The (Mis)use of Islamic Charity: Past, Present, and Future

The aim of this paper is to propose two arguments. First, since an insufficient historical perspective tends to be a characteristic feature of many studies about contemporary Islamic charitable organizations, the paper presents a view on some of the key aspects that have been linked to the granting of charity throughout history. In so doing, it reveals not only how the charitable institutions were supposed to work in theory, but how they actually functioned in reality. Furthermore, the paper explores the objectives of many of the charitable organizations from the inception. Already, by early medieval times, Islamic charitable work had shifted its focus from the individual to the welfare of the Muslim community as a whole and the category of "need" and "poverty" grew to encompass wider segments of society. Second, in modern times negative aspects have come to be associated, in particular, with those Islamic charitable organizations whose activities relate to the notions of jihad and da'wa, or which strive to promote Islam. On the ideological level this is mainly represented by means of two lines of fundamentalist Sunni Islam: the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafism.