Emanuel Schaeublin, Divine Money: Islam, Zakat, and Giving in Palestine (Indiana University Press, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Emanuel Schaeublin (ES): The book is the result of almost twenty years of engaging with Palestine and Islamic almsgiving (zakat). From 2004 to 2005, I studied for one year at the Palestinian University of Birzeit. After completing an MA in Arabic from the University of Geneva, a position at the Graduate Institute Geneva enabled me to think about the negative consequences of the US-led “War on Terror” for humanitarian assistance. The US government had launched a policy of “countering terrorist finance” and started putting Islamic charitable institutions on so-called terror lists preventing their access to international banking.
The repercussions of such counter-terrorist policies were felt across many villages and city neighborhoods affected by armed conflict. In 2008, the Palestinian Authority (PA) governing the West Bank under the tutelage of the Israeli army forcefully shut down more than ninety locally rooted committees collecting and distributing zakat to people in need. The aim was to bring the Islamic charitable sector under centralized control to prevent its abuse for “terrorist funding.” Among Palestinians, these measures were very controversial. Certain observers praised them for limiting the influence of Hamas after its rise to power in the Gaza Strip in 2007. Others highlighted the political diversity of the committees and the high degree of confidence they enjoyed among their respective communities—contrasting with a general perception of the PA as corrupt.
As a researcher from Switzerland who had learned Arabic in Palestinian cities, Damascus, and Sana‘a, I was able to conduct interviews with the people running zakat committees before and after the closures and to document the destructive effects of the crackdown. This led to publications in Arabic and English situating the zakat sectors in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip in their historical and social context and explaining different perspectives on their evolution. At the time, people told me that the flow of zakat cannot be obstructed. When faced with obstacles, zakat funds would find new channels including informal face-to-face distribution.
This image of widely ramified acts of giving in an otherwise opaque and repressive political landscape stuck with me. The issue turned into the focus of my doctoral research in anthropology at Oxford and long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Palestinian city of Nablus (2013-2014), ultimately leading to publication of this book.
J: Which topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
ES: To understand practices of mutual aid in small city that has been under foreign occupation and military rule since 1967, the book draws on (mostly) anthropological literature on Islam, giving, ethics, social interaction, and political economy. I also occasionally refer to Palestinian and Arab literary texts that resonate with the ethnography presented in the book.
The book owes a lot to Talal Asad and his students, such as Saba Mahmood, and their project of studying how people draw on the Islamic tradition to cultivate historically situated forms of selfhood. Given the relational character of zakat giving, I pay particular attention to the embodiment of virtues and piety in social interactions. In this regard, I found the work of Erving Goffman helpful. In the Islamic textual tradition, social interactions play an important role in discussions on how to live a good life. The display of virtue and piety in interactions, however, also has a disciplinary effect on others. To capture casual corrections and encouragements to embody virtues occurring in encounters between people without formal authority, I introduce the notion of “lateral disciplining.”
With a view to discussions about gift giving, I argue that zakat has a dual character as “loan to God” (highlighting spiritual merit) and as a “social duty” (foregrounding the obligation to pass on part of one’s wealth to others). The duty to pass on part of one’s wealth is to a certain extent enforced by lateral disciplining. Zakat is thus cast as the “just share” (haqq) one owes to a person in need in one’s proximity, but also as “God’s wealth” (mal allah). In the final chapter of the book, I reflect upon how such thinking about transactions relates to the political economy of military occupation.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
ES: The book is written from an outsider’s perspective. Since moving back to my hometown Zurich in 2015, I have recognized many things that I learned to attend to while in Nablus: utmost discretion and feelings of shame surrounding abundant wealth or the lack of it, lateral disciplining among neighbors as a constant part of social life, and subtle hints at some form of ultimate justice underpinning financial dealings of all kinds. All this also shapes life in a post-Protestant city such as Zurich. Initial attempts to conduct an ethnographic study of such themes in Switzerland and its political economy, and comparing this material with my findings in Nablus, have not yet come to fruition.
Reflections on how ethical and political concepts are invoked in casual interaction, however, found their ways into the screenplays of two fiction films set in Switzerland that I have co-authored with my brother Cyril: THOSE WHO ARE FINE (2017) explores everyday financial transactions and fraud in contemporary Zurich; UNREST (2022) documents the struggle for hegemony between the anarchist movement and nascent nationalism in Swiss watch factories in the 1870s.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
ES: I foremost hope that this book will contribute to ways of talking and thinking about Palestine that contribute to putting an end to current war, as well as to the ongoing displacement and annihilation of Palestinians. Consequently, I hope that the book will be read by people seeking ways to imagine political possibilities for organizing human live beyond the ongoing division of populations into different zones that are securitized with a growing arsenal of technologies. It is written in a language that should be accessible to students, teachers, researchers, activists, and analysts. The discussion of how transnational zakat flows become locally accountable through gossip about those distributing them (chapter two) seems particularly relevant to people working in the humanitarian aid sector.
As my findings result from the specific and problematic perspective of a white and foreign (ajnabi) ethnographer (discussed in the book), they should be put to the test by anthropologists with different positionalities conducting research on zakat practices in the towns and villages of the northern West Bank and Palestine more generally.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
ES: Currently, I co-direct a research project exploring the role of Islamic legal scholars in shaping how armed groups conduct hostilities, how they govern populations, and how they negotiate with other conflict actors. In parallel, I am working with my brother on the screenplay for a science fiction film about a high-level political meeting in Switzerland.
