Organizing Muslim Virtue: Community Organizing, Comparative Religious Ethics, and the South African Muslim Struggle Against Apartheid

Abstract

While offering valuable comparative insights into models of the self and ethical formation across religious traditions, studies of virtue ethics have been critiqued for putting forward accounts which are elite‐focused. Some comparative ethicists have pointed to work in religious ethics and political theology on faith‐based community organizing as offering compelling case studies of non‐elite ethical formation. I seek to add to this literature by performing an analysis of the theories and practices of ethical formation in the South African Muslim anti‐apartheid grassroots organization known as the “Call of Islam.” The “Call of Islam” emphasized a liberation‐oriented praxis and active solidarity with non‐Muslim organizations for the purposes of protesting apartheid and employed a range of social practices including study circles (halaqat) and political funeral processions to prepare and equip its members for such work. As such, it not only sheds light on non‐elite ethical formation, but in its cultivation of the habits and dispositions of democratic solidarity, it also serves as an Islamic example of broad‐based community organizing.