Abstract
Research on Islamic charities of the Gulf region and their work in Africa conducted by the authors over the past years has stimulated a reflection not only of the importance of trust in aid relationships, but also of active trust making by these organizations. Indeed, as transnational charity providers they are embedded in a web of relationships that they need to maintain and/or further, and for which trust is indispensable. First of all, they need to prove their trustworthiness towards their donors in the Gulf countries. Second, they need to create trust in the local African contexts in which they come to work. Lastly, Islamic charities, especially those from the Gulf, face a lot of distrust in the global context post 9/11, which they need to deal with and counter. This chapter discusses these challenges and Gulf charities’ strategies to address them, illustrated by examples from Chad, Senegal and Ghana. It is shown that their strategies of trust making towards different audiences may create tensions, implying the need for navigating different narratives of trustworthiness. How does this influence their work on the ground in Africa?
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Notes
- 1.
M. Kaag, “Transnational Islamic NGOs in Chad: Islamic Solidarity in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Africa Today 54, no. 3 (2008): 3–18; M. Kaag, “Comparing Connectivities: Transnational Islamic NGOs in Chad and Senegal,” in The Social Life of Connectivity in Africa, eds. M. De Brujin and R. van Dijk (New York: Macmillan, 2012), 183–201; M. Kaag, “Gulf Charities in Africa,” in Gulf Charities and Islamic Philanthropy in the ‘Age of Terror’ and Beyond, eds. J. Benthall and R. Lacey (London and Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2014), 79–94; M. Kaag, “Islamic Charities from the Arab World in Africa: Intercultural Encounters of Humanitarianism and Morality,” in Humanitarianism and Challenges of Cooperation, eds. V.M. Heins, K. Koddenbrock and C. Unrau (London: Routledge, 2016), 155–167; S. Sahla, In the Name of Geopolitics: The Proxy-War Between Saudi-Arabia and Iran in Ghana by Means of Islamic NGOs, Unpublished Research Master’s Thesis African Studies, Leiden University, 2018.
- 2.
Fieldwork for this paper was conducted in Chad (2004, 2012), Senegal (2014, 2017, 2019) and Ghana (2017).
- 3.
N. Luhmann, Trust and Power, eds. T. Burns and G. Poggi (New York: Wiley, 1979), 88.
- 4.
D. Gambetta, Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
- 5.
J. Elster, The Cement of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
- 6.
F. Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (London: Penguin, 1995); B. Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies: The Search for the Basis of Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996); A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Blackwood: Polity Press, 1995); Elster, The Cement of Society.
- 7.
See further Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies.
- 8.
N. Luhmann, “Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives,” in Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, ed. D. Gambetta (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 94–107; Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity.
- 9.
J.F. Bayart, L’Etat en Afrique: La politique du ventre (Paris: Fayard, 1998).
- 10.
K. Hart, “Kinship, Contract, and Trust: The Economic Organization of Migrants in an African City Slum,” in Trust: Making and Breaking Co-operative Relations, ed. D. Gambetta (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 191. Other examples include A. von Oppen, Terms of Trade and Terms of Trust: The History and Contexts of Pre-colonial Market Production Around the Upper Zambezi and Kasai (Munster: Lit Verlag, 1994); J. Levitt, “Pre-intervention Trust-Building. African States and Enforcing the Peace: The Case of ECOWAS in Liberia and Sierra Leone,” Liberian Studies Journal 24, no. 1 (1999): 1–26; Y. Zakaria, Entrepreneurial Ethics and Trust: Cultural Foundations and Networks in the Nigerian Plastic Industry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); M. Kaag, “Trust, Mistrust and Co-operation in a Senegalese Rural Community,” in Trust and Co-operation Symbolic Exchange and Moral Economics in an Age of Cultural Differentiation, eds. P. Smets, H. Wels and J. Van Loon (Amsterdam: Spinhuis, 1999), 83–96; A. Bellagamba, “Entrustment and Its Changing Political Meanings in Fuladu, the Gambia (1880–1994),” Africa 74, no. 3 (2004): 383–410.
- 11.
E. Cooper, “Sitting and Standing: How Families Are Fixing Trust in Uncertain Times,” Africa 82, no. 3 (2012): 437–456.
- 12.
