Islamic Ethics and Female Volunteering

Committing to Society, Committing to God

Merve Reyhan Kayikci

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030506636
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030506643
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book unpacks how the ethical is embodied through an examination of the lived experiences of female Muslim volunteers in Belgium. 

Kayikci draws on a wealth of interview material that sheds light on the ethical turn in the anthropology of Islam, exploring how volunteering enables the space and time for Muslim women to commit to both orthodox religious and civic social values. As volunteering and interacting (caring) with the society requires careful deliberation of their society and their position as Muslims, and as women in that society, this research unpacks how multiple belongings of Muslim women in Belgium are negotiated, balanced, and influenced. This analysis reveals how the everyday is informed by different epistemological traditions; both the liberal and the Islamic, and how these traditions make the life-worlds of the women. 

Islamic Ethics and Female Volunteering will be of interest to academics across religious studies, anthropology, sociology, gender studies and community studies, especially scholars working in the areas of ethics, migration, Muslims in Europe, volunteering and activism. 

© The Author(s) 2020

M. R. KayikciIslamic Ethics and Female VolunteeringNew Directions in Islamhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50664-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Merve Reyhan Kayikci¹

(1)

Department of Semitic Studies, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

Merve Reyhan Kayikci

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The year in which I started working on this book, 2019, was the tenth anniversary of the Brussels women’s association for which my interlocutors have been volunteering. For the occasion, we got together, the volunteers and I, for an evening organized especially for the anniversary celebration. The women blew out the ten candles on a cake bearing the association’s logo and made promises for ten more prosperous years. So far it has been ten years since my interlocutors, the Belgian Muslim women, started their association in order to make their volunteering official. Our first encounters coincided with their busiest years. We met in highly formal settings, in European and federal parliaments, where we discussed how to shatter the glass ceiling for women. We discussed topics from equal pay to motherhood and were introduced to the experiences of women from all kinds of social and cultural backgrounds. On their tenth anniversary, my interlocutors still hold strongly to these issues and have worked together with a range of international associations such as UN Women and Amnesty in actualizing their aims. Not all their events cater for political institutions and international movements, as they also work very much with local people and local organizations.

From the outside, my interlocutors are no different from any other volunteer in Belgium. Their association hosts similar events to other volunteering associations. They organize baked-good sales to raise money for their charitable programs. They take their members and non-member participants on day trips to promote friendship and networking. They organize conferences and panels concerning social and political issues. To raise awareness of the importance of a good education, they organize yearly math and social sciences competitions among young adolescents. They also seek to promote intercultural understanding from a young age with artistic competitions, urging teenagers to draw, sculpt and express their ideas on ‘the art of living together.’ They distribute food to homeless people and try to work with shelters for more effective charity.

It is not easy to describe the scope and content of my interlocutors’ volunteering activities. The most important reason behind this is because they do not have a clearly defined program or cause. They work around values such as dialogue, social cohesion and community betterment. These values are articulated in a wide array of different events and activities and most of them are short-term. Throughout this book, I detail the different kinds of activities the volunteers have organized and which I had the chance to attend. There are a handful of women who actually work full-time for the association, taking care of the administrative issues, the bills, and the communication and organization of the events. The rest of the contributors are full volunteers, who drop by occasionally depending on necessity.

In this picture, the female volunteering association works very similarly to any other Belgian/European association. There is, however, one thing that sets my interlocutors apart from their counterparts: volunteering for my interlocutors is inextricably linked to their pious trajectory. Volunteering is something for them that is done for rizayi ilahi, or in English God’s consent. Interestingly, they would in no way define their volunteering activities as religious but yet they are religious. This interesting dynamic was what channeled me to further unpack what volunteering meant for my interlocutors.

