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Article
Faith-based organizations: humanitarian mission or religious missionary
Journal of International Humanitarian Action
  • Riham Ahmed Khafagy
ORCID Identifiers

0000-0002-5677-4465

Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-9-2020
Abstract

This paper analyzes Islamic FBOs’ humanitarian approaches, programs, and challenges. Politicalized religious interpretations are also on board to investigate their missionary aspects. I design my argument based on Michael Barnett and Janice Grass Stein’s assumption on the impact of social constructions on establishing sacred and secular concepts and spaces. Thus, I study the UK-based Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) and the Kuwaiti Direct Aid Society (DAS) to examine the influence of their social settings on their humanitarian experiences. My question is “do different social settings shape various humanitarian approach, although of sharing the same religious mission?” I argue that Islamic rules encourage Muslims to be religiously committed to paying charity and showing human and religious solidarity. In this regard, flexible Islamic Fiqh (jurisprudence) allows Muslima to set various socially constructed implementations of these religious commitments. Humanitarian relief is not an exception in this regard. Therefore, Islamic FBOs lay down on a continuum based on their socially constructed models which reflect different interpretations of religious texts and their applications to understanding societal issues as well as various employed strategies of these civil society actors.

Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Disciplines
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Indexed in Scopus
No
Open Access
Yes
Open Access Type
Gold: This publication is openly available in an open access journal/series
Citation Information
Riham Ahmed Khafagy. "Faith-based organizations: humanitarian mission or religious missionary" Journal of International Humanitarian Action Vol. 5 (2020) - 11 ISSN: <a href="https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/id/publication/issn/2364-3412" target="_blank">2364-3412</a>
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/riham-khafagy/1/