From Islamic Charity to Muslim Philanthropy: Definitions Across Disciplines

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Abstract

ABSTRACT The study of Muslim philanthropy is often described as an emerging, multidisciplinary space of inquiry that takes contemporary Muslim practices of generosity such as giving and volunteering alongside behavioral motivations as objects of analysis. This emerging field follows over a century of knowledge production about Islamic charitable practices and institutions stemming from early orientalist studies of legal texts on endowments to more contemporary sociological and anthropological analyses of ritual exchange and giving across various Muslim‐majority and minority societies and communities. As the study of Muslim philanthropy grows, these two literatures are often brought together in generative, if uneven ways. In this paper, we review key themes and questions in the study of Islamic charity and ask what impact it has had on the study of Muslim philanthropy. This article surveys recent literature on charitable endowments/trusts (waqf), obligatory alms giving (zakat), and “extemporaneous charity” (sadaqa). We end with an analysis of dominant definitions of philanthropy currently used in philanthropic studies to argue that non‐denominational categories like “religious charity” exclude many religious practices that Muslims consider central to their charitable actions and their motivations, a point crucially missing in much philanthropy literature.

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