A Discussion with Marie Juul Petersen and Sara Lei Sparre, Islam and Civil Society in Jordan and Egypt

With: Marie Juul Petersen Berkley Center Profile Sara Lei Sparre Berkley Center Profile

December 15, 2007

Background: This conversation between Marie Juul Petersen, Sara Lei Sparre, and Katherine Marshall took place as part of preparatory work for a December 2007 symposium on “Global Development and Faith-Inspired Organizations in the Muslim World,” co-sponsored by the Berkley Center. In this interview, they discuss the findings of their study on Islam and civil society organizations in Egypt and Jordan. The project focuses on existing civil society organizations, particularly social welfare organizations and youth groups, and the role Islam plays in these groups. The two researchers highlight the heavy involvement of women in both traditional social welfare organizations and newer youth organizations, noting that women in both groups use Islam as a tool for empowerment and participation.

You are working on Islam and civil society organizations in Jordan and Egypt. Can you give me a brief summary of your current work?

Our year-long research project on Islam and civil society organizations in Jordan and Egypt is summarized in Islam and Civil Society with case studies from Jordan and Egypt (it can be downloaded from www.diis.dk). The project was anchored at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) and financed by the Royal Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

We were initially motivated by the unease we both felt with the increasing simplification of Islam, expressed in the dominant focus on certain aspects of Islam and the nearly complete ignorance of other aspects. In particular, since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, media coverage of the region and scholarly work on Islam have focused almost entirely on topics such as Islamist ideologies, religious radicalism, terrorist networks and fundamentalist movements. However, in order to comprehend the role of Islam in Middle Eastern societies, we felt that it was important to look at the broad range of different Muslim actors, many of whom do not play an explicitly political role but are primarily engaged in social and cultural activities—such as charity associations, development NGOs, youth clubs, health clinics, and schools. Although they may be less conspicuous, such organizations represent a much broader and possibly more important dimension of public religious engagement in Middle Eastern societies than their (in)famous political counterparts.

Against this background, our project's overall goal was to contribute to a more nuanced knowledge and understanding of the role of Islam and Muslim actors in Middle Eastern societies through case studies of civil society organizations in Jordan and Egypt. Since this is a relatively uncharted field, among both academics and practitioners, we aimed at providing concrete examples of existing civil society organizations and the role Islam plays in these, rather than lofty theoretical analyses of Islam and civil society. We hope that the report can also serve as an input to current discussions among NGOs and policy-makers of the feasibility and desirability of practical cooperation and partnerships with religious organizations.

We both have personal and professional experience in the field, albeit in different ways. Sara has lived, worked and traveled extensively in the Middle East, including a job as a research assistant at the Social Research Center of the American University in Cairo and a year of fieldwork for her Master's Thesis in Anthropology on young women in Syria. Marie had no Middle East experience, but throughout her studies and work experiences focused on the topic on religion and development. She did fieldwork in Guatemala on the Pentecostal churches and local development; her Master's Thesis in Sociology of Religion looked at religious NGOs in the United Nations. She has also worked in several NGOs in Latin America and Denmark.

So, neither of us had experience in or knowledge of the particular field of Islam and civil society in Jordan and Egypt. We therefore decided to take a very open and exploratory approach to the field, allowing the organizations to direct us to the most interesting aspects of their work rather than entering the field with predetermined assumptions of what would be most relevant to study. In Jordan, we focused on social welfare organizations, which make up almost half of all civil society organizations in the country and provide an excellent illustration of the wide spectrum of different religious discourses and practices found in civil society organizations. In Egypt, we chose to focus more specifically on a smaller group of recently established youth organizations which in many ways present new ways of organizing as well as using and interpreting Islam in this process.

We both spent almost three months doing fieldwork, Sara in Egypt and Marie in Jordan. During our fieldwork, we each interviewed about 80 to 90 people, including representatives from civil society organizations (religious as well as non-religious), government institutions, international organizations, newspapers, universities and research institutions.

How well did the fieldwork go?

