doings. On the one hand, in the Islamic tradition religion, or din, encompasses all of life, on the other hand, this assertion is then used to assert Islam’s inability to secularize and naturalize in the Western con-

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text. My research shifts the perspective in this argument and focus on how the notion of “encompassing all of life” offers certain flexibility to Muslim subjects to re-interpret religious teachings in relation to their contexts. This shift in perspective has offered a multitude of examples where Muslims’ cultivation of the ethical self is detached from both Islamic and secular formalisms. This does not mean that they do not borrow from the articulations of these traditions. By borrowing from both traditions, they work at the margins of both traditions but reclaim them in their own way. As the secular or the mundane can be deeply embedded with religious intentions, the religious in turn becomes “appropriately” visible. This chapter discusses how Muslims turn to Islam in order to embody the civic necessities of their context without having to face the usual stigma attached to Islam. The chapter also explored the moral discrepancies between the two traditions and the tensions and negotiations the Muslim women experience and how they seek to respond to them. Volunteering, itself being a modern practice informed by Islamic consciousness, provides a space to engage with these two traditions and experiment with such practices. It also provides a social visibility to the women, asserting a sort of acknowledgment for their becoming.

References Asad, T. (2002). Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam? Cambridge University Press. Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press. Asad, T. (2004). Where are the Margins of the State? In V.  Daas & D.  Pool (Eds.), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (pp.  279–288). School for Advanced Research Press. Asad, T. (2006). Trying to Understand French Secularism. In H. de Vries & L. Sullivan (Eds.), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (pp. 494–526). Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press. Asad, T. (2008). Historical Notes on the Idea of Secular Criticism (The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion and the Public Sphere, 2008).

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Retrieved June 15, 2016, from https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/01/25/ historical-notes-on-the-idea-of-secular-criticism/ Bangstad, S. (2009). Contesting Secularism/s: Secularism and Islam in the Work of Talal Asad. Anthropological Theory, 9(2), 188–208. Cesari, J. (2003). Muslim Minorities in Europe: The Silent Revolution. In J. Esposito & F. Burgat (Eds.), Modernizing Islam Religion in the Public Sphere in the Middle East and in Europe (pp. 251–269). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cesari, J. (2005). Mosque Conflicts in European Cities: Introduction. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 31(6), 1015–1024. Day, A. (2010). Propositions and Performativity: Relocating Belief to the Social. Culture and Religion, 11(1), 9–30. De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practices of Everyday Life (S.  Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Deeb, L. (2006). An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Denny, F. M. (1990). Ethical Dimension of Islamic Ritual Law. In E. B. Firmage, B.  G. Weiss, & J.  W. Welch (Eds.), Religion and Law: Biblical-Judaic and Islamic Perspectives (pp. 199–211). Winona Lakes: Eisenbrauns. Fadil, N., & Fernando, M. (2015). Rediscovering the “Everyday” Muslim: Notes on an Anthropological Divide. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 5(2), 59–88. Hirschkind, C. (2006). The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Joppke, C. (2009). Veil: Mirror of Identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lambek, M. (2010). Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press. Mahmood, S. (2001). Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of Şalat. American Ethnologist, 28(4), 827–853. Mahmood, S. (2004). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Messick, B. (2001). Indexing the Self: Intent and Expression in Islamic Legal Acts. Islamic Law and Society, 8(2), 151–178. Powers, P.  R. (2004). Interiors, Intentions, and the “Spirituality” of Islamic Ritual Practice. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 72(2), 425–459. Salvatore, A. (2004). Making Public Space: Opportunities and Limits of Collective Action Among Muslims in Europe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30(5), 1013–1031.

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Tisdall, W. (1910). St. Clair The Religion of the Crescent; Or, Islam: Its Weakness, Its Origin, Its Influence: Being the James Long Lectures on Muhammadanism for the years 1891–1892. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Vertovec, S., & Peach, C. (1997). Introduction: Islam in Europe and the Politics of Religion and Community. In S.  Vertovec & C.  Peach (Eds.), Islam in Europe the Politics of Religion and Community (pp.  3–47). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Wensinck, A.J. (2012). Niyya. In Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.). Retrieved November 17, 2016, from https://doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_ SIM_5935

7 Muslim Environmentalists, Activism, and Religious Duty Rosemary Hancock

On a humid evening in July 2013, a group of nine Muslims met in a house in Washington D.C. to plan for the upcoming month of Ramadhan. After praying the evening prayer together, the group broke up into smaller working groups, one planning a month of social media posts, another preparing a series of outdoor prayers and meditation walks, and another organizing a community Iftar. This was no religious study circle or youth group. These nine Muslims were members of Green Muslims D.C., an Islamic environmental group based in Washington D.C., who were planning to use Ramadhan to educate Muslims in their community on their Islamic duty to care for the environment and to mobilize local Muslims to participate in environmental actions. Further, this group was not alone in gearing up to mobilize Muslims to the environmental cause during Ramadhan. Islamic environmental organizations, individual Muslim activists, and some environmentally aware mosques across the United

R. Hancock (*) Institute for Ethics and Society, The University of Notre Dame Australia, Fremantle, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_7

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States and the United Kingdom were planning similar environmental education and action campaigns for Ramadhan. Inspired by an environmental reading of Islamic scripture and tradition and with a wide range of experience in grassroots activism, Muslim environmental activists like those described above often see environmentalism as a religious duty in Islam. The organizations and activists in this chapter run grassroots environmental initiatives, teach other Muslims an environmental interpretation of Islamic scripture and tradition, occasionally engage in environmental direct action, and promote environmental responsibility. The vast majority of their activism is directed toward Muslim communities. In this chapter, I discuss Islamic environmental activism in light of research into the civic engagement of Muslims in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Like the findings of empirical research into the civic engagement of Muslim youth and the significance of mosques and Islamic institutions on political participation, my own research demonstrates the active involvement of Muslims in the United States and United Kingdom in grassroots politics. Rather than focus on how Muslim institutions may or may not facilitate civic engagement, I analyze the way in which political participation becomes part and parcel of religious practice and obligation. In evaluating the efficacy of such a synthesis of religious and civic–political practice, I argue that framing environmental responsibility and action as a religious duty is, on its own, ineffective in mobilizing Muslims to environmentalism, and that most of the environmental activists in my study have been mobilized due to a pre-existing commitment to grassroots action or personal relationships with people undertaking grassroots action. This chapter is based on doctoral research conducted with six Islamic environmental organizations in the United States of America and Great Britain in 2012–2013. Two of these organizations, the Muslim Green Team (MGT) and Green Muslims D.C., were in the United States, and four, the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Science (IFEES), Wisdom in Nature (WIN), Sheffield Islamic Network for the Environment (SHINE), and Reading Islamic Trust for the Environment

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(RITE), were in Great Britain.1 Data were collected from two primary sources: textual data in the form of the organizations’ websites, newsletters, promotional material, and some internal organizational documentation; and key-informant semi-structured interviews with 17 Muslim environmentalist activists2—the founders and (where possible) most active members of the six environmental groups, along with two independent activists. Of the six organizations, three were active at the time of research while three were in abeyance. The organizations were identified and selected through concatenated and overlapping online searches utilizing three search engines,3 access was gained to the organizations through gatekeepers (the founders of prominent Islamic environmental groups) and the participants were selected through snowball sampling.4 The activists themselves come from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Almost all were university educated, with some either in or recently completed graduate school at the time of the research.

Muslim Voluntary Civic Engagement Since the mid-2000s, much academic attention has been paid to the positive influence of religious organizations on the civic engagement of their members, in large part driven by the work of Robert Putnam on social  All six of these organizations attracted relatively small numbers of activists and members—the most active, Green Muslims D.C., had around 20 people either active or loosely involved with the organization. Both SHINE and MGT were in abeyance during my fieldwork—prior to taking a hiatus, SHINE had contracted to only two active members. For greater detail on these organizations, see Hancock (2018). 2  The 17 participants were aged between 18 and 80 years (although predominantly under 40), and included eight women and nine men. 3  Utilizing the Internet to locate organizations limits the sample, in that it will only identify those organizations with an online presence. However, most social movement groups do have an online presence (Hanna 2013). Further, as there is no “population list” there is no way to know whether all possible organisations have been identified to select from. Earl (2013: 402) argues that it is possible, through the concatenated and overlapping searches conducted in this study, to identify what an ordinary user of the Internet would be likely to come across, which can then be used as a “comprehensive sampling frame.” 4  As environmentalism was a relatively marginal concern in Muslim communities at the time of my research, the pool of participants was small—with many activists either knowing each other, or knowing of each other. 1

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capital in the United States. Putnam’s social capital theory is rooted in a communitarian understanding of democracy in the tradition of Tocqueville that sees associational life as essential to the formation of social capital and through it civic engagement (Wagner 2008). Putnam (1995) argues that religious communities provide networks, norms, and social trust—all things that form the basis of cooperation and coordination necessary for effective civic engagement. For many citizens, religious communities act as training grounds where members learn the skills necessary to participate in public life (Levitt 2008). Civic engagement, in Putnam’s work, refers “to people’s connections with the life of their communities, not merely with politics,” and he argues that widespread civic engagement is essential to the healthy functioning of democracy (Putnam 1995: 665). Writing from the United States, Putnam and his collaborator Campbell claim that in a society with declining engagement in collective organizations, active members of religious communities make better neighbors and citizens than their non-religious peers because of the benefits accrued from religious communities (Putnam and Campbell 2010). Putnam’s theory of social capital has strongly influenced the field of research examining religious civic engagement since the late 1990s. It must, however, be treated with some caution. How the social capital of a community—its networks, norms, and social trust—lead to political or civic engagement is not adequately specified (Annette 2011: 390). There are also two forms of social capital: bonding and bridging. Where bonding social capital, as the name suggests, creates internal cohesion and cooperation in any particular community or group, and bridging social capital creates cohesion and cooperation between communities and groups (Wood and Warren 2002: 9). Arguably, the type of social capital most important for democracy is bridging social capital, while the social capital developed within religious community groups is more likely to be of the bonding type (Wood and Warren 2002: 9; Annette 2011: 390). Until recently, most of the literature examining the relationship between religion and civic engagement has focused on Christian denominations and churches with scare attention paid to whether Islam and Islamic institutions play the same role in the civic engagement of Muslims (Read 2015). Indeed, where churches are typically understood to be sites of societal integration, mosques are often viewed—both in media

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r­epresentations and in policy discourse—as potentially undermining integration by creating islands of self-segregation (Peucker and Ceylan 2017: 2406). This lacuna in research has been steadily filling in recent years with studies of Muslim civic engagement that seek to challenge the ways in which governments in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia have constructed Muslim communities and youth as “problematic” and Islam as potentially at odds with democratic citizenship (Harris and Roose 2014; Oskooii and Dana 2018; Peucker 2018; Read 2015; Roose and Harris 2015; Vergani et al. 2017). In multiple studies conducted across the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, researchers have found a positive relationship between various aspects of Islam and civic engagement. Regular attendance at mosque (Oskooii and Dana 2018) or other organizational involvement in the Muslim community (Read 2015; Vergani et al. 2017), religiosity, and perceived discrimination (Sirin and Katsiaficas 2011) are all positively related to Muslim civic engagement. Some Muslims even feel that they have a responsibility to be engaged in the wider community to counter Islamophobia and negative stereotypes about Muslims (Peucker 2018), a trend that, as I discuss below, is also found among Muslim environmentalists. Responding to stereotypes that Muslims are disengaged from civic engagement and formal politics, research in the United States demonstrates that Muslims have equivalent rates of participation to the general US population (Read 2015), while others assert that low levels of political participation among Muslim youth are not indicative of a trend related to Islam itself, but rather reflect broader changes to political participation among youth more generally (Harris and Roose 2014). Evidence does exist that Muslim citizens, particularly youth, feel alienated from mainstream politics and “British” or “American” cultural identity. Levitt (2008: 774) found that religious migrants (from multiple faith traditions) disproportionally disagreed with certain aspects of American culture such as sexual permissiveness; DeHanas (2016) had similar findings in his comparative study of Jamaican Christians and Bangladeshi Muslims in London. However, disagreement with parts of the culture does not equal rejection, or a lack of respect (Levitt 2008: 774). DeHanas (2016) demonstrates that young Bangladeshi Muslims in London feel

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alienated from the formal political sphere, believing their voices were not heard by politicians, that their votes did not have a meaningful effect, and that politicians were untrustworthy and corrupt. But alienation from formal politics is not the same as apathy, and certainly did not equate to a lack of civic engagement: the young Muslims in his study had equivalent or even higher rates of civic engagement as the average British citizen (DeHanas 2016). The findings of these studies demonstrate (a) that the Islamic religion is not only not antithetical to democratic citizenship, but generally is positively related to democratic citizenship, and (b) that Islamic religious institutions and communities provide much the same civic–political benefits to their members as other religious institutions and communities. Comparably little attention, however, is paid to the ways in which civic engagement and political participation may serve the religious needs or goals of Muslim citizens and communities. Peucker’s explorative and comparative study of Muslims in Australia and Germany concluded that a primary driver of civic engagement among his participants was faith: they saw “active citizenship […] as an act their faith obliges them to perform and they will be rewarded for [it] by God” (Peucker 2018: 566). Similarly, Vergani et  al. (2017: 72, original emphasis) found in their explorative study “unexpected points of overlap between religious beliefs and active citizenship practices in a republican tradition, with its emphasis on striving for the common good.” Religious faith is intimately bound up with how religious people conceive of a good society, and religious activists construct “theologies of change” (Levitt 2008: 772), which make sense of their political participation in terms of their religious faith. DeHanas (2016) discusses what he calls “revival activism”—when individuals from a religious tradition ground their political action in their faith, “social change occurs as more and more individuals act in faith (…) as more people take hold of faith they will make society better” (DeHanas 2016: 173). In this telling of religiously grounded civic–political action, the religious revival and the social change are of equal import—if not one and the same thing. Evidence of revival activism (or at least, a desire to see it occur) is present in Islamic environmentalism: a number of environmentalists in this study

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expressed that environmental change would happen if/when more people adopted an “authentic” practice of Islam (Hancock 2018).