A. Osei, “Elites and Democracy in Ghana: A Social Network Approach,” African Affairs 114, no. 457 (2015): 529–554.
- 13.
B.M. Shapiro, “Building Trust and Playing Hardball: Contrasting Negotiating Styles in South-Africa’s Transition to Democracy,” African Journal on Conflict Resolution 12, no. 3 (2012): 33–52.
- 14.
A. Erlich and N. Kerr, “The Local ‘Mwananci’ Has Lost Trust: Design, Transition and Legitimacy in Kenyan Election Management,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 54, no. 4 (2016): 671–702.
- 15.
A. Dziwornu Ablo and R. Overa, “Networks, Trust, and Capital Mobilisation: Challenges of Embedded Local Entrepreneurial Strategies in Ghana’s Oil and Gas Industry,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 53, no. 3 (2015): 391–413.
- 16.
M.J. Alpes, “Why Aspiring Migrants Trust Migration Brokers: The Moral Economy of Departure in Anglophone Cameroon,” Africa 87, no. 2 (2017): 304–321.
- 17.
Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies, 15.
- 18.
R. Beekun and J. Badawi, The Leadership Process in Islam (Shippensburg, PA: Proteus, 1999).
- 19.
A.W. Dusuki, “What Does Islam Say About Corporate Social Responsibility?,” Review of Islamic Economics 12, no. 1 (2008): 16.
- 20.
Kaag, “Comparing Connectivities.”
- 21.
J. Benthall and J. Bellion-Jourdan, The Charitable Crescent: Politics of Aid in the Muslim World (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 10.
- 22.
A collection of traditions containing sayings of the prophet Muhammad which, with accounts of his daily practice (the Sunna), constitute the major source of guidance for Muslims apart from the Quran.
- 23.
J. Krafess, “The Influence of the Muslim Religion in Humanitarian Aid,” International Review of the Red Cross 87, no. 858 (2005): 327–342.
- 24.
J. Dunn, “The Concept of ‘Trust’ in the Politics of John Locke,” in Philosophy in History, eds. R. Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Q. Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 279–301, quoted in Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies, 12; see also Beekun and Badawi, The Leadership Process in Islam.
- 25.
Kaag, “Transnational Islamic NGOs in Chad.”
- 26.
Sahla, In the Name of Geopolitics.
- 27.
Generally, Islamic charities have engaged in a process of professionalization as part of post-9/11 measures but also as part of a process of professionalization of the NGO-sector worldwide since the 1990s.
- 28.
See also Westerlund, D. and E. E. Rosander, eds., African Islam and Islam in Africa: Encounters Between Sufis and Islamists (London: Hurst & Co, 1997); O.M. Kobo, Unveiling Modernity in Twentieth-Century West-African Islamic Reform (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
- 29.
In line with view of the World Islamic Council, which as early as 1984 indicated Africa as ‘Land of Islam’ (Institut Pontifical d’Etudes Arabes, “Recommendations du 11ème séminaire Islamique Mondial sur l’Islam en Afrique,” Etudes arabes: feuilles de travail 66, no. 1 [1984]: 46–55). The President of the Shi’a Al-Mustafa University stated that “Shiism in Africa expands in ‘kilometre’ while in other areas expands in ‘millimetre’” (http://www.ahwazmonitor.info/articles/al-mustafa-international-university-globalization-of-shiism/).
- 30.
Kaag, “Comparing Connectivities.”
- 31.
Interestingly, this is also the perspective taken by several Western (secular and Christian) NGOs these last years; they have shown an eagerness to collaborate with Islamic organizations, as the latter would have a closer cultural proximity to Muslim target populations and would thus be able to deliver aid more effectively than these Western organizations themselves.
- 32.
See also Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies; Kaag, “Trust, Mistrust and Co-operation.”
- 33.
Sufism is a broad current in Islamic belief and practice, in which Muslims seek to find divine truth and knowledge through direct personal experience of God. In this sense, Sufism could be seen as in contrast with more scripture-oriented currents in Islam.
- 34.
A. Thurston, Why Is Militant Islam a Weak Phenomenon in Senegal? ISITA Working Paper no. 09-005 (Chicago: Buffet Center, Northwestern University, 2009).
- 35.
- 36.
