Article: “White-Adjacent Muslim Development: Racializing British Muslim Aid in Mali”

Author: Rhea Rahman, Brooklyn College, City University of  New York

Published in: Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 93, No. 2 (May 2023), pp. 256-272

Publication Date: May 13, 2023

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Abstract:

Muslim aid organizations are relatively new actors in the Western aid industry. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research with the UK-based NGO Islamic Relief, Rhea Rahman explores the organization’s engagement with a school in need of repair in southern rural Mali that is also the site of a sacred shrine of importance to locals. She examines the contextual global logics of racialization that undergird different interpretations and practices of what it means to ‘do well’. Situating an understanding of ‘development’ in an analysis of global racial capitalism, the author argues that, as an Islamic inspired aid organization based in the UK, Islamic Relief is both subject to anti-Muslim racism and complicit in a white-adjacent racialized project of ‘development’ in Africa. She foregrounds the whiteness of development to show how modernist development practice makes it impossible to see other ways of conceptualizing ‘doing well’ that are also deeply grounded in Islam.

Source: MUSE