Islamic Environmental Activism Environmentalism is a marginal, but growing concern in Muslim communities. Although environmental crises effect many Muslim-majority countries and environmental action happens across the Muslim world, the most consciously “Islamic” environmentalism emerges from Muslim communities in the diaspora (see Hancock 2018). In constructing an Islamic approach to environmental action, Muslim activists and scholars draw on the Islamic scriptures and intellectual tradition. There are three common theological touchstones of Islamic environmentalism (see also Keskin and Yucil’s chapter): Khalifah, Tawhid, and Mizan. Khalifah means “steward” or “successor” and comes from the Qur’an, where God states: “I am putting a successor (Khalifah) on earth” (2:30). This verse, and the other seven verses relating to humanity’s role as Khalifah, are typically cited by Muslim environmentalists to demonstrate that humans are destined to care for the earth in order to pass it on to successive generations (Abu-Hola 2009; Abu-Sway 1998; Setia 2007). That this task is divinely ordained means, as we shall see in the data analysis below, that Muslim activists believe care for the earth to be a religious duty. Tawhid refers to the absolute monotheism that characterizes Islam, and among environmentalists is interpreted to mean that all of creation is one with God. Sanctity is thus given to both humans and the natural world due to their shared created nature (Nasr 1996). Finally, Mizan is usually related to justice and balance, in the sense that God “weighs the balance” of humanity’s deeds. Muslim environmentalists also use Mizan to discuss the “delicate balance” of the natural world, meaning the complexity of ecosystems and the relationships between living creatures, their habitats, and indeed the very laws of nature (Khalid 2017). This environmental theology is matched by the articulation of uniquely Islamic environmental law. Historical Islamic law (Fiqh) contains a variety of prescriptions regarding water and land management. This is unsurprising, as the Islamic religion emerged in a desert region where the

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survival of early Muslim communities depended upon careful conservation of water and management of grazing and agricultural land (Ali 2016: 174; Bentham 2003: 10). Muslim environmentalists call for the revival of laws regarding, for example, the designation of environmental protected zones—Hima and Harim—which are modeled on the protected zone around the Holy city of Mecca (El-Deen Hamed 1993; Dutton 1996). Environmentalists argue these zones can be established to protect endangered ecosystems and wilderness areas. Others, utilizing the juristic practice of reasoning from analogy (Qiyas), argue that prohibitions in the Sunnah (the traditions about the Prophet’s life that are used as guidance by Muslims) against using water sources or pathways as places to relieve oneself can be extended to create regulations against pollution (Abu-­ Sway 1998). The environmental theology and law which is the foundation of Islamic environmentalism is unique, but the actual work undertaken by the Islamic environmental organizations and activists in this study has many similarities with that undertaken by secular environmental organizations. Muslim environmentalists on occasion attend protest marches (IFEES members attended climate change rallies in the United Kingdom), organize direct action (WIN staged a protest about rising sea levels in Brick Lane, London), or engage in environmental community service such as tree-planting (MGT) or litter picking (SHINE). However, the vast majority of their activities are focused on educating fellow Muslims about environmentalism in Islam. The organizations in this study typically run lectures and workshops at mosques and Islamic community centers and aim to, at least, encourage the adoption of environmentally friendly practices like recycling and, at best, motivate other Muslims to become environmental activists themselves. I have argued elsewhere (Hancock 2018) that the solutions proposed for environmental crises, and modes of activism utilized by Muslim environmentalists, make their activism primarily cooperative in nature. Rather than directly challenge the state or argue for revolutionary whole-system change, most Muslim environmentalists work within the status quo and argue for changes that can be undertaken on an individual (or perhaps community) level such as reducing consumption, recycling, and the reduction of fossil-fuel use.

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The majority of the activists had pre-existing commitments to either the environmental movement or to civic engagement through other causes. For example, the founder of WIN had been heavily involved in the anti-Iraq war movement in Brighton, while the founder of MGT had been on the board of her local Muslim Students’ Association chapter. Others had been members of secular environmental organizations like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club before joining their Islamic environmental organizations. Of the remaining activists, one—the founder of SHINE— found his experience running the organization led him to become involved in other forms of civic engagement: his environmental activism led to activism on poverty and racial discrimination, and to his election to the local committee, which ran Sheffield Environment Week.

Environmentalism as a Religious Duty Almost all the Muslim activists in this study, either explicitly or implicitly, saw environmentalism as a religious duty required of them as Muslims. This “duty” is to fulfill the role of Khalifah mentioned in the section above: to be a conscientious steward of the earth. Some stated this outright in their interviews, such as Elizabeth: “Well, it [environmentalism] is a duty, that’s my understanding. Similar to Christianity we’re guardians or stewards since the time of Adam. We’re supposed to be looking after it [the earth].” Summreen thought environmentalism was a “God-given” duty: I think it’s our duty to be doing it [environmentalism], and our responsibility […] you think you’re carrying out your God-given duties by being an environmentalist. You’re caring for God’s earth and you’re caring about all of His creation and trying to do, there is this thing about good deeds—and environmentalism is part of the good deeds.

Summreen mentioned that there are “good deeds” a Muslim should perform. The idea that Muslims can accrue good deeds that will have a positive impact on the Day of Judgement—what Camrey called “brownie points”—and that environmentalism is part of those good deeds, recurred

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throughout the interviews. This is closely related to the idea of Khalifah: if humans have been given a role to fulfill on earth, they will be judged according to how well they fulfilled this role by God. Elizabeth said: People are aware that as Muslims this [life] is a test, and they are going to be judged for all their deeds. They are so concentrated on the obvious things: trying not to backbite, trying to keep their prayers on time and stuff like that. If they are told that this [environmentalism] is on the list as well then they will at least try.

Zainab noted that the responsibility is such that failing to act environmentally will accrue bad deeds for oneself, with serious spiritual consequences: I think that a lot of people have no idea of how much of an obligation we have. And how much their actions can […] be possibly accumulating bad deeds for themselves in a larger—what do you call it? Cosmological sense.

That teaching Muslims about the responsibility of Khalifah will have a positive effect on behavior was evident in the experience of at least one organization. The Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Science (IFEES) was invited to Zanzibar to run a series of workshops on Islam and Ecology for fishing communities. These communities had adopted the practice of dynamiting the local reefs to catch fish, a highly destructive and unsustainable fishing method. Environmental organizations had for some time been attempting to change the behavior of the fishermen with no success, but the workshops by IFEES were effective in convincing the fishermen to stop using dynamite. Fazlun, the IFEES activist who ran the workshops, said: “They got the message of the Khalifah, and they said we can disobey man-made laws but we can’t disobey God’s law.” Nabeel, the founder of SHINE, had a similar experience running workshops for Muslims on Islam and Ecology. Although taken aback by the unfamiliar content, his audience were nonetheless receptive to the idea that environmentalism was a religious duty:

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We would set up a talk [on Islam and Ecology] and just talk about—so according to the Qur’an this [environmentalism] is your duty. A lot of the time, it was just saying—did you know? And that shocked people. Do I have to do that? Actually yeah, you do.

Some of the interviewed activists even admitted that they were not nature-lovers, but that they were simply motivated by the belief that environmentalism was a religious and moral duty: I don’t actually feel I have the same passion for environmentalism as a lot of the people around me. So for me […] it’s sort of like something that has to be done. So I think with the people around me there is this love of nature, there is this deep connection with the environment around them, the natural environment around them and for me it’s a lot more like— we’re destroying our world and that’s really wrong. […] For me it’s more an obligation. It’s a religious obligation, it’s a practical obligation as well but more than anything it’s a religious, moral obligation.

Although most of the environmentalists expressed in some form or another that stewardship of the earth was a religious duty, fewer explicitly articulated that environmental activism was a duty: yet all the participants were, in fact, activists of some kind. The reasons Muslim environmentalists gave for engaging in activism were varied. Two of them saw civic or political participation to be a religious obligation for Muslims. Discussing the goals of the youth program she helps organize, Bhawana said: A balanced understanding, a comprehensive understanding of Islam […] motivates them to be closer to God and be active and positive influences in society. So work on yourself and your own spiritual state, and also work on your own faults and try to improve as a person. But then go out and give service to people, broadly.

For Bhawana, that meant encouraging Muslim youth to not only be involved in the Muslim community, but to get involved in organizations and initiatives that serve the wider community as well:

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What we wanted to do was help promote volunteerism amongst youth […] and outside the Muslim community. So there was a lot of people who would do volunteer stuff within the community and help in the Mosque, but we wanted the youth to be involved with other community organizations so, every month we would do stuff like local food banks and special Olympics. You know, things like that.

Nabeel, meanwhile, stated: The message in Islam is if you’re sat down comfortable, something is wrong. If you’re sitting at home happy and comfortable, your meal is being served, then start to worry, because you’ve got to go out there. You’ve got to help people, you should be doing something that is testing you.

It was more common, however, for activists to state that Muslims should be civically or politically engaged to counter Islamophobia. Ameena thought Muslims had a responsibility to join secular or interfaith environmental groups, rather than to form Muslim-only groups for just that reason: “We need Muslims at the table to counter Islamophobia […] the table is ready and waiting for Muslims. And they’re usually just not engaged or they’re just not aware.” Summreen and Camrey both saw the potential of environmentalism as an issue to bring Muslim communities together with non-Muslim communities: Islam and the environment, I think it’s quite a good [issue] to bring Muslims and non-Muslims [together], to build understanding between them. Because Islamophobia in this country […] it’s really bad here, but I think it’s a really good thing to bring people together. (Summreen) Maybe we can use environmentalism as a conduit to kind of, ease tension or build relationships between other people we don’t know, other communities we don’t know. (Camrey)

However, despite the belief that environmental action was an opportunity to bring Muslim and non-Muslim communities together in political collaboration, the vast majority of work undertaken by the Islamic

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e­ nvironmental organizations in this study was focused only upon their own Muslim communities, and engaged only Muslim activists.

Discussion The research on the function of religious communities in accumulating social capital and facilitating political participation challenges the assumption that some belief systems, like Islam, are incompatible with democratic participation and the older bias that religion more generally is antithetical to social change. By framing their environmentalism as a religious duty, Muslim activists also challenge the perceived dichotomy between political action and religious practice prevalent in many Western liberal democracies. I have argued elsewhere (Hancock 2015, 2018) that the incorporation of religious ritual and practice into the actions undertaken by Muslim environmentalists (such as their staging of environmentally themed Iftar) coupled with the synthesis of their religious goals with their political goals5 demonstrates that religious and political action are one and the same thing for many of these Muslim environmentalists. The drive of the volunteer activists in this study to dedicate significant amounts of personal time and resources on environmentalism demonstrates both the political capacity within Muslim communities and their engagement in issues of widespread social and political importance. Just as scholars have argued that Islamic communities and institutions provide the same political benefits to their members as do the institutions of other religious traditions (Jamal 2005; Oskooii and Dana 2018; Peucker and Ceylan 2017; Read 2015), so the politics that emerge from Muslim communities have limitations that can be found in other religious traditions. By framing environmentalism as a religious duty, the goal of environmental action risks becoming individualized: a Muslim should be an environmentalist in order to draw closer to God, to fulfill their divine purpose as Khalifah, or to create a more “authentic” practice  For example, one participant would only eat meat that he himself had hunted and killed. He undertook this practice both as a protest against what he diagnosed as an environmentally destructive and immoral industrial livestock system in the United States, and because he believed hunting drew him closer to God through an appreciation for creation. 5

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of Islam. DeHanas (2016) found a similarly inward-looking and individualistic focus to the Christian and Muslim civic engagement he studied in London. He argues that by focusing on individual responsibility and individual action, religious activists often fail to address the underlying structural causes of political issues. This is also the case with much Islamic environmentalism—a fact recognized by some of the more politically experienced activists themselves in my study. Khalid, an independent activist based in the Bay Area notes that, “religion can lend itself very quickly to an individual focus, like the thought that you need to fix yourself ” and that Islamic environmentalism generally is: Very neoliberal in that sense, in that it is focused on the individual changing the way they live, so they are a product of the space they’re in. And I don’t think many of them have the (…) language to understand that’s even a neoliberal thing.

By far the most common kinds of changes advocated for by the Muslim environmentalists in this study were for their mosques and fellow Muslims to adopt recycling or composting, for people to consume less, buy organic produce, and reduce their fossil-fuel usage. This type of political behavior is consistent with the kind of “lifestyle activism” identified by social movement theorists (Haenfler et al. 2012; Crossley 2003) as common in the wider environmental movement, where individual lifestyle practices are moralized and politicized. Such practices are also consistent with research into the changing nature of youth political participation that shows youth more likely to engage with economic boycotts, donations to charity, and ethical consumption practices than with collective political action (Pattie et al. 2004). This atomized mode of political engagement has already been found among Muslim youth in Australia who engage in what Harris and Roose (2014) call “do-it-yourself ” citizenship practices rather than in formal political action alone. Some Islamic environmental organizations did propose more radical systemic change to the economic system, in particular due to the Islamic prohibition against financial interest, but such a structural focus was less common. The individualistic bent to Islamic environmentalism is, I argue, both part of broader trends toward atomized political action and

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due to Muslim environmentalists framing environmentalism as a religious duty—and in the process become trapped by the norms of religious individualism and spiritual improvement. Muslim environmentalists predominantly work within their own communities and seek to influence and recruit fellow Muslims, and mostly do not (with some exceptions, discussed below) work cooperatively with activists and groups outside their community. Framing environmentalism as a religious duty makes sense in this context, but simultaneously restricts the appeal of the environmental work undertaken. Given the argument that it is bridging, not bonding, social capital that is essential for effective political participation (Wood and Warren 2002; Annette 2011), the restricted audience for much Islamic environmentalism would appear to do little to promote cross-community relations and societal or political integration.6 As discussed in the section above, some of the activists themselves wish to use environmental action to counter Islamophobia in society, but this requires working collaboratively or in coalition with other religious and secular environmental groups. In the United Kingdom in particular, collaborative work comes with some risks. Some of the activists in the United Kingdom did experience Islamophobia when trying to engage with non-­ Muslims, with one being bullied by members of local environmental groups and another reflecting that: People have a certain […] defensive mechanism towards you because of who you are. […] Straight away, like it or not, you have come as a Muslim and straight away people put you in a certain box. You’re either quite aggressive, or you’re quite extreme, whatever it is, but people have that (Nabeel).

One of the environmental organizations in this study, UK-based Wisdom in Nature, did manage to recruit non-Muslims to their organization and work collaboratively with a variety of environmental and community organizations outside their immediate Muslim community. They  This is not to suggest that these activists or groups need to better integrate—for most the prime focus of their activism is to promote better environmental behavior within their Muslim community. 6

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organized public forums on climate change with Rising Tide and the World Development Movement and workshops at conferences held by the Campaign Against Climate Change; they also organized a Fast for the Planet action campaign with St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace. Wisdom in Nature consciously rejected explicit identification with the Muslim community, changing their name from the London Islamic Network for the Environment, and prioritizing the recruitment of members with grassroots political experience over religious identification or belief. Although Wisdom in Nature was better integrated in wider grassroots politics than the other environmental organizations in this study, this was to a large extent due to the core members’ networks within left-wing grassroots politics in the United Kingdom, particularly those of the founder Muzammal, and the group’s utilization of common left-wing organizing practices (such as consensus decision-making and non-­ hierarchical organizational structure). Of all the organizations, they were also the least explicitly “Islamic,” although the core members of the organization were all Muslim and much of the group’s literature was grounded in Islamic theology. Religious identity may be of primary importance to significant sectors of Muslim communities (see DeHanas 2016), but it is also relatively unremarkable and just one aspect of other Muslims’ identity. Research on the role of Islam in civic and political participation risks reducing the complexity and diversity of Muslim communities and individuals by only discussing their “Muslim-ness.” Ultimately, framing environmentalism as a religious duty has limited effectiveness for Muslim activists. There is some evidence to suggest that the framing may be appealing or intellectually convincing to some Muslims, from the positive feedback the activists report getting in their workshops and lectures. However, there is very little evidence demonstrating that this framing has any concrete effect on behavior. The IFEES workshop in Zanzibar, where Fazlun convinced local fishermen to stop dynamiting the reef, is one (self-reported) example. Without further empirical research, it is impossible to measure the effectiveness of framing environmentalism as a religious duty on environmental behavior change among Muslims. Relying on religious framing to motivate Muslims into environmental activism was largely ineffective, according to my study findings. Of the six

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environmental organizations in this study, three were in abeyance during the research period because they could not recruit sufficient numbers of participants to sustain their activism. The primary factors driving the Muslim environmentalists into their activism were their pre-existing commitments to and networks within the environmental movement. Activists came to their first Islamic environmental meeting because they were asked by a good friend, or because they knew and respected the leader of the environmental group (Hancock 2018) and most described an existing affinity to the environment, whether through a love of hiking and camping, or involvement in a secular environmental group prior to joining (or founding) an Islamic environmental group. However, we must be careful not to ascribe failure to Muslim environmentalists because they struggled to mobilize Muslims into the environmental movement. The goals of most of these groups is primarily to educate their fellow Muslims about the environment and effect environmental behavior change—not to create a mass mobilization for environmentalism. Further, insofar as many of the activists were convinced that environmentalism is a religious duty incumbent upon Muslims, they also seek to fulfill their religious duty through their environmental activism. Although there is insufficient evidence to say whether or not the organizations in this study were successful in creating environmental behavior change in their Muslim communities, they were very active with their education efforts and—perhaps more importantly for their individual consciences—felt that their activism was indeed the fulfillment of their religious duty.