Volunteering Muslims are still quite marginally understudied in anthropology. There are quite a number of studies that are concerned with volunteering in the liberal-secular contexts, dealing with the motivational forces that drive people to volunteer and the social/political/economic reasons and outcomes of the practice. Why do people volunteer, and what difference does that make for the society? This comes out as one of the major questions in the existing literature. Indeed, religion has always been part of the reason why people volunteer. The concept of (Western) charity itself is historically linked to Christian benevolence. Nevertheless, in the existing literature there seems to be an implicit insistence that volunteering is a secularized modern institution that is based on the impulse to do good. Even in cases where the church is involved, the form and content of volunteering are secular.

This came up when I was introduced to the director of the Catholic volunteering association in Flanders. Although the institution itself is Catholic by name, their starting inspiration was to find a way to keep people occupied with something when they did not work. That ‘something’ did not necessarily have anything to do with the church. While, similarly, my interlocutors pursue a secular form and content of volunteering, there is an undeniable nuance in how the religious is experienced within a secular space. This aspect, I effectively argue, is the point that deserves interrogation, more so because volunteering—a liberal-secular space—is not only a space of religious experience but also of public engagement. Thus, there are two factors in volunteering for the Belgian Muslim women that merge: religion and the public. This brings me to my main point. When I first started following the activities of the volunteers and observing their pious experiences, I also noticed that the ethical turn in the anthropology of Islam was concentrated on the individual experience. There is a profound emphasis in the existing literature on piety as the individual’s endeavor of self-making: ethical self-making. On the one hand I can only agree with this assertion, but on the other hand my interlocutors’ experiences point to an observable social component in ethical self-making.

The relationality of ethics and volunteering as an ethical self-making process is effectively absent in existing studies. The case of my interlocutors is significant in that not only does it contribute to the literature on ethics but also on how two different ethical traditions merge and diverge. These two traditions are namely the liberal-secular tradition of ethics and non-liberal Islamic tradition of ethics. The compatibility of Islam with European social and political values has been an ongoing and never-ending debate. The debate has increased in intensity over the years especially with the rise of ISIS and European Muslims traveling to Syria. Can Muslims ever be trusted with European values? Or does the loyalty to religion tilt on the heavier side?

These debates have reflected on different kinds of Muslim networks, including voluntary networks. When watching the news in Belgium or the Netherlands, it seems like one fragment that appears every day is the one concerning to what extent the state will allow Muslim networks to start institutions in their country. These can be mosques, schools, cultural centers and voluntary (aid) institutions. The flow of money is one of the main points of concern. Who funds these institutions and for what reason? Is it a non-liberal Middle Eastern government or organization that invests in the expansion of such institutions and is the money flow legal? Moreover, the sincerity of these Muslims is put into question. Are these Muslims really seeking social betterment, or are they actually serving a second agenda? Does this agenda include a missionizing project? Is the next new project establishing another Islamic state, or are these European Muslims actually working for their own (Islamic) governments? It is not a secret that Muslims who have volunteered for international aid organizations have been subject to prosecution on charges of terrorism/extremism. In particular, those Muslims who voluntarily departed to Bosnia during the civil war or to Afghanistan have been listed as jihadi. Even when their aim was to deliver aid, they were closely scrutinized by Western governments.

Even in cases where religious motivation is not blatantly apparent, Muslim activists are a source of contention in Western eyes. What do they really want when they ask for the liberation of Muslim coverings? Why do they still argue for the niqab, or the burqa? Are they still not liberated enough from the chains of their religion/culture? As Muslims make their religious/cultural demands increasingly public, all these debates become more and more heated. Significantly, even when Muslims participate in public actions for their specific demands, they use modern-liberal tropes of freedom and the freedom to choose.

This book starts with details of these discussions. It starts with the acceptance that Muslims can participate in volunteering, public participation and social engagements and still retain their religious concerns. This is an issue of negotiating different traditions while aiming to remain sincere to these traditions, whether they are liberal or religious. Without having to exclude one over the other, my interlocutors borrow from multiple moral rubrics. As long as we are concerned with their sincerity in being European, we will miss this nuanced dynamic. As long as we restrict our perspective on piety as an individualistic trajectory, we will miss seeing the social influence on how piety is actually lived.

