Islam in face-to-face interaction: direct zakat giving in Nablus (Palestine)

ABSTRACT

Zakat is the Islamic obligation to give away a share of one’s moveable wealth for the sake of the community—primarily supporting people in need. Based on fieldwork in the Palestinian city of Nablus (2013–2014) where institutional channels for distributing zakat had become blocked due to security crackdowns in 2008, this article analyses direct zakat practices where givers and receivers confront one another in face-to-face interaction. In Nablus, openly displayed material want was assumed to ‘expose’ people living in poor households as well as their relatives and neighbours. Against this background, direct zakat manifested itself as discreet gestures of ‘covering’ need, while people not asking openly for support tended to be praised for their shyness and piety. In direct zakat transfers, people actively cared for how they appeared to one another in social interactions. This ‘ethical work’ of presenting oneself involved reading signs, embodying Muslim virtues and invoking God as the sole source of material provision. Considering the Islamic tradition’s presence within social interactions, this article seeks to understand how Muslim piety exceeds the individual and how the moral responsibility to cover the needs of others is socially distributed.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• money
• ethics
• face-to-face interaction
• gift
• shame
• zakat
• charity
• Goffman
• God
• politics
• discursive tradition
• Palestine

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was carried out with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Berrow Foundation (Lincoln College, Oxford). During my fieldwork, I was an associated researcher at the Institut Français du Proche-Orient in Jerusalem. Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the University of Manchester, the ASA conference, the University of Zurich and elsewhere. The author thanks all the people who offered their company and looked after him during his fieldwork in Nablus. Moreover, he is grateful to the anonymous reviewers, Nada Abdulla, Marah Az, Jonathan Benthall, Morgan Clarke, Nicole Egloff, Webb Keane, Dominik Müller, Johannes Quack, and Samuli Schielke for comments on drafts or various conversations about the issues addressed in this article. Anne-Sophie Fraser designed the tables illustrating different models of zakat. Any mistakes are the author’s sole responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Emanuel Schaeublin (DPhil, MSc, MA) is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Zurich. In 2016, he completed a doctoral thesis in anthropology at the University of Oxford focusing on Islamic acts of giving in Nablus (Palestine).

Notes

1 Given the tense political context of my fieldwork, the names of all my interlocutors have been anonymized.

2 Notice that the ambiguity of the English word ‘to cover’ is also retained in the Arabic word satara.

3 For a discussion of the word ‘ayb in tribal Yemen, see Dresch (1989, p. 39–41) who renders it as ‘disgrace’ or ‘insult’ used to judge any public incident that breaks or damages honour (sharaf) while being largely unrelated to inner feelings.

4 Ismail (2007) aptly notes that such displays of piety in social interactions have a disciplinary effect on others and, therefore, need to be seen as political in the sense that they partially shape how people interact in the public sphere.

5 Here and throughout this article, I use Asad’s (1980) translation of the Quran. With a view to this passage, notice that orphans tend to be considered as a subcategory of the poor (for a discussion of these categories, see Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan 2009, p. 10). The Quran (76, 8) mentions giving to children without a father—whose attachment to an agnatic kin group has become fragile as a result—as a sign of the virtuous.

6 According to Hallaq (2009, p. 296), good ethical conduct in Muslim communities has been inherently tied to a person’s ways of spending wealth (nafaqa) translating into a duty to care for people in one’s surrounding.

7 For a discussion of how traditional discourses on zakat do not seek to challenge existing social structures and differences of class, consider the writings on zakat by the medieval Muslim scholar Al-Mawardi who died 1058 AD—discussed in Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan (2009, p. 15-16). In such traditional readings, we often encounter an inversion of hierarchy, whereby the wealthy are said to be dependent on the poor (Mittermaier 2019, p. 89). Consider Ghazali’s (1966, p. 42) description of the contemporaries of the Prophet who stretched out ‘their open palms so that the poverty-stricken man might take [sadaqa] therefrom and appear in the role of givers.’

8 See also Mittermaier (2019, p. 135).

9 For a reflection on political economy’s bearing on Islamic ethical discourse in contemporary Nablus, see Schaeublin, forthcoming.

10 Kapferer and Gold (2018) argue that the anthropological study of ethics runs the risk of becoming an ‘anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson 1994).

11 For a discussion of the limits of depersonalising gifts, see Laidlaw (2000).

12 Here, I follow Caton (1986, p. 291) arguing that personhood is not merely reflected or expressed through social interactions, but rather created through them.

13 For an account of how ‘divine accounting’ can be read as a ‘technology of the Muslim self,’ see Schaeublin, forthcoming.

14 For a general discussion of how the care of the self must not necessarily involve work upon an individual, see Laidlaw (2014, p. 104).

15 For a detailed discussion of the relation between interactions and acts of worship, see Hallaq (2014, p. 115–116, 203 fn. 69, 203–204 fn. 73).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was carried out with support from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Berrow Foundation (Lincoln College, Oxford).