Conclusion This chapter has outlined the work of Islamic environmental organizations and Muslim activists in the United States and United Kingdom, analyzing how environmental action is understood and framed as a religious duty and the effect of this on the environmental action of the organizations and their efficacy in mobilizing people to their cause. I have argued that the kinds of actions undertaken by Muslim environmentalists are predominantly individualistic and reflective of broader trends

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toward the atomization of political participation; framing environmentalism as a religious duty typically reinforces this individualism. The Islamic framing also restricts the resonance of their message to the Muslim community—most organizations self-restrict their activism to the Muslim community anyhow, and so this is not an issue in terms of their organizational goals. However, by remaining within the bounds of the Muslim community, Islamic environmental organizations are unlikely to build the kind of bridging capital necessary for broader civic engagement for the environment.

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Putnam, R., & Campbell, D. (2010). American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. Read, J. G. (2015). Gender, Religious Identity, and Civic Engagement among Arab Muslims in the United States. Sociology of Religion, 76(1), 30–48. Roose, J., & Harris, A. (2015). Muslim Citizenship in Everyday Australian Civic Spaces. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 36(4), 468–486. Setia, A. (2007). The Inner Dimension of Going Green: Articulating an Islamic Deep-Ecology. Islam and Science, 5(2), 117–149. Sirin, S., & Katsiaficas, D. (2011). Religiosity, Discrimination, and Community Engagement: Gendered Pathways of Muslim American Emerging Adults. Youth & Society, 43(4), 1528–1546. Vergani, M., Johns, A., Lobo, M., & Mansouri, F. (2017). Examining Islamic Religiosity and Civic Engagement in Melbourne. Journal of Sociology, 53(1), 63–78. Wagner, A. (2008). Religion and Civil Society: A Critical Reappraisal of America’s Civic Engagement Debate. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 37(4), 626–645. Wood, R., & Warren, M. (2002). A Different Face of Faith-Based Politics: Social Capital and Community Organising in the Public Arena. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 22(9/10), 6–54.

8 When Trauma and Citizenship Intersect: British Muslims Volunteering for Mental Health Services William Barylo

Introduction In the United Kingdom, state and mainstream mental healthcare services have started to offer culture-sensitive services1 in the 2000s, like Rethink (circa 2005),2 and faith-sensitive services, like MIND (2014).3 However, some Muslim community mental health services have been around for much longer, like Black Women’s Health & Family Support (1982), the Muslim Youth Helpline (2001), Muslim Women’s Helpline (2001), or Sakoon Islamic Counselling (2006). Muslim community services are  Culture-sensitive mental health services are designed to take into account the cultural or religious background of beneficiaries. Some of these services, when adapted for Muslims for example, offer beneficiaries to consult a Muslim therapist, to access services in other languages (Arabic, Urdu, or Bangla), or to see non-Muslim therapists trained in respecting religious or cultural sensitivities. 2  https://www.rethink.org/search?s=sahayak. 3  https://www.mind.org.uk/about-us/our-policy-work/equality-human-rights/our-work-with-muslimcommunities/. 1

W. Barylo (*) Warwick University, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_8

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usually grassroots initiatives. They have been setup in response to the lack of public services that take into account cultural and religious sensitivities, demonstrate understanding for socio-cultural specific, such as family dynamics in Muslim cultures, and are delivered in a way people could relate to, in terms of language, spirituality, or social experiences. Muslim services rely on trained therapists but very importantly also on volunteers for managing, referring, and sometimes supporting beneficiaries reaching out by phone or email. These frontline volunteers experience a heavy workload of emotional labor, and, as one could suspect, even just a few months at the helpline can be a life-changing experience. Observing young Muslims in France and in the United Kingdom getting involved in grassroots charities for social care, I found that the most committed volunteers I came across often were those who had gone through difficult life experiences themselves (Barylo 2017a). Some decided to look for a charity to volunteer following a grave illness, the loss of relatives, or other health-related or social traumas such as experiences of racism and Islamophobia. Often, significant life events, even something like a trip abroad, would suffice to trigger existential considerations: What is my purpose in life? What would I like to do with my life?, paralleled with a search for making sense of their plural identities related to multiple Cliffordian points of origins (Clifford 1992). Ultimately, they would find their unique ways to articulate this matrix made up of culture, religion, philosophies, ethics, political opinions, social circles, familial context, and lived experiences and to translate this into their discourses, their actions, and their commitments in the public sphere. The past few years have been marked by a further growing awareness within mainstream and Muslim communities around gender and racial issues, domestic violence, and the traumas they cause. While social media made these deeply rooted issues more visible, Muslim community mental health issues were set up specifically because of these. For this study, I looked at how the particular experience of volunteering for Muslim mental health services builds awareness specifically around these social issues. Rather than people working for well-established structures, I was interested in young Muslims working voluntarily, with little initial training, for a small-scale organization outside of their career path. By selecting people pursuing an activity out of curiosity (as my data suggest) more

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than out of career perspectives, my intention was to explore how this particular context and experience would shape their understanding and their practice of citizenship, informed by Islam as a frame of reference, and the exposure to social issues faced by Muslims in general. In this chapter, I focus on people who volunteered for the London-­ based Muslim Youth Helpline (MYH). Established in 2001, MYH employs around 25 volunteers and eight regularly paid staff as of the end of 2018, most of them based in London. MYH positions itself as a “faith and culturally sensitive organisation” rather than a structure providing religious guidance.4 The volunteers occupy various positions, from answering calls on the hotline to administrative functions. I analyze how their involvement impacted on their personal and professional journey, and their engagement with the wider community. Many of those who volunteered for MYH have later on set up their own charity, have campaigned or produced art, all at the service of vulnerable segments of the society. To what extent did their volunteering experiences at the MYH play a role in their orientations? I argue in this chapter that being exposed to people experiencing trauma can trigger a phase of introspective questioning, which potentially leads to engaging in and accomplishing civic actions. Moreover, being involved in the Muslim community leads volunteers to critically examine traumas within a wider religious and social framework. On the one hand, suffering is understood as the result of social pressures such as racism or gender expectations; on the other hand, Islam and the social context of the British Muslim community provide a frame of references that encourages volunteers to take action. The data of this study stem from my doctoral research focusing on grassroots Muslim organizations in the United Kingdom. The data of this study have been collected through ethnographic methods, participant observation, and face-to-face, semi-structured interviews and informal conversations, which were conducted between 2016 and 2019 in London. Seven volunteers have been interviewed, five of them female and two male, aged between 21 and 35 years. These volunteers have been first  https://www.myh.org.uk/faqs. All subsequently presented information on the MYH was obtained through direct interviews with the MYH managers in October 2018. 4

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selected from a wider pool of potential participants for a separate research project because they had in common a few years of volunteering for MYH. The volunteers, all Muslims, coming from various cultural, professional, socio-economic, or religious backgrounds, differ with regard to the level of religious education, praxis or understanding of Islam. They do not necessarily ascribe to a particular school of thought, jurisprudence, or spiritual path. Following a section briefly outlining the context of this study, its theoretical framework and methodology, this chapter offers a glimpse of the volunteers’ journeys and achievements some years after they had left the MYH. It shows how volunteering for the hotline shaped their vision of society and how the hotline experience, in conjunction with their religious beliefs, allowed them to develop an active sense of citizenship, oriented toward vulnerability and critically engaged with contemporary social debates on race, religion and gender.

Islam and Civic Engagement Grassroots organizations are infrapolitical organizations (Chanial 2003); although neither involved in political parties nor in the management of their local area, they play a role in a democratic environment. They are actors in the “theatre of citizens” (Pocock 1998; Clarke 1994), on the “stage” or in the “drama” (Göle 2005: 23) of the bios politikos (public life) (Habermas 1962 [1978]). As such, they also bear a political dimension (Emden and Midgley 2012). Grassroots organizations, because of their public action, are capable of “institutional innovation for modifying the normal rules and behaviours” (Rival 2008: 225). Providing the opportunity for civic engagement in the sense of formal or informal activities undertaken for the betterment of society (Adler and Goggin 2005), and through the provision of networks, norms and social trust, they become elements fundamental for democracies to function (Putnam 1993; Halman 2003). They become “cradles for democracy” (Chanial 2003). Some works have conceptualized this proactive civic engagement as “democratic” or “radical” ways of being a citizen (Mouffe 1992: 4) or

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“concrete citizenship”(Cefaï 2007), where citizenship is no longer defined by its sole legal status, or active citizenship. The latter term refers to the “participation in civil society, community and/or political life, characterized by mutual respect and non-violence and in accordance with human rights and democracy” (Hoskins and Mascherini 2009: 462). For Muslim volunteers taking part in grassroots initiatives, Islam takes a political dimension where daily life is religious and religion is lived daily: “active citizenship stands for being a good Muslim, and being a good Muslim becomes synonymous with active citizenship (in the discourses)” (Fadil 2006: 69–70). Research has shown that many Muslims feel that civic engagement is perceived as a religious duty (Roose and Harris 2015; Vergani et al. 2017; Barylo 2017a) and that Islam is perceived as a moral compass and provides a basis for political engagement (Peucker 2018; Mustafa 2016; Amath 2015; Pędziwiatr 2010). Moreover, studies also found correlations between Muslims’ religiosity and participation in voluntary organizations (McAndrew and Voas 2014). This research used an ethnographic approach and social phenomenology in order to describe phenomena with the subjects’ own words, references, and meanings, and using them as basis for the analysis (Pędziwiatr 2010; Cefaï 2007; Amath 2015). Therefore, Islam here goes beyond the modern, Western notion of religion, which operates a clear separation between the religious and the secular. Moreover, the term religion is too “damaged by its colonial, imperial and globalizing legacy” (Chidester 2005: 27), and concepts gravitating around it are not flexible enough (Tweed 2006) to describe Islam as perceived and practiced by volunteers observed in this study. Islam is considered by many as a comprehensive “way of life” (Roose and Harris 2015: 807), a holistic set of beliefs, ethics, practices part of complex identities (Barylo 2017b). In that sense, it is best conceptualized as a complex ecosystem (Morin 1977, 1986) influenced by various overlapping frames of references such as philosophies, cultures, political views, and life experiences.

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British Muslims and Mental Health Research conducted by the Care Quality Commission (2011) shows that people from the Black, South Asian, and Muslim diasporas in the United Kingdom are three times more likely to suffer from mental health issues than the average population. The same study finds that there is an over-­ representation of people from South Asian and African backgrounds among mental health patients: In 2010, 23 percent of mental health patients in England and Wales were from “Black and minority ethnic groups,” while this group makes up only 14 percent of the population in England and Wales (ONS 2012). While there are no figures for groups by religion, racism and discrimination are key triggers for mental health issues. Research demonstrates that those who had experienced verbal abuse or attacks are between three and five times more likely to suffer from depression or psychosis (Chakraborty and McKenzie 2002). Moreover, racism and Islamophobia increase feelings of depression and anxiety for Muslims worldwide (Kunst et al. 2012). In post-9/11 America, researcher Mona Amer (2005) found that out of a group of 611 Arab Americans, half had clinical symptoms of ­depression (the study doesn’t claim to be representative). Furthermore, being diagnosed with mental health issues increases chances to be discriminated: 93 percent of people of Black or South Asian background experience more discrimination because of their mental health issues; 32 percent of them even within their own family or community (Owen and Rehman 2013). Because seeking help in formal mental health services is often seen as shameful (Abu-Ras 2003; Khan 2006), the issues are tend to be kept taboo or addressed inadequately. While there is an increase in awareness around mental health issues, some Muslims perceive them as the result of a lack of religious practice, or possessions (Lim et al. 2018; Dein and Illaiee 2013). However, through observations conducted during my doctoral and post-doctoral research, and interviews with the staff of various Muslim mental health services, these explanations stem mainly from elder generations and from marginalized or deprived communities. Although formal and informal Muslim community structures have been offering support networks since the 1980s and professional

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c­ ounselling since the early 2000s, the issues gained mainstream coverage in the mid-2010s, especially due to more people sharing publicly their mental health struggles on social media. Moreover, university students’ societies and local community hubs such as Rumi’s Cave have been organizing events on the topic. At times of global contestation movements such as #BlackLivesMatter or #MeToo, discourses around mental health have been increasingly connected to racial or sexual abuse, and dealing with the consequences of personal and collective trauma. Events and online video series such as Black and Muslim in Britain highlight that being a Muslim or a person of color in the modern society is indissociable from trauma, and that the community needs to explore ways for healing. Therefore, the Muslim Youth Helpline exists at the intersection of community service, religious duty, and finds itself at the frontline of social trauma. Volunteers receiving and responding to calls at MYH are trained through a tailored four-day program, which include presentations by external professional psychotherapists and faith-sensitive training by organizations such as Sakoon Islamic Counselling. While from diverse cultural backgrounds (e.g., South Asian, Middle-Eastern, North African, East or West African), most of the volunteers are female (25 female and four males), and are selected through a skills- and character-based interview process and a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. Applicants have come to know about the MYH from various sources, either their own personal research or through word-of-mouth, usually among university students. The hotline receives on average 130 contacts a month, mostly from male support seekers. Email threads and conversations are systematically “quality-checked” (phone calls are monitored and assessed against an internal code of practice). Although volunteers are multi-lingual, the MYH provides services only in English mainly for quality-check purposes. After leaving MYH, it is not rare that volunteers pursue their civic engagement formally through their career path, volunteering for another organization, or informally through personal artistic expression.

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MYH: A Central Step The following analysis draws on interviews with seven volunteers, five female and two male, aged between 21 and 35 years. All had previously volunteered for MYH. Sadiya5 had been involved with the MYH for two years, before launching her own initiative, which was six years before the interview. Her organization runs a soup kitchen to the homeless and provides support for victims of domestic violence. Hassan, now in his early 30s, founded in 2010 an organization that seeks to empower young Muslims to speak out against Islamophobia through workshops and discussions on social topics, such as masculinity or anti-Black racism in Muslim communities. Sakinah, of Muslim-Caribbean background, has been involved in MYH for five years, including two years as a volunteer; she had just finished her studies to become a clinical psychotherapist. Like Soraya, she was also a spoken word artist in her early 20s. While Faiz now pursues a career as a solo artist and Miriam now volunteers for Hassan’s organization, Faymah still volunteers occasionally for MYH. Most volunteers in this study consider their involvement at MYH pivotal in their life journey. Sakinah’s testimony is particularly illustrative: studying business management, she decided to change her career path and undertake studies to become a psychotherapist during her time in the charity: “The MYH was an eye-opener. My friends and I often talk about their university counselling services; they don’t understand what does it mean to be Muslim or South Asian. While volunteering at MYH, I realised it’s my true calling.” Hassan elaborated on his personal growth as a result of his volunteering with MYH: …it gave me skills that followed me all my life until now: active listening, a sense of empathy, listening to others’ problems, trying to explore options together, being an emotional shoulder, emotional intelligence… From that point things changed: people would come to me whenever they had

 Participants’ real names have been replaced by pseudonyms, and any data allowing the identification of the subjects have been changed. 5

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­ roblems. This was as a pivotal experience in my life which took me to p where I am now.

