Islamic Migrant Organizations: Little-Studied Actors in Humanitarian Action

Abstract

Since 9/11, attention to Islamic migrant organizations within Western countries has grown. However, the humanitarian activities of these organizations have received only limited attention. Hence, it is not yet clear why these organizations engage in humanitarian crises, which specific role Islam plays in their humanitarian engagement and which factors influence the scope of their activities in humanitarian crises. This paper aims to address these research questions by using approaches from sociology of organizations and presenting three empirical case studies from Germany. Particularly, it argues that although all three case studies are active in humanitarian crises the scope of their activities differs due to their differing organizational characteristics, member interests and external expectations.

A multi-religious response to the migrant crisis in Europe: A preliminary examination of potential benefits of multi-religious cooperation on the integration of migrants

“…Whilst this project has begun to demonstrate that multi-religious approaches can be effective in certain contexts, an extremely important area for future studies is developing a much more comprehensive understanding of the contextual factors and variable which are likely to impact on the success and effectiveness of multi-religious approaches. This is an area which can learn much from the growing body of work on Migrant Organisations; where studies have sought to understand the influence of social and political factors such as national integration policies and 'regime of religious governance' (Kortmann 2012;Vinding 2013), and used organisational theory to understand the internal and external factors which shape organisational priorities and activities (Kortmann and Rosenow-Williams 2013;Rosenow-Williams and Sezgin 2014).…”

Transnational Islamic charity as everyday rituals

“…Transnational Islamic charity has been studied in the context of development, mainly as part of emergent work on the connections between religion and development (De Cordier 2009;Deneulin and Rakodi 2011;Orji 2011), including studies of © 2016 The Author(s) transnational Muslim NGOs (Ozkan 2012;Petersen 2012aPetersen , 2012bRosenow-Williams and Sezgin 2014). Some authors have explicitly connected it with humanitarian engagement in times of crisis (Benthall 2008;De Cordier 2009).…”

With faith in development: Organizing transnational Islamic charity

“…As such transnational Islamic charity can overlap and intersect with what elsewhere might be called ‘diaspora development engagements’ (Brinkerhoff, 2012). That migrants contribute to development in their country of origin is well established (de Haas, 2010: Faist, 2008: Nyberg-Sørensen et al ., 2002: Van Hear, 2010) and that religion can play a role has been acknowledged (Erdal, 2012; Levitt, 2003; Ozkan, 2012; Rosenow-Williams and Sezgin, 2014). However, which roles, if any, religion plays, needs to be further unpacked, taking on board the criticisms of studies of religion and development being ‘instrumental, narrow and normative’ (Jones and Juul Petersen, 2011).…”