Giving to God: Islamic Charity in Revolutionary Times by Amira Mittermaier

‘Our therapeutic direction is towards Light’: transcendence and a non‐secular politics of difference in Islamic Counselling training

“…Connections with multiple others are constituted through the divinely commanded ruh , and hence God is both separate ( tanzih ) through the nafs and not separate ( tasbih ) from human beings through the ruh (Dharamsi 2016). This is unlike recent anthropological analyses on self‐God relationships (Elliot & Menin 2018; Mittermaier 2019), whereby God remains to some extent both an agent apart or separate from human beings, and interrelationality is made sense of predominantly through exchanges and interactions between bounded, self‐contained nonhuman and human entities. Within Islamic Counselling, the Divine reconfigures and challenges the secular ‘buffered self’ (Taylor 2007), pointing to the porous nature or essence of selves and the impossibility of delineating separations between an inside or outside self and other.…”

Doing our best and doing no harm: A focused ethnography of staff moral experiences of providing palliative care at a Médecins Sans Frontières pediatric hospital in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

“…Despite MSF's official secular positioning [61], Islamic ethics and spirituality were important "horizons of significance" [12] that shaped the national staff's moral experience of palliative care. Although staff did not specifically mention these terms in their interviews, their beliefs about God's will resonate strongly with the Islamic virtues of tawakkul (reliance on God), sabr (forbearance or steadfastness when facing hardship) [62], and rida (pious contentment in the face of difficulty) [63]. In interviews and FGDs, MSF nurses described themselves as "just a medium" (NUR-01, FGD-04, nurses), a role that implies a lack of control over the outcome, yet simultaneously seems to require action on their part.…”

“…In her ethnography among dialysis patients in Egypt, Sherine Hamdy quoted a terminally ill man who said, "you might think doctors can help-but if they can heal, they are only instruments of God's unique healing abilities" [62]. And yet, Amira Mittermaier found that for devout Muslims in Cairo who spent their time preparing and distributing food for the poor, being a medium was far from passive and required daily effort to serve others [63]. These dialectical interpretations, where reliance on and submission to God are emphasized alongside a human duty to act, are consistent with the ways that many MSF staff interpreted these virtues.…”

“…The various ways that MSF staff interpreted Islamic virtues, their role as God's medium, and their duty to act on behalf of their patients demonstrates the diversity of what Mittermaier refers to as "grammars of Islam" [63]. Hamdy found that among terminally-ill dialysis patients, tawakkul and sabr were interpreted and cultivated in different ways depending on the context and their assessment of the benefits and burdens of available medical interventions [62].…”

Fright and the Fraying of Community

“…Omar's emphasis on the state of his nafs and its nexus of psyche, desire, others, and institutions comes from elaborations within the Islamic ethical traditions’ discourses on the fortification of the nafs , the modulation and expression of its desires, and ascetic practices, oscillating between its necessity to thrive both in this world and acquire tranquility in the afterlife (Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood 2011; Messick 1996; Mittermaier 2019; Pandolfo 2018). An apt articulation of soul‐fracture is found in the magnum opus of the twelfth‐century theologian Abu Hamid al‐Ghazālī, The Revival of the Islamic Sciences .…”