However, some realizations led him directly to think about setting up his own charity against Islamophobia and for opening conversations within the Muslim community: There were lots of calls related to Islamophobia. People who’ve been abused, bullied… also, back in the days, I found MYH was for a very South-Asian, middle-class type of Muslims; some people would not understand things like anti-blackness in the Muslim community, while Black Muslims are already targeted by islamophobia. I felt that we need to address these issues in our community.

Just like Hassan, volunteering at MYH and being exposed to people experiencing trauma also led Sadiya to set up her own initiative. She stated that, while at MYH “I got really affected by the issue of domestic violence, especially towards children. I have nieces and nephews, and I can’t imagine these things happening to them.” Hassan’s and Sadiya’s experiences made them aware of issues that were not directly affecting them, such as anti-blackness, domestic violence, or violence against children. As they became more sensitive toward these forms of violence, they decided to take further action through their own organizations or, like Sakinah, through their own career. However, some volunteers, like Soraya, found in MYH a space safe from judgment, which reinforced her decision to pursue a career in mental health care, and most importantly set up other spaces for conversation: MYH was a step, I think, in the greater journey. I hide [my bisexuality] to my family; I don’t know if I will end up with a man or a woman, and how my family would react. Volunteering at the MYH was a small relief. For me, it was a space where it was fine to be Muslim, a bisexual, and hearing people who experience similar things and just need to talk. When I started, I wanted to bring my friends along… it’s already difficult to talk about gender issues, let alone LGBT issues in the mainstream, it’s almost impossible in the Muslim community; even if you have groups like the Inclusive

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Mosque Initiative; and it makes people suffer a lot because they can’t talk about it.

Most volunteers found that the most impactful experiences were the direct conversations with beneficiaries and the acknowledge of how they could relate to some beneficiaries’ stories. Sakinah’s words are particularly illustrative: …it speaks to you more when it hits home, when you hear people who’ve been through sexual abuse, who attempted suicide, who live in London, who are your age. It’s different from volunteering abroad or in big charities. I feel big charities are very corporate, they have a very capitalist perspective. Here you feel you are more in touch with people.… [During my studies] I started looking for Muslim charities to volunteer with. I volunteered for some Muslim organisations, doing fundraiser or admin stuff but I found that MYH was more face-to-face.

Struggling himself with depression, Faiz felt a sense of responsibility after he had direct encounters with beneficiaries at MYH: “I want, through my art, to say that it’s okay, that there’s hope… if someone listens to me, to my story, and regains hope, that’s the purpose.” For the volunteers in this study, the Islamic dimension of their engagement comes through two perspectives: on one hand, the spiritual aspect, and the social aspect on the other. Soraya wanted to volunteer for MYH because she …wanted to give back to the community, do something good for the community and also because it’s a form of charity [referring to Sadaqa6] (…). I also had my own personal issues going on at that time, and I think it was a way for me to try to make sense of what was going on.

Faymah, another volunteer, explained her reasons for volunteering at MYH: “I am grateful for all the things I have overcome… it’s really to give back.” The concept of “giving back” can take different meanings for  Sadaqa, often translated as an act of charity in English, is a voluntary and non-obligatory act of worship. 6

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different volunteers. While usually Muslim volunteers perceive volunteering as giving to the Muslim community, the local neighborhood or society at large (Barylo 2017a), it is because they also feel that they have been given something from God (ibid.), either an opportunity to serve or a comfortable situation. In the case of Faymah, she perceives the fact that she overcame hardships as a gift from the divine, which encourages her to make others benefit from this gift. Interviews show that they felt they were receiving a lot from their involvement at MYH. Whether it is skills, work ethics, network of friends, inspirations or ideas, they all felt that MYH gave them more that what they perceive they have invested themselves. More explicitly, Miriam sees a more spiritual connection with her volunteering works, here God also is a reason for her making friends: I try to draw most of my life around my relationship with God. I’ve learnt through MYH the importance of selflessness and honesty; if you make mistakes, don’t try to hide it (…). I have a very kismati7 way of making friends. My experience at MYH gave me a good network of friends and has strengthen the good relations.

While mental health issues are more regularly addressed in mainstream services, Muslim community initiatives are slowly opening up physical and digital spaces for discussing issues and provide support to communities (e.g., Burnt Roti, Taraki, Rumi’s Cave, SOAS), focusing on symptoms, testimonies, and existing therapies. However, current therapies in public healthcare remain centered around the individual rather than addressing the collective, and, except for racism, rarely link mental health issues to systemic factors such as social pressures, or the political and economic environments. Consequently, Hassan sees current efforts as mere “band-aids” and hence advocates finding solutions that go beyond support. In the same vein, Hassan or Soraya have been reflecting on modes of resistance or coping with systemic trauma. The volunteers are critical of the “culture of antagonism on social media” or “call-out

 From kismat (destiny), meaning here going with the flow and believing that friendships are the result of the divine will. 7

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c­ ulture,” they center their conversations and their personal stories around the themes of “self-esteem,” “self-love,” and “the works of bell hooks.”

A Citizenship of Vulnerability The volunteers in this study all acknowledge that a lot of beneficiaries’ trauma is produced by systemic forms of exclusion, whether it is Islamophobia, racism, anti-blackness, misogyny, or the absence of space and recognition for LGBT issues. They are all come to realize the complexity of intersectional contexts and how forms of exclusion present in the mainstream affect, to various degrees, Muslim communities as well. Their engagement is driven by a sense of responsibility, for which the MYH has acted either as a trigger or a catalyst. They either have become sensitized to social issues, or it has reinforced their already pre-existing motivations for helping others. In some instances, as for Hassan, Faiz, or Sakinah, these personal insights are a direct result of their volunteering with the MYH. In other cases, they already existed but have been further reinforced, like for Sadiya, Miriam, or Soraya, for whom the MYH was just a “natural” step along the development of their journey or an opportunity. For Faiz and Soraya, the MYH offered a space for articulating personal trauma or issues and potentially gaining a better understanding of these and an opportunity to “breathe” or even helping to redress them. Their enactment of citizenship is not necessarily a citizenship of dissent (O’Loughlin and Gillespie 2012); it rather comes from the perspective of vulnerability and care: they are willing to get active and participate in the public sphere not only to tackle systemic issues such as anti-­ blackness, Islamophobia, or homophobia, but primarily for supporting people affected by these issues, listen to them, and offer guidance. Some initiatives, like, for example, the one Hassan founded, aim at empowering young Muslims through organizing workshops and training, helping Muslims enhance their practical and soft skills. It shows that, whether they seek to provide support through arts, clinical therapy or charity, beyond the dimension of healing, some are also thinking of alternative ways for collective growth and self-determination of Muslim communities.

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The role that MYH and Islam play in the volunteers’ journey to civic engagement can be understood through a gift economy. As in the works of Marcel Mauss, it shows that the most important items exchanged are not necessarily numerable or even visible (Mauss 2007). The dimensions of self, community (beneficiaries), and the divine are interwoven in a virtuous cycle of gift-giving, where those who give help are also receiving at the other end. The volunteers perceive being given opportunities, skills, knowledge, and experiences by God through the MYH, and feel that they have to “give back” or share with others. Both the anthropos and the theos play a role in shaping people’s thoughts and behaviors (Descola 2005), thus the need for considering God as a “real actor with a relative existence” (Day 2010). This matrix of gift sheds light on an anti-­utilitarian approach to citizenship (Caillé 2009). Their actions and modes of thought do not occur because of utilitarian interests such as career, salary, or prestige, but are motivated by generosity, friendship, emotions, or faith (see also Peucker’s chapter). All the volunteers interviewed seem to be comfortable with their complex identities as British-born Muslims of various cultural backgrounds. However, in this study, volunteers all have different relations to Islam, different levels of orthopraxy and understanding of the scriptures. While all the volunteers agree that Islam encourages civic engagement and taking care of the vulnerable, the place of Islam in their journey is different for each volunteer. Some would stress the importance of civic engagement first because it is to them a religious duty, it would be a secondary reason for others. While in some cases, the Islamic dimension of their engagement is the predominant reason, in other instances, the social aspect of working within “the Muslim community” would be a primary factor for their involvement. In all cases, however, Islam is the base layer, whether volunteers will emphasize on its spiritual dimension, or because it laid a social tissue allowing volunteers to evolve in a space which was familiar and safe. A few questions remain unanswered. The volunteers in this study all went through higher education, which assumes they have been introduced to some form of critical thinking. Would MYH have the same impact on people without tertiary education, or volunteers from more deprived social or economic backgrounds? Also, how important were

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social bonds in the shaping of their personality, views, and motivations? What if the MYH hadn’t provided a strong network? Would the volunteers actually pursue their civic engagement on the long term? All these questions would require following volunteers throughout a more extensive part of their journey, perhaps over a number of years.

Conclusion Volunteering for a faith-sensitive mental health organization has been a formative experience for the young Muslims interviewed. However, it has played different roles in their lives, from a pivotal time to a step among many others in a longer journey. Whether joining MYH was informed by their personal experiences, was an opportunity which was presented by friends, or an opportunity to give back to the community or the divine, their work had gifted them with practical and soft skills, networks, ideas, and overall a concrete knowledge through first-hand conversations with beneficiaries. Their work at MYH has informed their views on the traumas and challenges experienced by Muslim communities, either from the inside (anti-blackness, homophobia, patriarchy) or the outside, like the consequences of Islamophobia. Consequently, it has either fueled or strengthened their sensitivity and their motivation to undertake practical steps to support the wider community in a personal or professional capacity. Therefore, these Muslim volunteers are linking their life experiences to an understanding of citizenship “in order to improve conditions for others or to help shape the community’s future” (Adler and Goggin 2005: 241). These experiences have thus channeled or encouraged their practice of an active form of citizenship though other means after they left the charity. Overall, although not a general rule, the exposure to people affected by intersectional social and personal trauma can be a potential catalyst for an active understanding and practice of citizenship, as the volunteers in this study have shown. Islam plays various roles in their journey: a more spiritual one for some, a more social one for others, through their networks and social environment. Informed by their experience, they have decided to direct their action toward supporting and healing those affected by traumas.

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They understand citizenship through a matrix of vulnerability informed altogether by their journey, personal struggles, or spirituality. However, people involved in such activist circles are part of a minority within their communities. These volunteers for MYH have found themselves at the frontline of a complex battle, which requires them to understand, deal with, speak about and address intra- and extra-community issues and understand how these issues overlap and interact. This is a delicate exercise at times when matters such as patriarchy within Muslim communities or anti-blackness can be appropriated by far-right groups or the media and turned against Muslims. Consequently, they raise wider questions: how is it possible to raise an “internal” critique of certain behaviors in the age of call-out culture where information becomes weapons? On the other end, how to protect those at the receiving end of harm? Ultimately, how is it possible to raise awareness on these issues, understand the wider dynamics and forces at play in society and offer alternatives? How is it possible to train future generation to articulate these matters and be able to respond to both internal issues and external attacks? These are the questions the initiatives set up by Hassan and Sadiya, or Faiz’s and Soraya’s art are trying to answer.

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Hoskins, B., & Mascherini, M. (2009). Measuring Active Citizenship Through the Development of a Composite Indicator. Social Indicators Research, 90(3), 459–488. Khan, Z. (2006). Attitudes Toward Counseling and Alternative Support Among Muslims in Toledo, Ohio. Journal of Muslim Mental Health, 1(1), 21–42. Kunst, J. R., Sam, D. L., & Ulleberg, P. (2012). Perceived Islamophobia: Scale development and Validation. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 37(2), 225–237. Lim, A., Hoek, H.  W., Ghane, S., Deen, M., & Blom, J.  D. (2018). The Attribution of Mental Health Problems to Jinn: An Explorative Study in a Transcultural Psychiatric Outpatient Clinic. Frontiers in Psychiatry. https:// doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2018.00089. Mauss, M. (2007 [1924]). Essai sur le don [Essay on Gift]. Paris: Presses Universitaires France. McAndrew, S., & Voas, D. (2014). Immigrant Generation, Religiosity and Civic Engagement in Britain. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(1), 99–119. Morin, E. (1977). La Méthode: La nature de la Nature. Paris: Seuil. Morin, E. (1986). La Méthode: La vie de la Vie. Paris: Seuil. Mouffe, C. (1992). Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community. London: Verso. Mustafa, A. (2016). Active Citizenship, Dissent and Civic Consciousness: Young Muslims Redefining Citizenship on Their Own Terms. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 23(4), 454–469. O’Loughlin, B., & Gillespie, M. (2012). Dissenting Citizenship? Young People and Political Participation in the Media-Security Nexus. Parliamentary Affairs, 65(1), 115–137. Office for National Statistics (ONS). (2012). Religion in England and Wales 2011. Retrieved March 16, 2019, from http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/religion/articles/ religioninenglandandwales2011/2012-12-11 Owen, D., & Rehman, H. (2013). Mental Health Survey of Ethnic Minorities. Ethnos. Retrieved March 16, 2019, from https://www.time-to-change.org. uk/sites/default/files/TTC_Final%20Report_ETHNOS_summary_0.pdf Pędziwiatr, K. (2010). The New Muslim Elites in European Cities: Religion and Active Social Citizenship Amongst Young Organized Muslims in Brussels and London. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag. Peucker, M. (2018). On the (In)Compatibility of Islamic Religiosity and Citizenship in Western Democracies: The Role of Religion for Muslims’ Civic and Political Engagement. Politics and Religion, 11(3), 553–575.

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Pocock, J. G. A. (1998). The Ideal of Citizenship Since Classical Times. Queen’s Quarterly, 99(1), 33–55. Putnam, R. D. (1993). What Makes Democracy Work? National Civic Review, 82(2), 101–107. Rival, M. (2008). Associations et entrepreneuriat institutionnel. In C. Hoarau & J.-L.  Laville (Eds.), La gouvernance des associations (pp.  215–225). Paris: Eres. Roose, J., & Harris, A. (2015). Muslim Citizenship in Everyday Australian Civic Spaces. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 36(4), 468–486. Tweed, T. A. (2006). Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vergani, M., Johns, A., Lobo, M., & Mansouri, F. (2017). Examining Islamic Religiosity and Civic Engagement in Melbourne. Journal of Sociology, 53(1), 63–78.

