Islamic Charity as (Non)Political in Contemporary Egypt

Abstract

Whereas some Muslim-majority countries have centralized alms economies, in others Islamic charity unfolds informally. In Egypt, pious giving occurs on the margins of the state but lies at the heart of society. Egyptians’ daily charitable practices may therefore be read as political in the broad sense proposed by Hannah Arendt: efforts by ordinary citizens to shape the conditions of their collective existence. Although this Arendtian framework helps scholars to think about politics beyond the parameters of the state, even such widened notions of the political are not consistent with how pious givers in Egypt understand their practices. While attending to the poor, pious givers often orient themselves away from the social and material, foregrounding the beyond, paradise and God. Even though the “beyond” is intimately connected to the “here and now,” this decentering of the social poses a provocative challenge to the secular observer’s search for the political.