[Rezension von: Moumtaz, Nada, God's property]
Islamic charitable endowments, or waqf (pl. awqaf), are historically and in the present an important institutional pillar of Muslim philanthropy. Awqaf have been embraced by contemporary policy makers and neo-liberalists to further their own preconceived notions and agendas. In God’s Property, Nada...
| Résumé: | Islamic charitable endowments, or waqf (pl. awqaf), are historically and in the present an important institutional pillar of Muslim philanthropy. Awqaf have been embraced by contemporary policy makers and neo-liberalists to further their own preconceived notions and agendas. In God’s Property, Nada Moumtaz seeks to frame the questions: Is the waqf a (private) religious or an economic thing? How has the waqf been transformed in practice and scholarship from Ottoman times to the modern state?To help us think about these questions, she engages in historical and ethnographic research on the transformations of waqfs and discourses about waqfs in Lebanon. As a historical anthropologist, she examines the "grammar of concepts" of waqfs to produce a "conceptual history in its attempt to unearth different understandings of religion, property, and charity" (p. 10). As she states, grammar in this context is not about semantic rules but about meaning in use. In other words, she seeks to examine how these concepts come alive in practice and policy. In particular she explores how transformations from the centralization efforts of the late Ottoman Empire to the imposition of the French Mandate and subsequent independence of Lebanon and its various post-colonial movements caused ruptures in the Islamic tradition. However, she argues that "ruptures are not always destructive or obliterating… but some traditions are robust enough to absorb a fracture" (p.10). It is Moumtaz’s examination of the waqf in Beirut using this approach which allows her to examine the waqf at different junctures to understand both the ruptures and continuities. |
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| ISSN: | 2040-4867 |
| Contient: | Enthalten in: A journal of church and state
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jcs/csac083 |