Investing Islamic Alms: The Moral Returns of Charity among Indian Muslims

• In Event: Muslim Moralities in Asian Capitalisms - Sponsored by the South Asian Muslim Studies Association (SAMSA)

Abstract

Public recognition of growing Muslim poverty in India has opened up new spaces for modern Islamic charities in Lucknow, India to intervene in local labor markets to develop human capital in poor urban Muslim communities. These Muslim social entrepreneurs view intervention as simultaneously economic and moral. Unemployment and low educational levels among Muslims are interpreted also as failures of Islamic teachings related to work ethic, “halal” (permitted) earnings, and wealth distribution. New Islamic charities are re-inventing Islamic almsgiving (zakat) as moral and social “investment” in both Muslim communities and in India’s economy. Almsgivers interpret returns on this investment in both macroeconomic and spiritual terms. In the process, Muslim reformers are re-imagining zakat as a “principle of economics” and an economic “system” viewed as distinct from – yet parallel to and articulated with – local capitalisms. Scholars have analyzed such assemblages of Islamic practice and capitalism as “neoliberalized Islamic ethics” (Rudnyckyj 2010) or “pious neoliberalism” (Atia 2012). Yet this paper illustrates how the relationship between Islamic ethics and the market in India are best viewed as neither the expansion of late capitalist “morality of numbers” (Rose 1999), nor as resistance from Islam’s “moral economy” (Scott 1985, Tripp 2006). While reformers re-purpose Islamic rituals to increase market participation among poor Muslims, this paper shows such practices as a means to an end: strengthening moral community among Indian Muslims. Conclusions discuss calculative reason as originating in the articulation between globalizing capitalist relations and scriptural teachings of Islam, rather than merely the former (cf. Weber 1958).

Author

• Christopher Brennan Taylor, George Mason University