“Strange” affinities

British Muslim volunteers in Syria have been variously cast as humanitarians, activists, and—under the suspicious gaze of the war on terror—disguised militants. Yet many volunteers frame their efforts as attempts at iṣlāḥ (reform, repair, rectification). What is the ethicopolitical life of iṣlāḥ, a multivalent concept in the Islamic tradition, in a landscape marked by war and international relief efforts? Considered ethnographically, iṣlāḥ organizes heterogeneous practices, including charitable giving, political defiance, and ethical contestation. It is thus irreducible to either (religious) charity or to its oft-purported opposite, (political) solidarity. Further, it reveals the embedded secularity of such oppositions, which shapes the reasoning of both the British security state and social scientific commentary.