Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts

Abstract

This volume, written by scholars in Middle Eastern history, addresses the history of charity in the Middle East, including its meanings, conceptions, practical patterns, motivations, and the ways of institutionalization and identifying its “deserving” beneficiaries throughout the last 14 centuries. It is addressed to academic readers interested in Middle Eastern history or in charity in a universal sense. One aspect of charity dealt with throughout the book is that of motivation. It turns out that besides adhering to general Islamic principles, motivations of enhancing one’s prestige and social clout have played an important role as well. Michael Bonner points out in his chapter, “Poverty and Charity in the Rise of Islam,” that generosity in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia was clearly linked to competition for political and social prestige among tribal leaders. However, he does not adequately clarify these practices’ role in the emergence of the Islamic charitable tradition. In “Charity and Hospitality,” Miri Shefer describes how prominent individuals in the Ottoman Empire enhanced their own prestige by founding hospitals through the establishment of awqaf. Likewise, Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II sponsored numerous charitable projects in order to enhance his own public image as a caring and fatherly benefactor toward his subjects, as Nadir Özbek describes in “Imperial Gifts and Sultanic Legitimation during the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909.” Beth Baron and Kathryn Libal, authors of “Islam, Philanthropy, and Political Culture in interwar Egypt,” and of “The Child Question,” respectively, shed light on the emergence in Egypt and Turkey, during the first half of the twentieth century, of motivations informed by various philanthropists’ (either Islamist or secular) ideological commitment to the well-being of the nation as a whole. They also describe how this commitment translated itself into civil society activism and public debates in both countries. Another relevant aspect is institutionalization. Possibly, the earliest form of institutionalized charity in Islamic history is the collection and distribution of zakat. Timur Kuran distinguishes, in his “Islamic Redistribution through Zakat” (see the section “Instrument of Modern Redistribution?”) the “proceduralist” from the “situationist” approach toward this basic Islamic duty. The former approach denotes a strict application of specific rules from the Islamic sources, regardless of the concrete situation at hand, while the second refers to a flexible implementation of general religious principles based on the current situation ...