After the 9/11 attacks, the view of Islamic charities polarized between those who considered them as the non-sword arm of terrorism and those who saw them as humanitarian organizations that politicize aid equally as their western counterparts. Although each of these views captures a certain reality of Islamic charity, they both downplay the great diversity and complexity that characterize them, failing therefore to adequately capture their politicization of humanitarian aid. In this paper, I make a typology of Islamic charity based on their level of religious commitment and the scope of their intervention, and then I examine the way in which each type politicizes humanitarian aid. I argue that Islamic humanitarian organizations can be categorized in four different types: transnational-fundamentalist, transnational-moderate, national-fundamentalist, and national-moderate. Each of these types of Islamic humanitarian organizations has different objectives and therefore politicizes aid in different manner. Whereas transnational fundamentalist IHOs follow an umma-centric politics, transnational-moderate IHOs leans more toward a global civil society approach. And while national-fundamentalist IHOs uses humanitarian aid as a mean of campaign for the adoption of the Islamic way of life, national-moderate IHOs follow a development-centric approach. I use four case studies to give an in-depth on how each of these three categories politicize aid.

 

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email me at abrayaim@ufl.edu