UC Riverside

This dissertation looks at Islamic alms, or zakat, and how imams negotiate its rules as well as advise on a range of charitable practices. Zakat is generally understood as an instrument of poverty alleviation, and yet its conceptualization and practice across transnational contexts intersects with social, economic, and political forces. By taking a look at three major groups—Ikhwan, Sufi, and Southern Californian imams—the thesis unpacks the complexities and multiple trajectories that zakat takes in the post-9/11 and post-Arab Uprising period. This thesis pays special attention to the understanding, teaching, and practice of zakat at both the transnational and personal levels.

The principal argument of this dissertation is that zakat is being transformed by cultural and politico-economic forces, most significantly neoliberalism and the ethics of international humanitarianism. For example, though imams are often trained abroad in a seminary like al-Azhar in Egypt, the ubiquity of the NGO complex in Egypt and post-9/11 legal requirements in the US privilege managed practices, which the imams consequently naturalize in their own thinking of zakat. Contemporary zakat practices also bring into relief the tensions and malleability of Islamic legal interpretation as well as provide an analytical framework to explore issues of race, class, and gender. By narrowing the scope of shari’a to zakat and looking at its discourse and transnational circuits, I argue that we can gain an understanding as to how shari’a is practiced by our imams and is articulated within the structures of the nation-state and global economy.

I follow American imams who have trained at the shari’a college at al-Azhar University in Cairo, but work in their home communities in Southern California. This multi-sited ethnography takes place over five years in Southern California and seven months in Egypt following these students and their discourses, between schools, mosques, and sites of charitable giving. Through ethnographic description, I show how imams practice zakat by integrating the influences of their socialization with their seminary training. As such, I give three main sketches of the Azhari imam and their differing modes of zakat practice— The Sufi, The Ikhwani, and The Social Worker.