9 Muslim American Youth and Volunteerism: Neoliberal Citizenship in the War on Terror Sunaina Maira

Since September 11, 2001, and the ongoing global War on Terror waged since then, Muslim and Middle Eastern communities in the United States have been subjected to state surveillance and everyday scrutiny as suspect citizens and enemy aliens of the state. The national security paradigm that frames Muslim Americans as anti-American terrorist threats has created a political framework in which Muslim Americans are constantly forced to prove their national allegiance, often via a performance of “good” citizenship predicated on civic engagement. Muslim youth, in particular, are targets of the counterterrorism regime as they are viewed as vulnerable to “radicalization” and recruitment by extremist groups (Maira 2009a). Given this heightened preoccupation with asserting national belonging, which has only intensified since Donald Trump’s election and deepening xenophobia and Islamophobia in the United States, I argue that the paradigm of liberal civic engagement has become a litmus test of entry into virtuous citizenship for Muslim American youth (Peek 2011; Sirin and Fine 2008). S. Maira (*) University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_9

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Volunteerism is key to a neoliberal model of citizenship in the United States as it enshrines values of individual and community self-reliance promoted by the neoliberal state, which has abdicated its social responsibilities to citizens. Social services have been increasingly privatized as the neoliberal state shifts the responsibility of social welfare to individual citizens or community initiatives willing to do volunteer or charitable work. In this neoliberal model, citizens must earn access to social and economic rights by proving their economic productivity and virtue; this is a central tenant of neoliberal governmentality that has been discussed extensively in the critical scholarship (e.g., Melamed 2006; Harvey 2007; Ong 2006). Faith-based community service initiatives, which were encouraged by the George W. Bush administration, have also harnessed notions of entrepreneurship, and have mushroomed since 9/11 (Patel 2006: 20). Neoliberal governmentality provides the context in which liberal interfaith programs provide yet another arena for the promotion of the virtues of productivity, autonomy, and self-reliance (Duggan 2003). Thus I argue that, rather than being viewed as intrinsically outside of the liberal-democratic paradigm of volunteerism, the regulation and disciplining of Muslim American politics for the last couple of decades has actually meant that some political initiatives by  (“good”) Muslim Americans are held up as exemplars of the inclusiveness of US democracy, while others (by  “bad”  Muslims) have been demonized as antiAmerican and incur the risk of surveillance, and even detention or deportation., with the repression of dissenting politics (Maira 2009b). This bait-and-­ switch policy has led to divisions among Muslim Americans themselves, with some becoming suspect in the eyes of the post-9/11 state and also by other “moderate” Muslim Americans (Mamdani 2004). The “radical”/”moderate” Muslim framework is not a binary formulation in practice, as young Muslim activists take complex and sometimes contingent positions in this highly charged debate, but it is a dichotomy that has serious stakes for the players involved, especially those who are most vulnerable, such as youth, as I have discussed elsewhere (Maira 2007, 2016). I argue that liberal Muslim civil rights activism shores up a “moderate” Muslim American politics that is part of the disciplining and division of minority groups through the politics of recognition and within the context of American exceptionalism, that is, the valorization of the United States as an exceptionally democratic state and

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“land of the free.” I situate these debates in the context of a post-civil rights era and the “post-racial” moment signaled by the election of Barack Hussein Obama, examining what this civic engagement based on “Muslim civil rights” means for the triumphalist narrative of US multicultural democracy (Melamed 2006; Reddy 2011). This chapter is drawn from an ethnographic study, conducted in Silicon Valley in northern California between 2007 and 2011, in the South Bay Area and in the nearby cities of Fremont/Hayward that have a large Afghan population (Maira 2016). The book based on this research explores the political subjecthood of young people targeted in the War on Terror and in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. It is based on my interviews and field work with college-age Arab, South Asian, and Afghan American youth (largely Muslim but also including non-­Muslims), some of whom but not all were involved in political organizing. I also interviewed older activists and religious leaders and did participant observation at political and community events in Silicon Valley and Fremont/Hayward.1 The college-age youth I interviewed in Silicon Valley were generally the children of immigrants who had come to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly as graduate students or technical workers. These middle- to upper-middle class youth were students at private and public universities, including community colleges, and were engaged in politics on and off campus, via organized groups or movements (faith-based and secular) and also in informal ways. The study uses ethnographic methods to offer insights into how the youth of this “9/11 generation” responded, individually as well as  There are sizeable communities of South Asian and Arab Americans in the San Jose area and Afghan Americans in the Fremont/Hayward area (in fact, this region hosts the largest Afghan community outside Afghanistan), but they are under-researched. The Arab American community is diverse, consisting of Egyptians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, and Yemenis, some of whom have lived in Northern California for three generations. The South Asian community generally comprises Pakistani and Indian immigrants. South Asian and Arab Americans in this area tend to be upwardly mobile professionals, but there are also middle-class and some lower-middle-class families. The Afghan American community consists largely of refugees who are less affluent. They arrived in two waves: one after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the other after the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s. Silicon Valley has an increasingly visible and organized Muslim American community that has had the resources to establish major Muslim institutions, such as the Muslim Community Association (MCA) mosque in Santa Clara. 1

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collectively, to Islamophobia, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the US-backed occupation in Palestine. These youth have been engaging with an emergent Muslim American politics since 2001 and with activism that is defined by religious and/or national identities as well as by paradigms of civil rights, “Muslim rights,” and human rights. Young activists have made linkages to a domestic history and discourse of civil rights and also invoked the notion of human rights to express transnational solidarity with peoples elsewhere, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Palestine. In this chapter, I explore the turn to volunteerism by looking at examples of civil rights, interfaith, and environmental activism by young Muslim Americans after 9/11. I argue that liberal variants of these forms of mobilization are an expression of permissible civic engagement that is used by the state to contain more radical political expressions challenging state policies. Since 9/11, there has been a regulation of Muslim American politics through the binary of “good” versus “bad” Muslims that deems some forms of activism more permissible than others, as I will demonstrate. Many Muslim American volunteer initiatives related to community service that I heard about in Silicon Valley implicitly or explicitly fit within the framework of neoliberal citizenship. I discuss how young people wrestle with, and sometimes challenge, the limits of acceptable forms of civic engagement even while they grapple with the painful realities of Islamophobia and state surveillance and regulation of their political identities.

Civil Rights Activism After 9/11, many national Muslim American organizations that were focused on political mobilization launched or intensified civil rights campaigns in response to the heightened discrimination faced by Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, and “Muslim-looking” people (especially turbaned Sikhs) in the United States. The turn to civil rights was propelled by pragmatic concerns with addressing discrimination and profiling as well as the political imperative of resisting the abrogation of freedoms in the name of “national security,” authorized by the USA Patriot Act (Sirin and

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Fine 2008: 110). The post-9/11 crisis of civil rights made most vulnerable those from Muslim American communities who were not privileged enough to adequately defend themselves within the US legal system, given the state’s newfound powers to legally use secret evidence, warrantless wiretapping, mandatory and indefinite detention, “extraordinary rendition” (abduction), and torture (Cainkar 2011; Bakalian and Bozorgmehr 2009). State intelligence gathering and profiling continued well after 2001, and expanded, with FBI interviews and undercover surveillance that became less publicized and covert as profiling of Muslim Americans became normalized.2 By 2010, the language of Islamophobia had shifted more consistently toward focusing on the enemy within and with mass surveillance under Obama’s administration (Kundnani 2014). Since 9/11, anti-terrorism policies have also tightened the noose around the formation of transnational Muslim networks and philanthropic activities, so Muslim Americans began to worry about what forms of volunteerism and even charitable giving were permissible. Prosecution for “material support” of terrorism—which was introduced in the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act passed under President Clinton as was the legalized use of secret evidence—became a legal dragnet in which many were trapped. Muslim Americans were targeted simply for their charitable donations to Arab or Muslim organizations (Kundnani 2014: 47). As being Muslim or helping other Muslims increasingly became criminally suspect, national Muslim American organizations and juridical structures co-produced the notion of racial profiling or religious profiling as the proper paradigms for redress. In response to racial, religious, and political profiling, Know Your Rights workshops were organized by cross-ethnic coalitions involving Muslim, Arab, and South Asian American activists and lawyers who tried to do grassroots outreach to communities at mosques, gurudwaras (Sikh temples), and community spaces, as well as to youth, using pamphlets in  In 2013, CAIR reported that the largest number of civil rights complaints received in northern California were related to employment discrimination against Muslims, followed by complaints about interactions with law enforcement, including interrogations by the FBI or JTTF and concerns about profiling and surveillance; the total number of complaints had actually increased since the previous year, and included incidents of bullying and harassment of Muslim students at schools, as discussed in the San Jose hearing (CAIR 2013). 2

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different languages. Given the mass detentions, deportations, and surveillance in the War on Terror, and the abrogation of constitutional rights under the USA-PATRIOT Acts I and II, this was certainly a necessary and strategic response to the crisis experienced by those defined as enemies of “homeland security” (and I participated in and organized some of these workshops and campaigns myself ).3 But the question such organizing raises is: What kinds of political subjectivity are produced for youth by these particular civic and volunteer projects? My research in the greater San Francisco Bay Area highlighted how Muslim institutions in some cases morphed into a civil rights infrastructure with programs educating targeted communities about civil and immigrant rights. In the Bay Area, Arab, South Asian, Muslim American, and civil rights groups collaborated to provide free legal clinics and produce pamphlets in various languages to advise community members on what to do if an FBI agent came to their door to interview them or how to respond to interrogations at airports. For example, Farida, a Pakistani American woman, observed that after 9/11, There were all those events set up for people to know their rights and stuff.… It was hard, people were being held up at the airports. Nobody even knew about the PATRIOT Act. So people had to be informed about that.

CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) and other national Muslim American organizations began hosting Know Your Rights workshops and distributing educational materials about civil rights and legal resources after 9/11. Some Arab, South Asian, and Afghan American youth entered the sphere of formal politics via this form of civic engagement and volunteering in civil liberties projects. For example, Malaika, a young Pakistani American woman, attended a Know Your Rights workshop, conducted  For example, the infamous “Special Registration Program” established in 2002 required Muslim males who were non-citizens from 24 Muslim countries (and also North Korea) to register with the federal government, as a result of which almost 14,000 of those who voluntarily registered were put in deportation proceedings (notably, 35 percent of these were Pakistani) (Ahuja et al. 2004). The program sent a chill throughout Muslim immigrant communities, especially among those who were undocumented or working-class, which persisted after it was eventually canceled in 2011. 3

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by the Sacramento chapter of CAIR at her mosque, while she was in high school. She later went on to work with CAIR in the Bay Area in their civil rights and government relations programs. Malaika reflected: Part of CAIR’s mission, in addition to protecting civil liberties and educating people of their rights, is empowering the community. Being politically active and engaged, and then also developing better relationships with public officials. You know, making sure that their voice is heard and that they’re also aware of issues. So we’re constantly scheduling meetings with city council members, with assembly members, with congressmen.… And then also, we go to [voter] registration drives, have workshops on an occasional danger, reaching out to the mosque and making sure the community is active.

Civil liberties, in this view, are central to mobilizing and “empowering” the Muslim American community and giving it a “voice” in the political sphere through engagement with the structure of representative government. Several local as well as national Muslim and Arab American organizations also organized or intensified campaigns for voter registration, political lobbying, and civic engagement via electoral politics after 9/11; for example, the Arab American Institute launched an annual “Yalla Vote” campaign, CAIR offers a “Citizenship Curriculum,” and the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council engages in political lobbying (Bakalian and Bozorgmehr 2009: 180–182, 216). It should be noted that these volunteer and staff campaigns are organized by faith-based as well as pan-ethnic Muslim and Arab American organizations. In general, young Arab, South Asian, and Afghan Americans organized on the platform of civil rights using various strategies and tactics: street protests, public rallies, and alliances with larger immigrant and civil rights movements. What has united both national as well as local civil rights campaigns is the notion that the nation-state should live up to its liberal-democratic promise of constitutionally mandated rights and racial and religious equality, whether through channels of participatory democracy or pressure from outside the system. Liberal philanthropic groups and progressive foundations concerned with AMEMSA (Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian) communities also began to ­emphasize

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the need to fund programs “to protect civil rights” and “increase civic participation” in these communities, producing an agenda dovetailing with the civil rights complex (Ahuja et al. 2004: 7). The language of civil rights is one that has generally resonated with the younger generation of Arab, South Asian, and Afghan Americans who link their critique of Islamophobia and racism to a longer history of civil rights struggles by other groups in the United States (Kibria 2011: 74). For example, Aisha, a Palestinian American woman, was very involved with both domestic and global Arab American activism and observed, “African Americans had their struggle, they fought for their civil rights, and now Muslim Americans have to do the same. I think it’s about democracy.” The discourse of civil rights linking to Black freedom struggles de-exceptionalizes the racial persecution of suspect populations after 9/11. But situating the post-9/11 civil rights movement in a genealogy of US civil rights also runs the risk of associating it with a framework of national inclusion and US multicultural nationalism. There are tensions that arise in this rights-based activism as young people wrestle with the boundaries of what is defined as “proper” politics. I want to emphasize that these strategic responses and legal campaigns are not to be dismissed, and have provided a minimal line of defense for targeted communities in addition to collective support in a time of isolation and fear. However, liberal forms of post-9/11 civil rights mobilization by Muslim Americans also shored up a nationalist narrative. Commenting on the shift to greater civic engagement after 9/11, Selcuk Sirin and Michelle Fine (2008: 110) cite a remark by a young Muslim American man: “Especially in this nation, when one strives to do something, anything is possible.” While not all youth engaged in civil rights campaigns are as celebratory of the American Dream and US exceptionalism, the turn to civil rights is fundamentally driven by an appeal to the nation-state as the arbiter of rights, and often by an assumption that liberal democracy is the horizon of political mobilization in response to Islamophobia. For example, a survey by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (2005: 4) found that 94 percent of Muslim American youth thought that “Muslims should be involved in the American political process even though they may disagree

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with the government’s foreign policy.”4 The latter finding hints at the tension in the demand for rights from young Muslim Americans who simultaneously acknowledged their dissent against the US state’s overseas policies which impact their homeland communities (e.g., Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Palestine). This surge in post-9/11 civil rights activism did, on the one hand, expose the racialized distribution of rights by the state, but in its reformist variant, it also facilitated a discourse of nationalization. For example, a “leader” in the Arab and Muslim American community used a common refrain to describe post-9/11 civil rights organizing by Muslim Americans: “People in the end did not lose hope in the sense of fairness here in the country” (cited in Bakalian and Bozorgmehr 2009: 182). In this narrative redeeming US democracy, Muslim Americans are framed as the latest group to fight for inclusion in the nation, and like African Americans, Latinos, and other Asian Americans before them, will become part of the national community through their struggle in the crucible of civil rights activism. The “story of racial and ethnic inclusion,” as Nikhil Pal Singh (2004: 19) points out, is central to a liberal nationalist narrative based on notions of “America’s exceptional universalism” and “religious tolerance.” While some youth I spoke to identified with, or least invoked, a liberal discourse of civil rights, others were ambivalent or deeply skeptical. For some, civil rights were an inadequate or ineffective framework because the profiling, exclusion, and violence targeting Muslim and Arab Americans is due to a system of racial domination constitutive of the nation-state—a state of exception in Agamben’s (2005) terms. Yasser, whose father was Pakistani and mother Mexican American, said passionately: Muslims need to start standing up for their opinion and start attacking the credibility of the CIA and the FBI … Stop being scared! Unite! Who cares if they kill you or you lose your jobs? Or they do all this funny stuff like they did with the Black people and their civil rights movement. If you start standing up, other people will start standing up!  It also needs to be pointed out that the MPAC survey was conducted among youth (14–25 years) attending the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, who were strongly affiliated with Islamic institutions (Muslim Public Affairs Council 2005: 2). 4

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In Yasser’s view, the role of state intelligence and counterterrorism agencies in the War on Terror need to be challenged by a political critique of the state that would link the civil rights violations targeting Muslim Americans to repressive strategies of surveillance and infiltration used against African American activists in the civil right and Black Power movements. Yasser suggested that resistance to state violence and policing must be based on inter-racial solidarity emerging from a radical genealogy of anti-state struggle. However, the official narrative about civil rights struggles in the United States generally occludes the history of dispossession of natives by settlers, the genocidal violence against indigenous peoples, slavery and Jim Crow, the colonial appropriation of other territories, and imperial interventions overseas. The discourse of civil rights tied to “national redemption and moral regeneration” (Singh 2004: 3) selectively embalms the legacy of Black civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and confers inclusion on groups that engage in peaceful struggles shaped by Christian ethics and liberal-democratic politics. This liberal racial narrative of civil rights has been erected as a front in the US ascendancy to global power in order to undermine radical struggles against US imperialism in the post-­ 9/11 era, a strategy that was used in the Cold War era as well (see Dudziak 2000). In the current climate, the narrative of exceptionalist US democracy also relies on an Orientalist story of anti-democratic Arab and Asian states and civil rights activism as tutelage in liberal, participatory democracy, and civic engagement. This is evident in accounts that suggest that Muslim, Arab, and South Asian American community activists had to “convince immigrants to believe in the American way of activism, advocacy, and mobilization,” since they presumably migrated from societies lacking in civil and human rights (Bakalian and Bozorgmehr 2009: 178). This coming-of-age into liberal civic engagement and volunteerism via a civil rights awakening in the West is contingent, however, on erasing the political histories of immigrants and struggles against imperial interventions and neoliberal capitalism in their home countries.

