Overview

A robust ethnography of Islamic Relief explores difficult questions about the extensive reach of white supremacy An ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West, Racializing the Ummah explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world that defines Muslimness as less than human. Rooted in more than a decade of international research, Rhea Rahman's study on the organization's projects, methods, and limitations reveals how racial capitalism permeates all aspects of humanitarianism. Beginning with a counterhistory of Muslims in the United Kingdom following World War II, Rahman analyzes IR's mission and transnational activities in and across places including the UK, South Africa, and Mali in the broader context of global white supremacy. She shows how IR's approaches often effectively secularize Islam to evade anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, implicating concepts such as the ""good"" Muslim aid worker, who complies with War on Terror surveillance while attending to victims of Western colonialism. Meanwhile, Rahman theorizes the tactics of aid workers on the ground, who creatively draw on an Islamic Black radical tradition to drive real change. Through her engagement with IR and other organizations, Rahman paints a frank, nuanced portrait of the constraints Islamic aid entities face in the effort to disentangle themselves from neocolonialism and Western hegemony. Yet she also locates the possibility of escape from the all-encompassing dictates of racial capitalism in alternative visions of doing good-ones that are grounded in Islam as the foundation of a revolutionary praxis. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

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9781517920265

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Reviews

""Exploring themes of racialization among, across, and between Muslim communities worldwide, Racializing the Ummah positions Islamic Relief's work in the coordinates of anti-Muslim and anti-Black racism. Rhea Rahman persuasively shows how Islamic Relief is situated between diverse logics of racialization with this much-needed and overdue book.""--Darryl Li, author of The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity

Author Information

Rhea Rahman is assistant professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her research has been published in Africa, Religions, and an edited volume of The Anthropology of White Supremacy.

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