We had feared that we might encounter some problems doing fieldwork as young female researchers. Chief among our concerns was the question of access to the organizations. Would we encounter difficulties in trying to access Muslim civil society organizations, whether as female researchers, non-natives, or as Danes, the latter in light of the recent Cartoon Crisis? But none of these worries materialized. On the contrary, we were met with openness and hospitality, and most people were talkative and eager to participate in our interviews. Many interviewees were keenly interested in the subject and liked our approach, which they saw as an attempt to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of Muslims and their organizations. Some assumed that the study was a direct consequence of the Cartoon Crisis and an attempt by the Danish government to approach the Muslim world and engage in dialogue. We found no major obstacles in terms of access linked to our being young female researchers. On the contrary, we sometimes had the feeling that as long as we took the necessary precautions, this fact might even have facilitated a more relaxed atmosphere, since we were felt to be more harmless and less threatening than, e.g., an older, higher-ranking man would have been.

You spent some time researching the motives of people working in civil society organizations. Do you think that Islamic principles are generally the main motive behind most Islamic civil society organizations? If so, how did you see that manifested? If not, what other motives/forces are driving these movements?

The question of motivation can be answered at two levels, organizational and individual, the first focusing on goals and visions of the organizations as such, the second on motives of the individuals participating in the organizations.

The organizations we studied can all be characterized as social welfare organizations. As such, all are engaged in activities to support or assist poor people in one way or another. For all the organizations we talked to, Islam plays an important role as the underlying rationale for this engagement in social welfare. Based on stories and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as the Islamic concepts of thawab, sadaqa, and zakat, the organizations construct a strong connection between Islam and social welfare. Reflecting a common attitude, the director of one organization explained the connection in this way:

"In general, human kind tends to do good work, but in Islam this is high-lighted: giving and doing good are just as important as praying. The word “volunteer” is mentioned in the Qur'an. In Islam, it is not that hard to do good work. The Prophet Muhammad says that, if you see something harmful in the street and you remove it, you have done something good, you will receive points. So charity is good, whether it is small or big. Another good example is that it is considered a good deed if you smile to your brother's face. And this really doesn't cost you anything. This saying has two important aspects: that it is good to do charity, and that the relation between people should be good. A peaceful, loving relationship between people is what Islam wants. This is what Islam is all about—doing good deeds."

One popular narrative that people often referred to tells a story about the second caliph after Muhammad, Omar bil Khattab, who used to wander around among the poor in Mecca, carrying a sack of flour and making sure that everyone had enough to eat. Another tells how the Prophet took care of his old neighbor, even though the man had never been nice to him. Likewise, we heard sayings such as “The one who sleeps with a full stomach while his neighbor is hungry, he is not a believer,” and The prophet said, "‘The person who takes care of an orphan will be my friend in heaven,'” repeated over and over again by interviewees to illustrate the connection.

The concept of thawab, referring to the divine rewards given for good deeds, also underlines the importance of social welfare activities in Islam. Among the deeds recognized as triggering the most rewards are visiting the sick, giving alms and helping the poor. Persuading others to do such good deeds also prompts rewards in the afterlife.

The concepts of zakat and, to a lesser degree, sadaqa also play an important role in people's understanding of social welfare. While sadaqa, literally ‘to be truthful', refers to voluntary almsgiving and charity, zakat refers to the obligation for all Muslims to pay 2.5 percent of their wealth to the poor and needy. Zakat is one of the five pillars of Islam and as such a crucial element of the Muslim faith. One person even told me that zakat and prayer are the two most important duties in Islam. Zakat is good for both the giver and the receiver and, by extension, for society, as one person pointed out to me: “When the rich people give, they feel better because they help people. And when the poor get money they will not hate the rich. This will contribute to the creation of a more secure community; there will be no hatred between the classes."

At an individual level, participants in the organizations quoted a wide range of different factors motivating them to engage, including religious as well as non-religious factors. For a few people, their engagement in social welfare is simply a job like any other job, and they are primarily motivated by a need to make a living. However, most people cited other, less tangible factors, such as atmosphere or colleagues, often linking these factors to the religiosity of the organization. They like working in this or that organization because there is a good atmosphere and because the colleagues are nice and friendly—and the atmosphere is good and the colleagues friendly because they are religious. As one woman said: “I don't think I would enjoy working in a non-religious organization. I don't think people there would understand me." Many, in particular women, cited a desire to be active and to play a role in society. Some said their participation was a way to develop their personality and skills, others that the simple activity of doing charity is a reward and motivation in itself.

