Beyond Charity: Poverty, Gender, and Local Islam in Contemporary India

Abstract

This ethnographic study of contemporary Muslim poverty alleviation projects in India investigates the way in which Islamic social ethics are brought to bear on efforts to redress the social suffering. Drawing on field research in Hyderabad, one of many cities that experienced Hindu-Muslim riots after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the present study demonstrates that confronting social suffering has propelled the creation of new public spaces and experimental social practices. Within such spaces, local understandings of Islamic ethics, gender formation, inter-religious relations, and religious authority are elaborated in such a way as to reshape lived social relations. The projects studied demonstrate that Muslims counter social suffering by drawing on the longstanding commitment to charity and care of the vulnerable that is the hallmark of Islamic social ethics, and simultaneously reformulate this tradition in light of contemporary concerns about communal violence and gender justice. Focusing on diverse Muslim poverty alleviation projects within the same urban area, this study demonstrates that there is no monolithic Islamic response to poverty. Rather than a single ethical code that organizes all Muslim poverty alleviation efforts, practical interventions are shown to be the result of particular interpretations of Islamic tradition, suffering, and gender that cluster together to support emergent notions of wellbeing. These emergent social projects further demonstrate that poverty localizes Islam. The effort to alleviate poverty instantiates a creative field in which ways of being Muslim are contested, embodied, and engaged through the frame of local tradition. In such local spaces, Islam is elaborated in such as a way as to support forms of sociality that counter the use of force in social reproduction. Within the on-going efforts of poverty alleviation efforts, religion is inflected in such a way as to reflect the desire that what bonds people in everyday life is something other than violence, subordination, fragmentation, deprivation, and suffering. As Muslim poverty alleviation projects shape modes of belonging to others, and work to inhibit the formation of zones of social sacrifice, they simultaneously construct nonviolent social practices and gender reforms as expressions of local Islam.