There is one point that I wish to discuss before going further with the book and that is this issue of sincerity. The hype in Western media over Muslims’ true intentions may be seen as speculative, however there is one core issue on which they center their ideas. This is that although some Muslims may seem to be liberal, democratic, secularized, pro-gender equality and so on from the outside, they are still attached to their religious values. The seemingly essential discrepancy between Western values and Islamic ethos makes it impossible for them to co-exist in the same body, thus claiming to embody both raises concerns over sincerity.

This book works with this assumption and each chapter engages with how the Muslim subject is in constant conversation with the two traditions. This is where relationality and relational ethics become significant. Piety is not only informed by society as I have mentioned above, but also by the ethical sources that shape society and the state. More explicitly, the subject’s sense of piety is not restricted to Islamic ethics but also by what is considered ethical in the liberal modern sense. Muslims such as my interlocutors who were born, raised, and educated in a liberal-secular country such as Belgium are shaped by these principles as much as any other non-Muslim Belgian (or European). This is not an issue of sincerity but of negotiation for my interlocutors. On the one hand they are pious, while on the other hand they want to socially engage and be accepted for who they are by society.

This is not a very straightforward experience and often includes much accommodation, compromise, and adjustment on the side of my interlocutors. I will gradually deliberate what this means in the coming chapters. To put it briefly, there are many cases where public discourses shape how my interlocutors understand their position, space, and performativity in the public scene. There is a tendency in the media, in politics, and even in academic studies to emphasize how social and political institutions accommodate Muslim populations, namely, their cultural and religious needs, their differences and conditions. This book attempts to cover how Muslim subjectivity is also subject to outside influence. Even piety, I argue, is influenced in form and content, and can become a very non-formalistic experience. This takes place within the dynamics of social context. This is the initial reason why I was intrigued by volunteering. I wanted to understand what volunteering meant for this community of Muslims. Such a secular practice in form had such a religious significance. It appeared to me that volunteering had become a huge part of my interlocutors’ lives. Not only were they invested in volunteering, prioritizing it more than any other entity in life (work/family included), they were also invested in each other’s general well-being as volunteers.

Why is this important? Firstly, the existing literature on volunteering suggests that it is a very liberalized endeavor. People volunteer for many reasons; however they volunteer in their free time. It is seen as doing something useful when you are not doing something else useful, like working. It is usually short-lived, focusing on one project or another and then moving on. It is usually very individualistic, where the main motive is to ‘get the job done’ without developing a sense of attachment to the parties involved in volunteering. Higher numbers of people are volunteering, and there is a circulation of people who volunteer for different causes; one person volunteers, then drops out and is immediately replaced by another person.

Interestingly, this was pointed out to me during a conversation with the director of the Flemish Catholic volunteering association. He was surprised when I mentioned to him that most of my interlocutors were under 35 and had never given up volunteering ever since they had started. The case with their association is different, apparently. The founding reason for their association was to get people to do something useful when they were not working, or when they were retired. It was a way to keep people from spending time in bars and cafés and have them do something with their extra time. So up until today their community of volunteers still consists of older people who have time on their hands. While in other associations there may also be younger volunteers, it is basically about having that kind of extra time to spare.

This is roughly how volunteering works in the current context. Some scholars express their concern over the increasing individualism that is taking over volunteering, stating that this does not do much in terms of social solidarity. Others highlight that it is not only about doing good, but also about personal development and feeling the sense of doing good. My interlocutors gave me a lot to think about in this sense. In many ways, the ways in which they volunteer are disorganized but very strongly attached—to the cause, to the people involved, to people who are on the receiving end of volunteering—making t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Getting Acquainted with the Volunteers
• 3. Caring Is a Part of Believing and Why the Ethical Is Relational
• 4. Reviving a Forgotten Tradition, Infaq
• 5. The Authority in Sisterhood
• 6. When Volunteering Touches the Experience of Time
• 7. The Adab of Da’wa
• 8. Transparency, Visibility and the Mahram
• Back Matter