Apart from these different personal benefits, many people pointed to religious obligations as an important motivational factor. Most people regard charity as an important part of Islam, so involvement in social welfare activities becomes a way of pleasing God and ensuring a place in heaven. Not many mention da'wa, the duty to inform other about Islam, and nobody seemed to see their involvement in social welfare activism in this light, at least not officially. In practice, however, missionary activities do appear to take place in a few organizations. Last but not least, for almost everybody, participation seems to be driven by a genuine wish to contribute to improving the lives of the people, and perhaps even improving society.

You noted that in Egypt, women made up a large percentage of the organizations you studied. What do you conclude from this and what kinds of arguments did you hear from women active in organizations?

In both Jordan and Egypt, the new youth organizations inspired by the Egyptian TV preacher Amr Khaled and similar preachers include very high numbers of women. This finding, at least on the surface, contests the idea of the passive and oppressed Muslim woman, replacing it with an image of the Muslim woman as active and independent. These young women are resourceful university students or graduates. They are not engaged in what are typically regarded 'female' professions like teaching and nursing. Instead, they study marketing, engineering, medicine, and IT, and they work as financial advisers, doctors and project managers. A few of them are housewives but they also are well-educated. Most are from the middle or even upper class, often from secular or very liberal Muslim homes.

In this segment of the population, the role of women does not seem to be a highly contested issue and at least not when judging from our interviews with participants in the organizations. Issues of women's rights and gender equality simply did not come up very often. Apparently, the young women did not feel a need to verbally demonstrate their equality with men, just like the men did not feel they had to convince us of their respect for women's rights.

When we observed practices in the organizations, we found that gender equality was an integral part of leadership and decision-making structures. It is still rather rare to see women in the very top of the organizations (but that's not so different from Denmark!). But women are found everywhere else in mid-level management, among regular volunteers and in the boards. In one of the Egyptian organisations, for instance, almost 90 percent of all participants and seven out of 10 board members are women. And that's not a rare sight.

In some of the more conventional Muslim organizations, women also make up a large part of participants. Here, though, their participation is often confined to rather traditional 'female' activities like child care, courses in housekeeping and family matters, or teaching. In the new youth organizations, there seemed to be no difference between ‘female' and 'male' activities. Women are in charge of IT education, they organize human resource management courses, and they negotiate with potential donors, just as men do. As such, the youth organizations offer the young women a spacious place with plenty of room for maneuver and fewer restrictive norms and expectations than elsewhere in society.

By introducing such gender practices to a Muslim context, the young women in the new youth organizations present an image of the Muslim woman as someone who participates actively in society and on equal footing with men. They insist on the relevance of Islam to them as women, claiming that Islam is what gives them their power. As one woman put it: “The religious women that I know say that religion gives them more power, their mind becomes more open, and they become more effective.” This way, the youth organisations challenge both conventional Muslim views on women as well as Western, predominantly secularist, ideas of women's rights.

While we came away with a view of very progressive gender discourse and practices in the new youth organizations, the majority of the conventional social welfare organizations are clearly more conservative. Many members of the Jordanian social welfare organizations we visited were aware of common prejudices concerning women and Islam, and they were very eager to challenge them, explaining to us that Islam and women's rights are not necessarily at odds with each other. Instead, they argued that women's rights can and should be seen as an inherent part of Islam. But we found that practices do not always accord with this discourse. First of all, in contrast to the youth organizations, very few board members and almost no directors are women, and many organizations have a policy of only hiring women who wear headscarves. Also, many of the activities offered in the organizations sustain rather than challenge traditional gender roles. Vocational training focuses on flower arranging, basket-making and cooking, and lectures addressing topics like motherhood, good kitchen hygiene. and marriage. Finally, many people's personal opinions conflicted with the overall discourse about women's rights. For instance, while continuously emphasizing the rights of women, the (female) director of one organisation said that women's participation as volunteers ought to depend on the support of their husbands.