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Interfaith Activism and Religious Multiculturalism In addition to civil rights mobilization, another important site of civic engagement that has in some instances legitimized acceptable Muslim American political identities and “proper” politics is interfaith activism and dialogue programs. Since 2001, Muslim Americans have become increasingly active in a growing interfaith movement, which has become a sanctioned site of public engagement and volunteerism. However, this exists in an uneasy relationship with cross-racial alliances and anti-­ imperial, transnational solidarity for several youth I spoke to in Silicon Valley. Muslim American youth have been active in an expanding interfaith youth campaign that emerged on college campuses and has rapidly spread across the United States since the early 1990s (Patel and Brodeur 2006). Muslim Americans who were demonized after 9/11 and wanted to resist rising Islamophobia often threw themselves into organizing interfaith programs in mosques and community centers for education and interfaith dialogue (Afzal 2015). Organizations such as CAIR and the Islamic Networks Group (ING) in the Bay Area have been actively involved in the interfaith movement; for example, ING does presentations about Islam for faith-based groups and participates in interfaith programs, stating that it “recognizes the need for ongoing interfaith dialogue and cooperation in our increasingly multicultural and diverse society to bring about peace in our neighborhoods, our country, and the world.”5 Inclusion for Muslim Americans is thus framed through religious pluralism and winning political recognition for a faith-based community that belongs to, and is not outside, of the US multicultural state—a demand that in itself is not problematic, but only when expressed in terms that bracket a critique of the state beyond the ambit of religion or culture. The problem is that in the post-9/11 context, the mainstream interfaith movement is built on the same tenets of liberal inclusion that valorize “moderate” Muslim politics and contain dissenting politics as mainstream civil rights activism.  www.ing.org/speakers/page.asp?num=14

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Interfaith dialogue projects involve state interventions in religion and the anointment of selected religious representatives and religious streams, thus promoting certain expressions of Islam and particular Muslim leaders (Hicks 2013; see also Aidi 2014: 72–74). Arun Kundnani (2014: 77) points that out in the United States as well as in Europe, a “state-­sponsored Islamic leadership” has been established with the “multicultural recognition” of “new religious identities,” not just ethnic or racial identities, describing this shift to “multi-faith-ism” as paradoxical for presumably secular states who now “endorse an official version of Islam.” Furthermore, liberal-progressive foundations and other groups invest funds in interfaith projects; it is significant that youth are seen as “bridge builders” within this model of civic integration, as part of a larger push by Muslim Americans toward civic engagement (Ahuja et al. 2004: 17; Afzal 2015: 168, 173). The goals of the interfaith youth movement are generally to encourage engagement across religious difference and to create a public place for religious tradition within society through interfaith cooperation (Patel and Brodeur 2006). Interfaith youth programs generally involve various kinds of workshops, forums, and volunteer activities that include Muslim, Jewish, and Christian youth and attempt to connect the Abrahamic traditions through a paradigm that emphasizes commonalities among the religions of the book (i.e., the Bible). Interfaith youth activism has thus become a significant site for alliance-building, circumscribed by the parameters of religion. The issue is that liberal interfaith coalitions generally represent one of the boundaries of permissible political responses to the War on Terror. My research demonstrates that they are a site where young Muslim Americans grapple with, and sometimes challenge, structures of recognition and containment. Malaika talked about coordinating an Interfaith Club Council at her college and organizing events such Islam Awareness Week and workshops on “debunking” stereotypes about women in Islam; she commented wryly that the latter event was a “boring one, but it was necessary.” Many interfaith programs tend to propound ideas of liberal “tolerance” and “dialogue” that are deeply embedded in broader assumptions about multi-cultural/multi-faith belonging and also neoliberal citizenship, having grown out of the Bush Jr. administration’s effort to push social services out of governmental agencies and into faith-based

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i­nitiatives. It is apparent that the growing interfaith industry that has burgeoned since 9/11 has drawn on liberal notions of pluralism to produce what I call religious multiculturalism. Speaking to youth and activists in Silicon Valley shed light on the erasures and deferrals produced by the prioritization of interfaith activism since 9/11, which are similar to the limitations of notions of diversity in US race politics. In its increasingly liberal, institutionalized form since the 1990s, the “grammar of diversity” conceals deeper issues of political and economic inequality and focuses instead on cultural, and now religious, diversity (Ahmed 2012: 13). The irony is, of course, that this liberal multiculturalism is perceived as a failure for both the left and the right; for conservatives and nativists in the United States as well as the United Kingdom, liberal multiculturalism is blamed for undermining the civic integration of Muslims and “providing a space for militant radicals” or even for fostering violence or riots among urban Muslim youth (Esposito 2011: xxv; Modood 2002: 206). Religious multiculturalism, or multi-faithism, is sanctioned by the state and buttressed by the simultaneous trend within the Muslim American community, and among youth, emphasizing Islam as a religion that crosses national, ethnic, and racial boundaries and is aligned with liberal multiculturalism. This pan-Islamic universalism contributes to a discourse of pluralism within Islam—and also to a discourse of Islam within religious pluralism. For example, Salima, a Pakistani American woman, described her family’s emphasis on belonging to a “diversified masjid” such as the Muslim Community Association in Santa Clara: We think that’s really important because that really shows what Islam is. And it’s made up of so many different people, you know, Malaysian, Indonesian, Pakistani, Indian, European. It’s just everywhere … So we’re all made differently, we all come from different tribes, but you know, we’re here on earth to be with each other and to learn from each other.6

 Salima references here the oft-cited aya, or verse, from the Qur’an: “We have created you in tribes and clans so that you can get to know one another.” 6

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There is a religious discourse that shapes the notion of racial pluralism within Islam, which is certainly valuable and progressive in orientation, but there is also a political dimension to cross-racial and interfaith affiliations. Salima went on to reflect on the impetus for interfaith programs after 9/11 and her involvement in the Muslim Green Team, which was focused on volunteerism and environmental activism in Silicon Valley, saying: A lot of the Muslim Student Associations … have come together and [are] kind of informing the community at large, like, ‘This is what we’re about,’ or ‘These are our beliefs and what we don’t believe in.’ … So because of 9/11, that really forced us to step forward and be like, ‘Hi, we’re here. We’re American, just like you, and this is what our religion is really about.’

Salima suggests that these interfaith and educational activities by youth and volunteer initiatives demonstrated an embrace of American-ness. I argue that they position Muslim Americans squarely within multicultural, neoliberal citizenship, through volunteer activities that present a civic face of Islam. Clearly, the eviction of Muslim Americans from citizenship and political community after 9/11, as described by Sherene Razack (2008), necessitated organized outreach and alliance-building, so these interfaith activities certainly have had many positive effects. But as a CAIR activist from the Bay Area commented thoughtfully: Interfaith alliances have always been a big part of CAIR. Muslim Americans didn’t know how to open their doors to others ten years ago. But now the entire focus is on outreach, and in and of itself, it’s not the solution. Clearly there needs to be more work done … I think the more institutionalized this outreach is, the less useful it is.

This activist’s comment hints at the ways that the investment in the interfaith industry is presented as the solution to the crisis faced by Muslim Americans after 9/11 and so funnels much of the organizing in Muslim American communities into a politics based on liberal, faith-­ based inclusion.

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The interfaith movement has been increasingly institutionalized in liberal spheres such as the academy and non-profit organizations where interfaith dialogue has been promoted, and also, notably, in programs related to Israel/Palestine.7 Interfaith initiatives on Palestine are perhaps one of the most striking examples of how this liberal faith-based perspective can be a tool for de-politicization of complex political issues in which Muslim Americans are involved. Many interfaith youth programs do address the conflict in Israel–Palestine (the word occupation is rarely used, let alone settler colonialism or apartheid) but only through a model of Jewish–Muslim/Christian dialogue. Such an approach suggests that this is a problem of religion and not of state repression, military occupation, and racism. In the case of interfaith (and intercultural) programs involving the triad of Muslims, Christians, and Jews, or the dyad of Muslim–Jewish or Arab–Jewish dialogue, analyses of political conflict and structural inequity are displaced to the domain of culture or religion, confined to what Mahmood Mamdani (2004) calls “culture talk.” Liberal, religious multi-culturalism has been presented as a solution to the problem of Islamophobia, racial violence, and military occupation, obfuscating or containing a critique of the structural or geopolitical imperatives of warfare and issues of race and sovereignty. Spaces for cross-racial solidarity may be created through interfaith dialogues about the War on Terror or the occupation of Palestine, but these are generally framed as primordial, ahistorical conflicts based on religious identity and requiring greater religious tolerance. However, I found that tensions related to Middle East politics and censorship of the Palestine question often ruptured interfaith coalitions on college campuses, forcing the question of anti-Arab racism to the surface. For example, Jenaan, a Palestinian/Korean/white American woman, was involved in an interfaith student group at San Jose State University. She recalled that some of the Jewish American students did not want Muslim youth to wear clothing or jewelry with the colors of the Palestinian flag. Jenaan protested:  The US state has since World War II increasingly adopted an official, liberal multi-culturalism so that the state is not only the “guarantor of rights” but also assumed to be anti-racist, even as it directly or indirectly suppresses movements that demand genuine racial justice (Reddy 2011: 194, 210). 7

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I was, like, ‘This isn’t the issue we’re discussing. I can wear whatever I wanna wear.’ But they didn’t understand that, they were just, like, ‘Oh, you can’t wear red, you can’t wear black, you can’t wear green.’ You know, the colors of Palestine. I was like ‘I’m going to wear whatever the hell I want to wear! You can’t tell me what not to wear.’

This campus interfaith alliance became a repressive site for Jenaan when the expression of her Palestinian national identity was censored and “the issue” suddenly became one of regulating permissible Arab political identities, however symbolic (arguably Jewish students or members of the Jewish campus organization would not be asked to remove the colors blue and white—let alone the Star of David—although they are elements of the Israeli flag; this would automatically be considered anti-Semitic within US liberal discourse). Jenaan’s experience is just one of many incidents in which Palestinian identity or support for Palestinian rights is erased or even attacked in liberal interfaith and multicultural spaces in the university (and beyond), which are rarely described as anti-­Palestinian or anti-Arab (see Elia 2011; Salaita 2011). This vignette illustrates how difficult it for a politicized Muslim American or nationalist Arab American identity to be inserted into religious multicultural alliances. Some progressive Muslim American critics have described this  as an “interfaith Trojan horse” approach for “faithwashing” the politics of “apartheid and occupation” in Israel-Palestine, though there has also been a rise of progressive faith-based activism in solidarity with Palestine in recent years (e.g., Friends of Sabeel-North America and American Muslims for Palestine).8

Green Muslim Activism A prominent example of the ways in which an “acceptable” Muslim American youth activism is produced through interfaith volunteer activities is environmentalist activism, which is popular in northern California  Sana Saeed, “An Interfaith Trojan Horse: Faithwashing Apartheid and Occupation,” Islamic Monthly, July 1, 2014. http://www.theislamicmonthly.com/an-interfaith-trojan-horse-faithwashingapartheid-and-occupation/. 8

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and also nationally. Mariyam, a Libyan/white American woman, had participated in interfaith youth projects through a local chapter of the Muslim American Society, which included clean-up programs with the Catholic Church and the Muslim Green Team, also noted by Salima, above. The Jewish Federation of Silicon Valley and the Muslim Association of America have also brought Jewish and Muslim American youth together to clean up the Guadalupe River in San Jose.9 The paradigm of interfaith volunteerism is part of a growing Green Muslim movement that has connected faith to the concept of environmental stewardship (see Hancock’s chapter).10 “Green” activism is extremely important, of course, but it seems it is more easily wedded to liberal social justice models of interfaith youth organizing than anti-war and anti-occupation politics for Muslim American youth. Muslim American environmentalist politics have been promoted by activists such as Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, a second-generation (Black) Muslim American whose book, Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet (2010), has inspired regional networks of Muslim Americans who participate in volunteer projects. Abdul-Matin’s core mission is to “rebrand” Muslim Americans not as extremists but as environmental activists and “moderate” political actors, stating: Look, everyone wants to know where the moderate Muslims are. They’re everywhere. They go to work, they go to school. Frankly, they’re boring— which is why the media doesn’t do any stories about them.… I’m highlighting Sarah the Muslim who believes in recycling. As more and more Muslims come forward, describing the positive ways they are contributing to society … I believe people will stop focusing on the tiny percentage of Muslims who are extremists. I hope my book will re-label Muslims from terrorist to activist or, even better, environmentalists. I want Muslims to be known as the people who save water.11

 “Jewish, Muslim Teens Worth Together.” Islamic Life, September 23, 2013. http://www.islamiclife.com/health/2013/jewish_muslim_teens_work_together.php. 10  For example, see: http://green-muslims.org/. 11  “Author wants to rebrand Muslims from terrorists to environmentalists.” CNN Belief Blog, November 16, 2010. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/16/author-wants-to-rebrand-muslimsfrom-terrorists-to-environmentalists/ (accessed September 23, 2011). 9

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While not all Muslims who engage in clean-up or recycling projects necessarily want to be interpellated as “moderate Muslims,” these sanctioned forms of volunteerism have come to define “good” citizenship for Muslim Americans, which in this case is defined as “green citizenship.” One could say the green of environmentalism is more compatible with US liberal democracy than the green of Islamism or the green of red-­ black-­and-green Arab/Palestinian nationalism. The irony of the dual connotations of “green” do not seem to be lost on some Muslim American proponents of this eco-citizenship, as suggested by the title of the book, Green Deen. Abdul-Matin is one of many in a younger generation of Muslim Americans who are self-consciously engaging in “green deen” and public activist projects that they hope will challenge the perception of Muslims as suspect citizens while also critiquing the excesses of a destructive capitalism that has ravaged the planet. While the latter is a laudable goal, what is striking is that Muslim American politics can only be legible through the neoliberal consensus about “proper” politics. There seems to be a hyper-awareness among those who participate in these volunteer programs or interfaith alliances that their political projects are a strategic response or self-fashioning as “good Muslims,” within the national security paradigm defined by the War on Terror.