Excerpt from the book (pp. 77-79)
… [A] gift of zakat inevitably marks the recipient as needy, and it can have a wounding effect. Given the general reticence to talk openly about material need, the first problem that arises for zakat givers is how to locate and assess the needs of poor households in their proximity. The same reticence also made it difficult for me to study acts aimed at covering people’s urgent needs. To avoid roping my interlocutors into shameful situations, I let myself be guided by the same ethics that my interlocutors relied on when looking out for poor households and assessing their needs. I gradually learned that my interlocutors were reading signs of need in the behavior of others to detect poor households and assess their degree of need. This sign reading relied on observations made during face-to-face interactions and visits. Signs were given implicitly and registered silently, to be passed on with great discretion to those wishing to give their zakat to a household in need. The point of discretion is to avoid embarrassing and shaming anyone by publicly exposing material want.
Detecting People’s Needs
Reading the subtle signs of poverty in public is crucial for determining whether other people are eligible to receive zakat or sadaqa. Those wishing to give zakat usually look to women’s gatherings, shopkeepers, or mosques to generate knowledge on material needs in Nablus. This knowledge is then discreetly shared among various social networks.
The women my research assistant Marah interviewed told her that they would detect signs of need when visiting one another’s homes by inspecting the state of the furnishings and occasionally going into kitchens to examine the contents of refrigerators. An empty refrigerator, for instance, was a clear sign of financial scarcity and incited giving. Maryam, a married woman living with her family in a village outside Nablus, one day went to visit one of her in-laws, a widow with three children. After some time, Maryam sneaked into the kitchen and saw that there was no food in the refrigerator. The next day, Maryam bought groceries and went to the widow’s house to fill her refrigerator. The woman reacted with surprise: “Were you spying [tfayyidī] in my fridge?” Maryam replied, “No, I just wanted to get something out of the fridge when I visited you yesterday. Then I saw that it was empty.” After this incident, Maryam called one of her wealthier relatives abroad and convinced her to start providing monthly payments for this widow and her three kids.
Other women could detect signs of need in public. Women living in villages would occasionally go to the central markets in Nablus and look around for women who appeared to be in need. One woman claimed to be able to spot financial distress by examining facial traits or bodily movements of strange women in the streets and looking for signs of worry or fatigue. When these women found a likely candidate for assistance, they would start talking to her. If it turned out that she was poor, they would try to help as much as they could afford. They claimed only to talk to other women in the street, never men. Occasionally, however, they would ask men shopkeepers in the old city if they knew of any poor women nearby who needed help. If there was one, they might go to her home and offer zakat or sadaqa.
Dina, a member of the Palestinian Parliament for the Fatah Movement, ran a charitable society in Nablus. She recognized that asking people directly whether they needed assistance often led nowhere, as many destitute families would tell their neighbors, “We do not need anything!” She recommended that potential zakat givers ask the “most influential lady of the neighborhood” … if they wanted to know the whereabouts of poor households. According to Dina, these ladies play a leader role in the neighborhood. Other women show them reverence (hayba) and listen to them in important matters. An influential lady’s position allows her to centralize information considered very sensitive. Everyone knows her, and everyone talks to her. Dina thought that such women are even “better than the Ministry of Social Affairs” as sources of information about the people in need, as they are aware of the tiniest details related to private matters.
Knowledge of poor households circulated swiftly among social networks in Nablus, even though most people were hesitant to reveal their needs. Outsiders like myself walking through the old city of Nablus would not think that many families behind the walls of these buildings had no access to regular meals or necessary medical services. A young man told me that very few people in Nablus knew the extent of poverty and the whereabouts of the poor families in the old city: “There are some respectable men of a certain age who know where they are. They are able to distribute zakat. Unmarried and young men like you and me cannot know such things.” The men I talked to relied on interactions outside of homes to generate knowledge about households that had run out of money. The two main places for detecting signs of need were grocery stores and mosques. Nablus only had two large supermarkets, but street-corner shops selling groceries were widespread. These small grocery stores played an important role in the social perception of a family’s material scarcity since shopkeepers were well situated to observe and interpret the consumption patterns of their customers. One day, for example, I was chatting with Kamal, the owner of a little grocery store who had spent many years working in the Arab Gulf. A small boy walked into the shop and asked him, “How many eggs can I get for two shekels?” Kamal silently placed three eggs in a plastic bag and handed them to the boy while taking two coins in return. After the boy left, Kamal turned to me and said, “Did you see this? This boy’s family is broke. If they still had money, they would send him to buy a whole box of eggs to get a better price.” Like many other shopkeepers, Kamal would keep track of the consumption patterns of his neighbors and, thereby, generate reliable knowledge about poverty in the vicinity. People’s patterns of buying food allowed shopkeepers to infer the financial situation of families. While this information remained hidden to strangers moving through public space, shopkeepers administered this knowledge carefully, disclosing it tactfully to discreet givers.
People wishing to give zakat often turned to shopkeepers such as Kamal to find families in need of support. The mosque is another social sensor for financial hardship because it is a space where men struck by poverty can spend time when they do not have much else to do. In the mosque, one can pray, rest, and occasionally receive support from fellow Muslims. This meeting space allows merchants to socialize with men from poor households living in the old city. Merchants sometimes help these families by giving them money and helping them pay for medical operations.
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