That said, even the most conservative organisations seem to agree that education is an indisputable right for all girls and women, and an important part of Islam. Many staff members openly criticize Muslims who do not support this, and they constantly challenge those among their beneficiaries who oppose girls' education (often the fathers and uncles) by trying to convince them to let the girls study. A small group of organizations, many of them local women's associations, go even further, promoting women's economic and personal independence. In one organization, female teachers and beneficiaries are engaged in a program called “Women Can,” which explicitly teaches women that they can do anything men can do. Another organization, run by a group of middle-aged women, offers health information and vocational training to prostitutes. One of the women, now working as a counselor to other prostitutes, told me that she was lost before she started participating in the organization's activities. Now she knows her rights, and she knows what she is capable of. This kind of empowerment is exactly what the director is hoping for. She told me that people often ask her why she does not try to get the girls married off instead of going through all this trouble teaching them to work. But she does not want them to be dependent on a man. She wants them to be independent and self-sufficient.

It was obvious to us that women in both kinds of organisations use and interpret Islam as a tool for empowerment and participation. A good Muslim woman is strong, independent, and participates actively in society. On a very concrete level, many women also use Islam as a heavy argument against skeptical husbands and parents who don't see the point in the women's organizational activities. One woman told us that her husband didn't like her going out at night to meetings in the organisation. But then she said to him: “Are you saying that I, as a good Muslim, should turn my back on the poor instead of helping them?” That made him shut his mouth.

You focus on youth in your paper. Given that youth are such a large share of the population in the Muslim world, what roles do you see them playing in organizations? What are the special challenges and what can be done to address them? What do you hear from them as to the kind of agenda they would like to see advanced?

Traditionally, young people have not played a major role in social welfare organizations in either Jordan or Egypt. Most organizations have been lead and run primarily by middle-aged men and while a few young people may have been involved as volunteers, they have not had much influence.

The new youth organizations we met with break with this pattern in that they are run and lead entirely by young people. This phenomenon, what we call the new Muslim youth organizations, emerged from Egypt in the late 1990s and is now spreading to other Middle Eastern countries, including Jordan. Urban, upper middle-class young people constitute the backbone of this new movement of voluntary social development work, but recently it seems to be spreading to lower levels of the middle class. The majority is in their twenties, and most have been to university.

Social change plays an important and explicit role in the discourses of this new movement. According to the young people, Muslim societies are full of problems that need to be solved. Poverty, unemployment, and social apathy among the young were the problems most commonly mentioned by the people we talked to. In their social commitment, many of the young people are inspired by the Egyptian lay preacher, Amr Khaled, and similar preachers. According to Amr Khaled, Islam is not only about praying five times a day and wearing the hijab the correct way, and da'wa is not just a call to live by these rules. Islam is about changing and improving yourself and your community, and da'wa is a call to actively engage in this change. The overall goal is not only a stronger Muslim individual, but a stronger Muslim society, a renaissance of the Muslim world. On a concrete level, the young people engage in a wide range of activities to contribute to this renaissance, from collection and distribution of second hand clothes to poor people and microfinance programs to human development courses for university students and blood donation campaigns.

The difficult question is what effect this will have at a more structural level. Are the new Muslim youth organizations breeding grounds for formal political participation or sites for politically harmless social activities?

In their current form, the organizations are characterized by an explicit lack of formal political engagement. The young people see their participation as an answer to social injustices and moral wrongs rather than political injustice, and they take no interest in using formal political channels to gain influence. One might even conclude that organizations like these could even hinder formal political participation, by diverting potential actors from the political scene, luring them into harmless social activities like blood donation campaigns and distribution of second-hand clothes.

But for many young people in counties such as Jordan and Egypt, formal political participation is simply not an option. They feel marginalized and excluded from decision-making processes by the regime and the older generation. They see the formal political system as corrupt, illegitimate, and authoritarian, incapable of providing solutions to the countries' problems. As such, they do not see participation in formal politics as a relevant way to gain influence.