Conclusion Volunteerism is compelling for Muslim American youth in the post-9/11 climate who can prove through public community service that they are, indeed, “model minorities” (as Asian Americans have been stereotypically described) or at least, virtuous Americans worthy of neoliberal citizenship. While some engage in liberal forms of community activism that are sanctioned by the state and evade structural and political critiques of the US state and racial capitalism, there are also green deen coalitions that challenge the ravages of neoliberal capitalism as they impact marginalized communities, using a model of “food justice” embedded in racial and economic justice. For example, in the historically African American neighborhood of West Oakland, the People’s Kitchen, founded by Sakib Keval, a young Muslim (Indian African) American activist, is a ­community

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restaurant that focuses on movement building and offers free, organic meals inspired by the Black Panther’s free breakfast program (though it is not a faith-identified project). These programs represent what Aidi (2014: 191) describes as the politics of a new generation of “Muslim race activists” who believe that inter-racial solidarity, including and especially with indigenous (Black) Muslims, is necessary to challenge the imperial state. This is a form of civic engagement that goes beyond a liberal civil rights framework of national inclusion to address difficult issues of poverty and racism. It is important to point out that liberal forms of civil rights and interfaith activism also expose the need for cross-class, not just cross-racial, solidarity. Class fissures within Muslim American communities are partly related to class inequalities that are overshadowed by the discourse of “entrepreneurial freedom” in Silicon Valley (Pitti 2003: 200). The young CAIR activist from the Bay Area, whom I cited earlier, commented that interfaith coalitions are “evolving, now they’re focusing on homelessness and poverty, and we need to catch up with that work in the Muslim community.” But she also went on to note critically: “The reason we can’t fully leverage coalitions … the perfect example is labor. Interfaith coalitions can’t touch labor.” This young woman was frustrated because in her view, Muslim Americans were not as actively involved in cross-class coalitions as they should be (at the time of this research), and she went on to remark on the class schisms among immigrant professionals: “You don’t care who cleans your toilet if you’re an engineer.” At the same time, she acknowledged that Muslim Americans are heterogeneous in terms of class and that there are many Yemenis, and also Indians in the Bay Area, for example, who work as security guards and belong to labor unions. I should note that national Muslim American leaders have also directly spoken to the issue of class divisions within and beyond the Muslim American community. The politics of liberal interfaith activism have to be situated in relation to the ways in which notions of neoliberal autonomy are shaped by discourses of class mobility and professionalism among the largely middle- to upper-middle-class youth in this study. Interfaith and also liberal Muslim civil rights activism generally do not make the connection to issues of capitalism or imperialism and broader political solidarity that would challenge freedom and selfhood as defined

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by US exceptionalism and free-market rationalities. Political formations embedded in a liberal-democratic politics of volunteerism, pluralism, and civil rights promote inclusive exclusion, as I have argued here, often displacing radical solidarities and resistance to imperial policies, state violence, and neoliberal capitalism (Shryock 2010). This argument challenges, on the one hand, an Islamophobic narrative that Muslim American volunteerism is somehow incompatible with Western liberal-democratic notions of active citizenship and, on the other hand, a liberal discourse that valorizes civic engagement but does not oppose Western imperialism or neoliberal capitalism. The boundary between “moderate” civil rights and interfaith activism and “radical” Muslim American youth politics lies in a discursive battle about the meaning of which forms of politics are “civil” and what forms of mobilization are permissible and promoted for Muslim American youth.

References Abdul-Matin, I. (2010). Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. Afzal, A. (2015). Lone Star Muslims: Transnational Lives and the South Asian Experience in Texas. New York, NY: New York University Press. Agamben, G. (2005). State of Exception (K. Attell, Trans.). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Ahuja, S., Gupta, P., & Petsod, D. (2004, November). Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian Communities in the San Francisco Bay Area: An Introduction for Grantmakers. San Francisco: Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy. Aidi, H.  D. (2014). Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture. New York, NY: Pantheon. Bakalian, A., & Bozorgmehr, M. (2009). Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond. Berkeley, CA: UC Press. Cainkar, L. (2011). Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations). (2013). Standing Up For Your Rights, Preserving Our Freedom: The Status of Muslim Civil Rights in Northern California—2013. Santa Clara and Sacramento: Council on AmericanIslamic Relations. Dudziak, M. L. (2000). Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative. In R. Delgado & J. Stefancic (Eds.), Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (pp. 106–117). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Duggan, L. (2003). The Twilight of Inequality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Elia, N. (2011). The Burden of Representation: When Palestinians Speak Out. In R. Abdulhadi, E. Alsultany, & N. Naber (Eds.), Arab and Arab American Feminisms: Gender, Violence, and Belonging (pp.  141–158). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Esposito, J.  L. (2011). Introduction. In J.  L. Esposito & I.  Kalin (Eds.), Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21st Century (pp. xxi–xxxv). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Harvey, D. (2007). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New  York, NY: Oxford University Press. Hicks, R. R. (2013). Religious Pluralism, Secularism, and Interfaith Endeavors. In J. Hammer & O. Safi (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to American Islam (pp. 156–169). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Kibria, N. (2011). Muslims in Motion: Islam and National Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Kundnani, A. (2014). The Muslims are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. London and New York, NY: Verso. Maira, S. (2007). Deporting Radicals, Deporting La Migra: The Hayat Case in Lodi. Cultural Dynamics, 19(1), 39–66. Maira, S. (2009a). Missing: Youth, Empire, and Citizenship After 9/11. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Maira, S. (2009b). “Good” and “Bad” Muslim Citizens: Feminists, Terrorists, and U.S. Orientalisms. Feminist Studies, 35(3), 631–656. Maira, S. (2016). The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror. New York, NY: NYU Press. Mamdani, M. (2004). Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York, NY: Pantheon. Melamed, J. (2006). The Spirit of Neoliberalism. From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism. Social Text, 24(4), 1–24.

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Modood, T. (2002). Muslims and the Politics of Multiculturalism in Britain. In E. Hershberg & K. W. Moore (Eds.), Critical Views of September 11: Analyses from Around the World (pp. 194–208). New York, NY: New Press. Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). (2005). Special Report: Religion and Identity of Muslim AmericanYouth Post-London Attacks.Washington, DC: MPAC. Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Patel, E. (2006). Affirming Identity, Achieving Pluralism. In E.  Patel & P. Brodeur (Eds.), Building the Interfaith Youth Movement: Beyond Dialogue to Action (pp. 15–41). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Patel, E., & Brodeur, P. (Eds.). (2006). Building the Interfaith Youth Movement: Beyond Dialogue to Action. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Peek, L. (2011). Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans After 9/11. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Pitti, S.  J. (2003). The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Razack, S. H. (2008). Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Reddy, C. (2011). Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Salaita, S. (2011). Israel’s Dead Soul. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Shryock, A. (2010). Introduction: Islam as an Object of Fear and Affection. In A. Shryock (Ed.), Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend (pp. 1–25). Indiana and Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Singh, N.  P. (2004). Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sirin, S.  S., & Fine, M. (2008). Muslim American Youth: Understanding Hyphenated Identities through Multiple Methods. New York, NY and London: NYU Press.

10 Conclusion Merve Reyhan Kayikci

During a meeting with a local volunteering organization in Flanders (Belgium), I had an exchange about the alleged demise of Christian volunteering activities. The director of the volunteering associations—that are connected to the Catholic Church—conveyed that there is diminishing interest in volunteering among local Flemish youth. He added that in contrast, the associations are concerned with incorporating more elderly people in their activities in order to help them socialize in their free time. The director was very interested in my research and more specifically about the fact that most of my interlocutors—the Muslim volunteers— were under the age of 40. According to his experiences, that youth participation was much less prevalent in the Christian volunteering scene. His question to me was: How can we incorporate “your” Muslim interlocutors into our activities to make it more attractive for the local youth? It is true that my interlocutors are very young, and in the active process of recruiting more and more young volunteers. It is also true that this is a common fact that runs through the different chapters of this volume. M. R. Kayikci (*) Department of Semitic Studies, University of Granada, Granada, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6_10

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There is an increasing tendency among (young) Muslims participating in local, national, and international volunteering associations. The chapters point to the Islamic factor in their volunteering, but they also unpack the social and political dynamics that channel Muslims toward volunteering in growing numbers. Especially in the post-9/11 War-on-Terror era there has been an increasing concern among Muslims to make their personal demands public. This trajectory is very much embedded in the liberal–secular vocabularies of Western world; arguing for—and not limited to—freedom of choice, expression, equality, religion, and anti-discrimination. Muslims not only rely on the repertoires of their religion as they volunteer, they also reflect the concerns and sensibilities of their (Western) context. Historically, volunteering has been appreciated as an indication of democratization and a strong civil society. This goes as far back as Alexis du Tocqueville’s observations of civil society in the United States. Volunteering is not merely charity work or a response to the impulse of doing good. It is a social commitment fit into expressions of societies that are fundamentally modern, secular, and liberal. Ultimately, if active citizenship practices are a foundation for a well-functioning democracy then Muslims are an undeniable wheel in this dynamic. However, their growing participation in fields of active citizenship are not always met with appreciation. Many secular and faith-based (Muslim) volunteering networks have been subject to surveillance. The main reason for such apprehension rests in the unease toward these networks and the sincerity of their intentions; do they have a second (extremist/religious) agenda? Or do they really serve the benefits of the country and the liberal world? Does the fact that faith is part of their volunteering make this an Islamic endeavor that essentially serves for a missionizing purpose? The chapters of this volume carefully unpack these quandaries, but also aim to move away from reiterating the debates. They take a bottom­up approach in interrogating how Muslims negotiate belongings and traditions (liberal–religious). While some of the chapters understand the social tensions concerning Muslims in the post-9/11 context, other chapters explore the details of non-tension. Not all Muslims shape their volunteering around “problems” but around social contribution and betterment. For these Muslims, the narrative of belonging travels deep

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into their social engagements. Serving the (western/liberal) society is as important as the pursuit of doing good as part of being a better Muslim. This volume allows us to think beyond the dichotomies of faith and citizenship, and pushes us to see how performances of both entities intersect. The contributors of this volume believe in the importance of stepping out of the either–or paradigm and looking at how embodied religion accommodates contextual needs and desires. The marginally understudied field of volunteering is exactly an entity of everyday life wherein social, political, and economic concerns merge with pious ones. It is with this volume that the contributors seek to convey that these matters are far from exclusive.

Glossary

akhira 

An Islamic term referring to the afterlife. It is repeatedly referenced in chapters of the Qur’an concerning the Last Judgment, an important part of Islamic eschatology. Allah Rizasi  (Turkish) God’s approval of a certain behavior/thought/action. al-lin  Arabic word for the quality of being lenient and compassionate. al-ta‘ah  Arabic word for compliance. al-tabarru  a form of sincere donation given to a party without expecting any return. amana  Financial rights that are established by contracts and covenants, such as items left with a person for safekeeping, loans, hiring and rentals, etc. Ashura  Tenth day of Muharram, the first month in the Islamic calendar. dar’ul harb  Arabic for “the house/abode of war,” came to signify in classical jurisprudence a geopolitical reality dar’ul hizmet  Arabic for Land of Service. Often used by followers of the Gülen Movement in contrast to notions of “House of War” and “House of Peace,” claiming that all lands are “lands of service,” where Muslims should work for the peace and prosperity. dar’ul Islam  Arabic for the “house/abode of Islam”; similar to Dar as-Salam (house/abode of Peace) or Dar al-Tawhid (house/abode of monotheism), term used by Muslim scholars to refer to those countries where Muslims can practice their religion as the ruling sect. © The Author(s) 2020 M. Peucker, M. R. Kayikci (eds.), Muslim Volunteering in the West, New Directions in Islam, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26057-6

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206 Glossary din 

Arabic word for religion; broader than the Western idea of institutional religion. The root of the Arabic word din is d-y-n, which has four main meanings: mutual obligation, submission or acknowledgment, judicial authority, and natural inclination or tendency. Diyanet  The Turkish Ministry of Religious Affairs. ehsan  Arabic for an inner spiritual motivation. fard  Arabic for compulsory fard al-kifayah  A communal obligation or social responsibility. fatwa  A ruling on a point of Islamic law given by a recognized Islamic authority. fi sabilillah  Doing things for the sake of Allah fiqh  Islamic law. Gurudwaras  Sikh temples. hadith  Record of the traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, revered and received as a major source of religious law and moral guidance, second only to the authority of the Qur’an. himmet  High aspirations for the sake of Allah. hizmet  Time and effort allocated on the part of the believer to do service for Allah. ibadah  Arabic word meaning service or servitude. In Islam, ibadah is usually translated as “worship,” and ibadat—the plural form of ibadah—refers to Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) of Muslim religious rituals. ihsan  Perfection of conduct. iman  Faith jihad  Jihad means “struggle”; usually refers to one inner spiritual struggle against sin (major jihad) but can also mean a military fight against the enemies of Islam (minor jihad). khalifa (also: khalifah)  Name or title which means “successor,” “ruler,” or “leader.” Often refers to the leader of a Caliphate, but is also used as a title among various Islamic religious groups and orders. kurban  Term for animal sacrifice in Islam. lillah  Receiving God’s pleasure. maslaha  Arabic for public interest. mazlum  Arabic meaning for downtrodden or oppressed. mizan  Arabic for justice and balance. nafila  Superogatory or optional. niyya (also niyyah)  Principle that charity should come straight from the heart.

 Glossary  sadaqa 

207

General term referring to a wide range of different (monetary and non-­ monetary) types of charity. sadaqa jariya  Perpetual charity. salat  five daily obligatory prayers. samimi  Sincerity. Sincerity in doing worship. sohbet  Informal lecturing or reading circles. sunnah  Arabic term to refer to the practices of the Prophet Mohammad. surah  A chapter of the Qur’an. tablig  Spreading God’s words among people. taqwa  Arabic word meaning piety. tatawwu (also tatawwu’)  Arabic word that refers to what could be translated as volunteerism. tawhid  Principle of absolute monotheism. ulama  Islamic scholars umma (also ummah)  The community of Muslims bound together by ties of religion. zakat  Mandatory payment/donation made annually under Islamic law, used for charitable and religious purposes. It is one of the five pillars of Islam.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS

9/11, 16, 166, 180, 182–186, 189, 191, 192, 202 A

Active citizenship, 3, 8–12, 45, 71, 75, 83, 88, 146, 165, 198, 202 Activism, 6–8, 16, 71, 77, 99, 102–105, 141–158, 180, 182–198 Advocacy, 76, 188 Afghan, 16, 181 Afghanistan, 6, 181n1, 182, 187 Afterlife, 81, 94, 96–101, 108 See also Heaven; Paradise

Agency, 5, 13, 15, 57–59, 97, 100, 110, 112, 113, 188, 190 Akhira, see Afterlife Allah, 1, 22, 109 See also Creator; God Al Nour foundation, 44 Altruism, 3, 69, 74, 77, 80, 82 Anthropology, 5, 14, 15, 96, 98, 121, 133 Arabic, 26, 27, 61, 99, 161n1 Asad, T., 4, 60, 121–123 Ashura, 133, 136n2 Assimilation, 55 Association, see Organization Australia, 9–11, 13, 34, 35, 37, 70, 71, 75, 79, 80, 83, 88, 142, 145, 146, 154 Autonomy, 7, 48, 180, 197

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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210 Index B

Belgium, 13–15, 119–138, 201 Belonging, 87, 121, 123, 134–137, 179, 190, 191, 202 See also Identity Benevolence, 3, 4, 11, 12, 28, 36, 72, 73, 77, 80 Benthall, J., 6, 61, 94 Binaries, 6, 7, 13, 14, 86, 88, 121, 180, 182 Black, 161, 166, 167, 169, 186–188, 194, 195, 197 Bonding (social capital), 144, 155 Bridging (social capital), 144, 155, 158 Brussels, 119, 124–126, 129, 131, 135–137 Business, 43, 95, 105, 112, 125, 168 Businessmen, 108, 110–112 C

Career, 74, 78, 162, 163, 167–169, 173 Charitable acts, 33, 97 Charitable organization, 22, 61 Charitable work, 33, 43–63, 180 Charity, 1–3, 14, 22, 25–32, 39, 43–45, 58, 60–63, 81, 93–114, 125, 136, 154, 162, 163, 168–170, 170n6, 172, 174, 202 Christian, 3, 50, 58, 70, 121, 122, 134, 144, 145, 149, 154, 188, 190, 193, 201 Circles, 7, 95, 141, 162, 175

