1st Edition
Caring for the Poor Islamic and Christian Benevolence in a Liberal World
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Generosity as an alternative: is giving a challenge to the market logic?
2. The genealogy of Islamic and Christian ethics: from renunciation and redistribution to interdependence
3. The world-historical revolution in ethics: the dismantling of interdependence and the rise of the liberal subject
4. Comprehensive religion: communitarian associations in Egypt
5. Mobilizing Volunteers on Rocky Terrain: Neoliberal Benevolence in Egypt
6. Walking the tightrope between professionalism and tebliğ: Turkey’s neoliberal associations
7. Punching above their weight: Turkey’s communitarian and redistributive associations
Conclusion: Combined and Uneven Liberalization
References
Biography
Cihan Tuğal is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley. He works on mobilization, socioeconomic change, and religion. Tuğal’s first book Passive Revolution (2009) studied pro-capitalist Islam and its popularization among the poor. In his second book The Fall of the Turkish Model (2016), Tuğal analyzed Islamic movements and regimes in Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia and Iran.
"This is a remarkable book on a scarcely researched topic. Focusing on Turkey and Egypt, Caring for the Poor offers a comparative study of Islamic and Christian charitable ethics and the non-market economies arising therefrom. At a time of cultural reductionism and Islamophobia, Caring for the Poor is a particularly timely book and must be read by all those interested in countering the ideology of the clash of civilizations, which, in recent times, has been flaunting a renewed viciousness." - Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Distinguished Legal Scholar of the University of Wisconsin, Madison and author of Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide
"This scholarly study of the ethical transformations of charity from early times to today is an attempt to analyze the emergence of what Cihan Tugal calls 'neoliberal subjectivity' – first in Euro-America, and subsequently in the Middle East. The book contains a rich account of the development of Islamist charity organizations in modern Egypt and Turkey based on the author’s own fieldwork. Most thought provokingly, this work demonstrates how central the history of an apparently marginal social practice can be for understanding major problems of our world. Caring for the Poor is a welcome contribution to an important question and deserves to be widely read." - Talal Asad, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Graduate Center, City University of New York.