Participation in organizations associated with political lobbying, like secular human rights and women's organizations, is not an attractive alternative to these young people. They view such organizations as too secularist and ‘Western' in their approach. Because of their explicitly political activities and frequent conflicts with the regime, many see engagement in these organizations as way too dangerous.

Against this background, the new Muslim youth organizations may be expressions of a new kind of political engagement, one that challenges the dysfunctional political system by insisting on different forms and channels of participation. Instead of using a vocabulary of democracy, reform, and political rights, the Muslim youth organizations talk about participation, social justice, and voluntarism. They do so within a framework of Islam and social welfare rather than formal politics. Meanwhile, they strengthen skills that can be characterized as essential to political engagement, skills such as argumentation techniques, critical thinking, team work, and strategic thinking. One girl said: “We work in teams, we try to find ways for all members to think together, decide together, and work together. It's more difficult but also more interesting.” By working within the field of social welfare, and using a politically less sensible language than for example human rights organisations, the young people avoid harassment from the regime, creating a relatively free space for participation and engagement in society.

How are mosques involved in the work of these organizations?

In Jordan, mosques are state-run and most imams are employed by the regime, which also exerts a great deal of control over the imams and their activities. For instance, once a week, the imams receive suggestions as to what topics to take up in their Friday sermons, and there is a clear understanding among imams of what kinds of topics not to discuss. Thus, the mosque is not a particularly conducive site for organization and activism. We did meet with one organization, however, which was established in connection to a mosque, but members did not see their organization as an integral part of the mosque. Rather, they described their relationship with the mosque as a practical one: When the mosque was built, they were offered an office space in the basement below the mosque in exchange for regular maintenance of the building.

That said, many people in the social welfare organizations we visited said that they involved the local imams in their work. A project manager of a children's rights program told me that the organization had offered the local imams training in children's rights: “Some imams rejected the idea until we gave an example from the Qur'an and the Prophet Mohammad actually played with his children. There was one imam, he used to hit his children and never play with them, then he heard this story and participated in our course and he actually apologized to his child.”

And female preachers play an important role in local social welfare organizations, indirectly or directly. The director of one association told me that she had participated in weekly religious lectures together with a group of friends and acquaintances and the female preacher had told them about the Islamic duty to help others, and this was what inspired them to establish their own organization. Many female preachers teach religious lessons to the organizations' beneficiaries.

In Egypt, most conventional Muslim social welfare organizations are established in connection with mosques. In fact, almost all of Egypt's private mosques run some kind of charity organization and/or zakat committee in addition to its religious activities. The organizations vary in size, from very small organizations with approximately five volunteers and very few resources available for its charity activities to large and famous organizations like the Mahmoud Mosque Association in Cairo which supports thousands of people and runs more development oriented projects all over the country.

Only two of the new Muslim youth organizations we studied were established in connection with mosques. They did this for practical administrative reasons and because of the good reputation held by these mosques and their related charity organizations. In exchange for a monthly fee to the mosque they gain access to offices and lecture facilities and they avoid some of the administrative procedures of registration with the Ministry. Some of the other organizations sometimes invited imams to speak to the volunteers and members about Islam and the duty to help the poor, but on the institutional level few of the youth organizations have regular contact and communication with the mosques.

What policy implications do you see emerging from your work in the countries concerned?

The relationship between the regime and the Muslim organizations in Jordan is complicated. While all civil society organizations in Jordan, religious or non-religious, are subject to strict state control and surveillance, clearly some are subject to stricter control than others. Royal organizations most often enjoy a high degree of state support and organizational freedom, whereas some religious organizations, in particular the ones related to the Muslim Brotherhood, have an increasingly problematic relationship with the regime, mirroring the Brotherhood's own troubled relations with it. One of the most obvious examples of this is the replacement of the executive board of the Brotherhood's charitable wing, the Islamic Center Charity Society (ICCS), with a government-appointed board following charges of corruption in the organization. A few organizations and scholars support the regime, adding to the charges that ICCS activities supposedly function as ways of attracting votes for the Islamic Action Front. Most people, however, reject this argument and place themselves on the side of the ICCS and the Muslim Brotherhood, which they see as democratic, transparent and honest. While their religiosity is not the only reason for this popularity, Islam does play a major role, creating a common frame of resonance and recognition.

