Charity and the Construction of Modern Muslim Subjectivities in Jordan

Abstract

The activists, volunteers, and employees we met in Jordanian charities and social welfare organizations make up a very diverse group of people. Some organizations are run entirely by volunteers, others by paid staff, and yet others by a mixture of volunteers and staff. In a few organizations, the members are young, while in most, they are older. Some come from the lower middle class, a few may even have experienced poverty themselves, and others have very wealthy backgrounds. Most of our interlocutors had a formal education, whether as electricians or doctors. A number of them had studied at expensive universities abroad, but most had received their qualifications from local schools and universities. The majority of social welfare activists in Jordan are men, in particular at the management level, but there is an increasing number of female activists especially in the royal NGOs. In the following chapter, we treat our four social welfare organizations as institutional sites for individual processes of modern subjectivity formation, asking the question of how employees and volunteers construct specific forms of meaningful selfhoods as modern Muslims through their engagement in Islamic charities and social welfare organizations in Jordan.