Lecture
Da‘wa as Development: Kuwaiti Islamic Charity in Africa
- Date
- Wednesday 9 October 2024
- Time
- Location
- Herta Mohr Building / Faculty of Humanities
Witte Singel 27a
2311 BA Leiden - Room
- 0.31
Direct Aid (formerly Africa Muslims Agency), Kuwait’s largest charity focused on Africa, carefully mediates between Gulf donor wishes, aid recipient needs, Kuwaiti and African government regulations, and various development priorities. Since the 1980s, Direct Aid has been centralizing religious and development work in complexes that comprise orphanages, schools, clinics, and mosques. The Islamic NGO therefore cannot be confined to narrow Western categorizations of Gulf Salafi da‘wa (proselytizing) institutions. Direct Aid’s approach is strategically grounded in comprehensiveness/“holism,” which serves to blur established categories of “charity,” “relief,” and “development” to become da‘wa-as-development. What is the cultural and religious impact of Gulf funding in Africa? How do Kuwait headquarters interact with African beneficiaries? Based on multi-sited fieldwork, this talk examines Kuwaiti-funded projects in Tanzania and Senegal.
Dr. Mara A. Leichtman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Muslim Studies at Michigan State University. Her research highlights Middle Eastern-African relations; Kuwait’s foreign assistance; Senegalese politics; and the interconnections among religion, migration, and economic development. Occasionally she also works with Muslim immigrant communities in the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Brown University, a master’s degree in International Relations from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and was a 2020-2021 Luce/ACLS Fellow in Religion, Journalism and International Affairs. In addition to numerous other publications, Dr. Leichtman is the author of Shi‘i Cosmopolitanisms in Africa: Lebanese Migration and Religious Conversion in Senegal. As a 2016-2017 Fulbright Scholar at the American University of Kuwait, she launched a project on Gulf Islamic charity and humanitarianism in East and West Africa. She has written policy reports and analyses for the Stimson Center, the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, The Conversation, Women’s eNews, and Maydan, and contributed to a report for the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. She has also given briefings on the Middle East and Africa to several units of the U.S. Department of State. She is regularly contacted by national and international media outlets to provide background interviews on a range of topics.
The talk is co-sponsored by the African Studies Centre (ASC), the Asia Research Cluster and the ERC-funded ‘Entangled Universals of Transnational Islamic Charity’ project at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.