In Egypt, the regime has an ambivalent relationship with many Muslim social welfare organisations. One the one hand, it fears that these organisations are supporting the Muslim Brotherhood or other political Islamic movements against the regime in one way or another. And, even if these organisations have no connections with such Islamic political actors, they still offer concrete, visible examples of what Islam can provide, in contradistinction to the state's secular modernization failures, which make them a threat to the legitimacy of the government. On the other hand, the government is very much aware of the fact that Muslim social welfare organisations provide good and much needed services to the poor, a task the government is unable to solve by itself. This ambivalent relationship is very much reflected in the regime's stance vis-à-vis the different kinds of civil society organisations.

In practice, the government often uses the NGO law as a way to restrict the power and influence of Muslim social welfare organisations that are considered to be a threat. Apart from control over most of the financial resources available to organisations, the government has the power to block individuals from competing in board elections, to dissolve organisations without the need for a juridical order and to appoint up to 50 percent of the board members. In order to avoid such consequences, as well as more general harassment by the government, Muslim organisations, including the youth organisations must stay completely out of politics and not raise the religious banner too high.

As you look at the Berkley Luce FBO project and December consultation, what are the issues you would most like to see addressed?

It is crucial not only to understand the heterogeneity of the field of Muslim actors in Middle Eastern civil societies, but also to let this understanding guide concrete initiatives and policies in the area. Our study clearly demonstrated that Muslim civil society organizations do not constitute a homogeneous group of organizations but consist of a wide variety of organizations, differing among other things with regard to their activities, structure, constituencies, and religious beliefs. As such, their religiosity is not a unifying factor that binds them together. In other words, religiosity is an ambiguous characteristic, and it makes little, if any, sense to categorize civil society organisations based on preconceived assumptions of the significance of their religiosity. Religious organizations are not per se good or bad, progressive or conservative. Instead, we have to ask in what ways the organizations are religious, thereby opening up for a more nuanced understanding of religious actors. In relation to development, for instance this means that it makes no sense to categorize Muslim civil society organisations as having either a positive or a negative influence on processes of development. In some organizations, their religiosity seems to exert a negative influence on processes of development, in others their religiosity is an inspiration and a tool for such processes. As such, there is no point in asking whether Muslim organizations are facilitating or hindering processes of development. We need to take a step further, asking questions as to how, when, where, under what circumstances and in what ways Muslim organizations might hinder or facilitate processes of democratisation.

Secondly, it is important to understand that the boundaries between secular and religious are not always clear-cut and static but most often blurred and dynamic, at least in the Jordanian and Egyptian contexts. For instance, organizations we would otherwise characterize as secular, and which would characterize themselves as secular, would often use a religious language in order to improve communication with the beneficiaries of their work. Thus, instead of being mutually exclusive and sharply defined categories, these distinctions represent two poles on a continuum on which organizations over time may move back and forth. Likewise, the religiosity of an organization may be important in relation to certain aspects of its work, but not to others. In other words, the religiosity of an organization may not always be its most important or defining characteristic.

On a more concrete level, several topics merit further attention. An obvious task for researchers would be to look at religious organizations and their activities from the perspective of beneficiaries (such as single mothers, orphans, the unemployed, students and the sick), asking questions as to how the beneficiaries view and interpret the religiosity of the organizations. Unfortunately, our own data lack interviews with the beneficiaries of the organizations we met with. When asked, some activists were in fact more than willing to facilitate interviews with their beneficiaries, but these interviews often took the form of awkward ten-minute encounters with 8-year-old children very scared at having to answer strange questions from an even stranger woman, and with the director staring angrily at them from his chair in the corner.

Another topic for discussion and further research is the movement of new youth organizations in the Middle East. There is a need for more in-depth and long-term studies of the young people involved in these new youth organizations, including their background and motivations for participation, their interpretations and use of Islam, as well as the implications and impact of the movement on a societal and political level.

Finally, there is a need for studies focusing on common development themes such as reproductive health, gender, and education, discussing the potential role of Muslim organizations in the concrete design and implementation of development projects within these fields.

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