H. Weiss, Begging and Almsgiving in Ghana: Muslim Positions Towards Poverty and Distress (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2007); R. Seesemann, The Divine Flood: Ibrahime Niasse and the Roots of a Twentieth-Century Sufi Revival (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Sahla, In the Name of Geopolitics.
- 37.
Sahla, In the Name of Geopolitics.
- 38.
Y. Dumbe, “Islamic Polarisation and the Politics of Exclusion in Ghana: Tijaniyya and Salafist Struggles Over Muslim Orthodoxy,” Islamic Africa 10 (2019): 153–180.
- 39.
This trend occurred also in Senegal, see M. Leichtman, “Revolution, Modernity and (Trans)National Shi’i Islam: Rethinking Religious Conversion in Senegal,” Journal of Religion in Africa 39, no. 3 (2009): 319–351; M. Leichtman, Shi’i Cosmopolitanisms in Africa: Lebanese Migration and Religious Conversion in Senegal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
- 40.
M. Bacharach and D. Gambetta, “Trust in Signs,” in Trust in Society, ed. K. Cook (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), 155.
- 41.
Kaag, “Transnational Islamic NGOs in Chad.”
- 42.
Sahla, In the Name of Geopolitics.
- 43.
See for instance Kaag, “Transnational Islamic NGOs in Chad” for Southern Chad.
- 44.
See also Kaag, “Trust, Mistrust and Co-operation.”
- 45.
Gambetta, Trust, 227.
- 46.
See also G. Turnaturi, Betrayals: The Unpredictability of Human Relations. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).
- 47.
Sahla, In the Name of Geopolitics.
- 48.
Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan, The Charitable Crescent.
- 49.
A.-R. Ghandour, Jihad Humanitaire: Enquête sur les ONG Islamiques (Paris: Flammarion, 2002); Z.V. Wright, Living Knowledge in West-African Islam: The Sufi Community of Ibrahim Niasse (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015).
- 50.
Wright, Living Knowledge in West-African Islam.
- 51.
Kobo, Unveiling Modernity.
- 52.
See for instance P. Raymond and J. Watling, “The Iranian-Saudi Proxy Wars Come to Mali,” Foreign Affairs, 19 August 2015; B. Hubbard and M. El Sheikh, “Wikileaks Shows a Saudi Obsession with Iran,” New York Times, 16 July 2015.
- 53.
Sahla, In the Name of Geopolitics; see also Leichtman, Shi’i Cosmopolitanisms in Africa.
- 54.
Ghandour 2002; Sahla, In the Name of Geopolitics.
- 55.
H. Dai, “Al Mustafa University, Iran’s Global Network of Islamic Schools,” Iranian American Forum, 12 April 2016; Sahla, In the Name of Geopolitics.
- 56.
See also Gambetta 1988, Trust, 218.
- 57.
Sahla, In the Name of Geopolitics.
- 58.
C. Ahmed, “Networks of Islamic NGOs in Sub-Saharan Africa: Bilal Muslim Mission, African Muslim Agency (Direct Aid), and al-Haramayn,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 3, no. 3 (2009): 426–437.
- 59.
Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan, The Charitable Crescent.
- 60.
Benthall and Bellion-Jourdan, The Charitable Crescent.
- 61.
Kaag, “Gulf Charities in Africa.”
- 62.
Weiss, Begging and Almsgiving in Ghana; Kaag, “Transnational Islamic NGOs in Chad.”
- 63.
See also Bacharach and Gambetta 2001.
- 64.
Gambetta, Trust, 217.
- 65.
Bacharach and Gambetta, “Trust in Signs,” 156.
- 66.
See also Kaag, “Trust, Mistrust and Co-operation.”
- 67.
Kaag, “Islamic Charities from the Arab World in Africa”; M. Kaag and M. Ocadiz, “A Plea for Kaleidoscopic Knowledge Production,” in Researching South-South Development Cooperation: Critical Reflections on the Politics of Knowledge Production, eds. A.E. Fourie, E. Mawdsley and W. Nauta (London: Routledge, 2019), 81–91.
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Kaag, M., Sahla, S. (2020). Reflections on Trust and Trust Making in the Work of Islamic Charities from the Gulf Region in Africa. In: Weiss, H. (eds) Muslim Faith-Based Organizations and Social Welfare in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38308-4_3
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