Citizenship, 4–6, 8, 11, 12, 16, 53, 55, 122, 124, 137, 145, 146, 154, 161–175, 179–198, 203 Civic engagement, 3, 8–11, 13, 16, 45–52, 56, 71, 75, 81, 86–88, 100, 142–147, 149, 154, 158, 164–165, 167, 173, 174, 179, 182, 184–186, 188–190, 197, 198 Civil rights, 16, 77, 180, 182–189, 197, 198 See also Human rights; Universal right Civil society, 3, 7, 10–12, 36, 45, 50, 87, 104, 107, 113, 165, 202 Cohesion, 53, 54, 56, 111, 125, 135, 144 Colonialism, 106, 193 Commitment, 4, 6, 13–15, 56, 59, 75, 95, 100, 101, 108, 130, 142, 149, 157, 162, 202 Community leadership/leaders, 56 organization, 9, 10, 12, 14, 36–38, 70, 71, 75–77, 80, 83, 85, 87, 152, 155 Compassion, 14, 58, 60, 63, 97, 99, 101 Creator, 81 See also Allah; God Cultural capital, 4, 45, 51, 72 Culture, 50, 52, 53, 60, 120, 125, 145, 162, 165, 171, 172, 175, 189, 193 Culture of benevolence, 4, 11, 72, 73, 77, 80

 Index  D

Democracy, 45, 50, 144, 165, 180, 181, 185–188, 196, 202 Dialogue, 15, 108–114, 125, 128, 137, 189, 190, 193 Diaspora, diasporic, 93, 93n1, 93n2, 94, 147, 166 Dichotomy, 12, 13, 70, 153, 180, 203 Discrimination, 85, 145, 149, 166, 182, 183n2 See also Exclusion; Racism Dissent, 54, 172, 180, 187, 189 Diversity, 5, 13, 36, 50, 55, 56, 76, 125, 156, 191 Diyanet, 105 Domestic violence, 37, 162, 168, 169 Donations, 1, 2, 25, 32, 43, 106, 110, 154, 183 Drivers, 3, 10, 11, 14, 70, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 88, 146 See also Motivation; Motives Duty, 3, 15, 23, 24, 31, 43, 57, 70, 81, 95, 97, 100, 101, 111, 141–158, 165, 167, 173 See also Obligation

211

Environmentalism, 15, 141–158, 194–196, 195n11 Equality, 8, 23, 53, 54, 137, 185, 202 Essentializing, 12, 13 Ethnography, 16, 94, 123, 130, 133, 163, 165, 181 Ethos, 4, 11, 12, 88 Everyday, 4–6, 13, 15, 22, 59, 63, 94, 95, 101, 113, 119, 123, 124, 133, 136, 179, 203 Exclusion, 172, 187, 198 See also Discrimination; Racism Extremism, 131 F

Fadil, N., 5, 6, 13, 124, 133, 165 Fard, 24, 26, 31, 33 Fasting, 24, 98, 130, 136 Fatwa, 4, 33 Fernando, M., 5–7, 13, 124, 133 Fi sabilillah, 22–26, 28, 39 Formalism, 121, 126–134, 138 Freedom Flotilla, 6 Fundraising, 95, 104, 108, 110 G

E

Education, 15, 34, 36, 50, 71, 72, 76, 102, 107–114, 125, 131, 142, 157, 164, 173, 184, 189, 192 See also Human capital Egypt, 99, 100, 104, 133 Emotions, 5, 34, 74, 95, 127, 162, 168, 173 Employment, 70, 125, 183n2

Gaza, 6, 104, 106 Gift, 43, 60, 93, 96, 99, 100, 171, 173 Giving back, 79, 170 God, 22–28, 30–33, 31n4, 39, 57, 61, 79, 82, 95–101, 105, 107–109, 111, 130, 132, 135, 146, 147, 149–151, 153, 153n5, 171, 173 See also Allah

212 Index

God’s approval, 83, 94, 96–101 Göle, N., 105, 164 Good deed, 2–4, 29, 30, 80–82, 98, 99, 149 Good Muslim, 4, 57, 76, 99, 105, 121, 132, 134–137, 136n3, 165, 180, 196 Grassroots organization, 8, 164 Green Muslims, 141, 142, 143n1 Gülen, F., 108–112 Gülen movements, 15, 61, 94, 108–114 H

Hadith, 25, 27–30, 27n3, 33, 101, 132 Heaven, 109 See also Afterlife; Paradise Hirschkind, Ch., 4, 60, 99, 130 Hizmet, 76, 94, 109, 110, 113 Human capital, 71 See also Education Humanitarian (aid) organizations, 6, 7 Humanity, 11, 13, 15, 21, 24, 29, 30, 62, 77, 81, 82, 106, 107, 112, 114, 147 Human rights, 7, 8, 77, 165, 182, 188 See also Civil rights; Universal rights I

Identity, 22, 59, 81, 135–137, 145, 156, 193, 194 See also Belonging Iman, 98, 122n1

Immigration, 35 Imperial, 165, 188, 197, 198 Imperialism, 188, 197, 198 Inclusion, 96, 186–189, 192, 197 Integration, 10, 12, 14, 38, 44, 45, 47–49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 63, 103, 107, 125, 135, 144, 145, 155, 190, 191 Intention, 3, 7, 12, 32, 43, 52–58, 72, 81, 82, 121, 126, 128–132, 138, 163, 202 Intentionality, 130–134 Interfaith, 16, 110, 136n2, 152, 180, 182, 189–198 See also Dialogue Internet, 143n3 See also Online Intervention, 188, 190 Iraq, 104, 182, 187 Islam, 4–6, 10–12, 14, 15, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 30, 35, 39, 44, 57, 58, 60, 61, 94, 98, 102, 103, 105, 107–112, 120–122, 130, 133, 135, 138, 142, 144, 145, 147, 148, 150–154, 156, 163–165, 173, 174, 189–192 Islamic activism, 99, 102, 103 Islamic history, 30, 31, 39 Islamic Relief, 7 Islamic Society of North America (ISNA, Canada), 1, 2 Islamic theology, 24, 30, 126, 156 Islamic tradition, 13–15, 23, 28, 30, 34, 38, 121, 133, 135, 137 Islamophobia, 8, 10, 12, 16, 107, 145, 152, 155, 162, 166, 168, 169, 172, 174, 179, 182, 183, 186, 189, 193 See also Racism

 Index 

ISNA, see Islamic Society of North America Israel, 24, 104, 106, 107, 193, 194 J

Jewish, 190, 193–195 Jihad, 6, 131 Jurisprudence, 26, 33, 164 Justice, 23, 54, 57, 81, 101, 147, 193n7, 195, 196 K

Khalifa, 22–25, 39 Knowledge, 5, 6, 9, 21, 29, 33, 48, 60, 73, 74, 79, 110, 121–123, 128, 173, 174 L

Lambek, M., 5, 122n1 Liberalism, 53 London, 15, 145, 148, 154, 156, 163, 170 M

Mahmood, S., 4, 97, 100, 121–123, 122n1, 130, 133, 135, 193 Mainstream, 14, 56, 57, 59, 76, 145, 161, 162, 167, 169, 171, 172, 189 Mandatory, 2, 183 See also Duty; Obligation Marginalization (marginalized), 12, 108 Mauss, M., 60, 93, 96, 173

213

Media, 7, 12, 43, 44, 131, 141, 144, 162, 167, 171, 175, 195 Melbourne, 11, 75, 77, 79, 81–83 Mental health, 15, 39, 161–175 Millî Görüş movements, 15, 94, 103–108, 113, 136n2 Minority, 8, 9, 12, 50, 51, 72, 80, 83, 84, 87, 93n2, 106, 125, 175, 180 Mittermaier, A., 94, 96, 97, 99–101 Moderate Muslim, 180, 189, 195, 196 Modernity, 13, 122 Moral, 8, 11, 23, 26, 36, 53–62, 72, 73, 96–98, 128, 134, 137, 138, 151, 165, 188 Mosque, 1, 2, 10, 29, 34, 35, 37, 38, 60, 72, 75, 76, 95, 105, 126, 133, 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 152, 154, 181n1, 183, 185, 189 Motivation, 3, 9, 14, 45, 56–63, 70, 73, 74, 77, 78, 172, 174 Motives, 14, 43–45, 52–58, 62, 63, 69, 70, 74–83, 100, 105 See also Drivers; Motivation Multiculturalism, 55, 125, 189–194 Mundane, 5, 15, 121–124, 128, 133–136, 138 Musick, M., 3, 11, 45, 70–73, 77, 87 Muslim subjecthood, 15, 16 Muslim Youth Helpline (MYH), 161, 163, 163n4, 164, 167–175

214 Index N

P

Neighborhood, 51, 56, 119, 125, 171, 189, 196 Neoliberal citizenship, 16, 179–198 Neoliberal, 11, 16, 154, 179–198 Netherlands, 13–15, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 55, 56, 63, 94, 102, 104n4, 106, 107 Networks, 3, 7, 8, 43–63, 69, 71–74, 87, 103, 125, 127, 136, 144, 156, 157, 164, 166, 171, 174, 183, 195, 202 Niyya, 129–132 See also Intention

Palestine, 182, 187, 193, 194 See also Gaza Paradise, 23, 99, 100 See also Heaven Parallel community, 47, 48, 54, 55 Peucker, M., 3, 4, 9, 11, 14, 26, 36–38, 45, 71, 72, 75, 80, 81, 83, 87, 130, 145, 146, 153, 165, 173 Pew, 9, 72 Piety, 4, 13, 15, 94–101, 105, 108–114, 120, 124, 132, 135, 137 See also Taqwa Pillars of Islam, 27, 60, 98 Political activism, 6, 71, 104, 105 Political participation, 10, 11, 45, 51, 71, 72, 75, 142, 145, 146, 151, 153–156, 158 Post-secular, 3, 4, 8, 88 Pragmatic, 49, 55, 85, 182 Pragmatism, 86 Prayer, 24, 27, 34, 35, 97, 102, 130, 136, 141, 150 Privilege, 79 Prophet, 24, 24n2, 30, 109 Public piety, 15 Public sphere, 8, 104, 107, 120, 130, 132, 133, 137, 162, 172 Purification, 30, 31 Putnam, R., 45, 46, 71, 72, 102, 143, 144, 164

O

Obligation, 11, 24, 31, 33, 34, 36, 57, 61, 70, 71, 80, 81, 96, 100, 142, 150, 151 See also Duty Online, 76, 143, 143n3, 167 See also Internet Oppression, 105–107, 113 Ordinary ethics, 4, 5 Organization, 2, 3, 6–12, 14, 22, 25, 29, 36–38, 43–49, 51, 53, 56, 57, 61, 62, 69–71, 75–77, 80, 83–87, 95, 102, 104, 106–108, 111, 112, 124, 125, 131, 135, 136, 141–144, 143n1, 143n3, 148–158, 162–165, 167–170, 174, 182–185, 189, 193, 194, 201 Outreach, 183, 192

Q

Qur’an, 1, 14, 21, 23–28, 30, 32, 33, 38, 97, 102, 108, 109, 126, 147, 151, 191n6

 Index  R

Racism, 16, 85, 107, 162, 163, 166, 168, 171, 172, 186, 193, 197 See also Islamophobia Radical, 14, 16, 43, 44, 76, 88, 154, 164, 180, 182, 188, 191, 198 Radicalism, 131 Radicalization, 179 Ramadhan, 141, 142 Rawls, J., 54 Read, J., 10, 11, 72, 144, 145, 153 Recognition, 8, 9, 16, 98, 125, 172, 180, 189, 190 Refugee, 38, 44, 61, 181n1 Religiosity, 3, 4, 9–11, 59, 72, 81, 101, 103, 104, 120, 145, 165 Resources, 12, 27, 50, 71, 72, 86, 93, 112, 153, 181n1, 184 Reward, 1, 24, 24n2, 26, 28, 73, 81, 82, 100, 101 Rituals, 99, 123, 130, 131, 135, 153 Roose, J., 75, 81, 145, 154, 165 Rotterdam, 43, 51, 112 S

Sadaqa, 1, 2, 22, 25, 27–29, 31, 39, 61, 170, 170n6 Salafi, 43, 44, 76 Salvation, 97, 98, 100 Secular, 3, 6, 7, 12–14, 57, 59, 75, 83, 87, 95n3, 100, 111, 114, 120–124, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 148, 149, 152, 155, 157, 165, 181, 190, 202 Secularism, 122, 123

215

Securitization, 10, 12 Security, 179, 196, 197 Segregation, 48, 49, 133 See also Separateness; Withdrawal Self-cultivation, 59, 123 Self-esteem, 74, 172 Separateness, 14 Service, 3, 4, 10, 11, 15, 26, 29–31, 35–39, 50, 56, 72, 75, 108, 110, 114, 148, 151, 161–175, 180, 182, 190, 196 Silicon Valley, 181, 181n1, 182, 189, 191, 192, 197 Skills, 3, 37, 69, 71–74, 78–80, 85–87, 95, 112, 144, 168, 171–174 Social capital, 56, 71–73, 112, 143–144, 153, 155 See also Bonding; Bridging Social movement, 8, 103, 143n3, 154 Sohbet, 95, 125–129, 131 Solidarity, 7, 96, 182, 188, 189, 193, 194, 197, 198 Spiritual, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31, 31n4, 34, 36, 39, 61, 81–83, 97, 99, 108, 121, 130, 132, 136, 150, 151, 155, 164, 170, 171, 173, 174 Spirituality, 30, 34, 162, 175 Struggle, 105, 126, 167, 175, 186–188 Sufism, 30, 31n4 Sunier, T., 14, 47, 49, 51, 52, 94, 103, 107 Sunnah, 21, 26, 38, 148 Suspect community, 12 Suspicion, 14, 44, 52, 58, 62 Sydney, 9, 37, 75, 82

216 Index T

V

Tablig, 105 Taqwa, 94, 96–101, 122n1 See also Piety; Tatawwu; Taylor, C. Tatawwu, 23, 25–28, 99 Taylor, C., 58, 59, 62 Tension, 4, 13, 77, 80, 121, 123, 138, 152, 186, 187, 193, 202 Terrorism, 183 Theologization, 21–39 Theology, 15, 24, 30, 126, 146–148, 156 Transparency, 7, 45 Trauma, 16, 161–175 Trust, 23, 46, 56, 71, 144, 164 Turkish (Islamic) organizations, 47, 49, 94 Turkish Muslims, 47, 94, 108

Values, 3, 31, 47, 48, 53–55, 62, 72, 73, 77, 108, 120, 180 Vicegerency, 14, 23–25 See also Khalifa Volunteering Functions Inventory (VFI), 70, 74, 76

U

Ummah (umma), 7, 15, 103–108, 113 United Kingdom (UK), 8, 10, 11, 13, 142, 145, 148, 155–157, 161–163, 166, 191 United States (US), 9–11, 13, 15, 16, 102, 104, 142, 144, 145, 153n5, 157, 179–183, 186–191, 193n7, 194, 196, 198, 202 Universal rights, 8 Universities, 36, 76, 129, 143, 167, 168, 181, 194

W

War on Terror, 6–8, 16, 179–198, 202 Wealth, 1, 21, 24, 27, 32, 33, 50 Weber, M., 62, 98 Welfare, 11, 50, 58, 63, 76, 180 Wilson, J., 3, 9, 11, 45, 69–73, 77, 87, 93 Withdrawal, 14 Women, 28, 35, 37, 75, 97, 105, 124–129, 132, 133, 137, 138, 143n2, 190 Worship, 3, 10, 24, 25, 30, 35, 71, 97, 130–133, 170n6 Y

Young people, 51, 57, 70, 73, 104, 105, 108, 113, 181, 182, 186 Youth, 16, 36, 37, 76, 107, 141, 142, 145, 151, 152, 154, 179–198, 201 Z

Zakat, 1, 2, 27, 31, 32, 61, 98, 101–103, 111