Markets of Islam: performative charity and the Muslim middle classes in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ways in which middle class Muslims in Turkey talk about Islamic ‘community’ and analyses these discourses in relation to the phenomenon of market Islam. The evidence is drawn from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork with donors, managers, and volunteers of a government friendly Islamic NGO, the Light House (Deniz Feneri Sosyal Yardımlaşma ve Dayanışma Derneği) in 2009–2010, followed by subsequent trips in 2013 and 2015. I argue that Islamic charity is not merely a calculative economic behaviour or a reflection of deep-seated religious values, but rather a performative site of market Islam. In seeking to reconcile a faith-based understanding of charity with diverse interpretations of the neoliberal economy, I show that middle-class Muslims adhered to two discourses of ‘community’: whereas donors saw charitable giving as a market-enhancing mechanism, NGO managers defined their charitable work as part of an Islamic project focused on economic redistribution. Although they conceptualized the relationship between faith and markets in divergent ways, both discourses of market Islam posit ‘community’ as an intrinsic component of governing the poor in Turkey.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• market Islam
• charity
• community
• governmentality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Gizem Zencirci is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Providence College. Her research centers on understanding how religious beliefs shape and are shaped by economic ideas and practices, specifically as they relate to Muslim-majority contexts. She has published extensively on faith-based giving, development, and social welfare, and is currently completing a book on Islamic neoliberalism in Turkey.

Notes

1 This and all subsequent translations are the author’s own unless otherwise noted.

2 Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı. 2016. ‘Uluslararası İyilik Ödülleri.’ Accessed from http://www.uluslararasiiyilikodulleri.com on February 20, 2017.

3 I use ‘governing’ as the intentional efforts (often with unintended consequences) of those who enjoy relative positions of cultural, economic and political power towards transforming the fabric of society. This paper builds on an extensive literature that examines the ways in which the reorganization of public welfare and private charity also operates as a technique for governing the ‘social.’ (Cruikshank 1999, Donzelot 1979, Foucault 1980, 2012, Procacci 1991, Rose 1996).

4 The electoral linkages between the Muslim middle class and the governing AKP has been noted by a number of scholars. In this article, I do not seek to provide evidence for institutional linkages and dynamics of electoral mobilization, rather I argue that the middle classes were attracted to philanthropic giving because they perceived charity as a site for realizing both market-enhancing and redistributive notions of Islam. See Demiralp 2009, Gümüşcü and Sert 2009, Öniş 2012.

5 Deniz Feneri Yardımlaşma ve Dayanışma Derneği Yayınları n.d., p. 14. On file with the author.

6 Ibid.

7 For more information on how the AKP responded to this corruption scandal and the political attack on the Hurriyet newspaper, see Akser and Baybars-Hawks 2012 and Yesil 2016 among others.

8 All names are anonymous.