Bulletin N°49

Zakat is one of the five “pillars” of Islam, the obligation on all Muslims to give one fortieth of their wealth every year (above a low threshold, and excluding their homes and working equipment) to charitable causes. It is closely associated with sadaqa, i.e. supererogatory alms. In principle, zakat is honoured as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth, which foreshadowed modern systems of social security. In practice, no actual Muslim-majority country today serves as an exhibit for its functioning according to that ideal, whether the obligation is interpreted as prioritizing the needs of local people or more expansively. But it is taken very seriously by observant Muslims, who are taught that praying is ineffective unless their zakat obligation is fulfilled. Emanuel Schaeublin’s book Divine Money: Islam, Zakat and Giving in Palestine^[1]Indiana University Press, 2023. As well as hardback, paperback and Ebook editions, this book is available on open access online: https://publish.iupress.indiana.edu/projects/divine-moneyis adapted from his doctoral thesis in social anthropology at Oxford University, for which he undertook residential fieldwork in 2013–14 in Nablus, an ancient city in the Palestinian West Bank with about 160,000 residents. He chose zakat as the unifying thread for his research, with two aspects.

On the one hand, it is institutionalized in the West Bank in the form of zakat committees. Regulated by the Palestinian proto-state under a special law, they are endogenous charities responding to locally set priorities – mainly the provision of basic essentials, including health and education, rather than pursuing the rhetorical goals set by many Western NGOs and their local affiliates. But the zakat committees are also able to raise funds from international donors. Shortly after Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, its brief period in government, and then the splitting off of Gaza under Hamas administration, the Nablus zakat committee was among some ninety West Bank committees summarily dismissed by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah. The question of the pre-2007 zakat committees was highly contentious at the time of Schaeublin’s fieldwork.  Surveys of Palestinian public opinion conducted between 2000 and 2004 had indicated strong popular confidence in the zakat committees, by contrast with lack of confidence in all political parties. But the pre-2007 Nablus committee was among those accused by the Israeli and United States authorities of being fronts for Hamas – an allegation that led to high-profile civil litigation in the US and elsewhere (still ongoing today) against donors and also banks that had supplied financial services. Here Schaeublin refrains from taking a decisive stand, but he shows an implicit scepticism about the fairness of these charges, noting the well attested financial integrity of the pre-2007 committees (by contrast with Fatah’s reputation for corruption) and the local expectation that their members be persons committed to Islamic ethics, representing different political colours, and informally accountable through the management of reputations. At the time of his fieldwork in Nablus, newly appointed committee members with some independence from political factions were trying to re-establish the local trust that the PA in Ramallah had eroded by its hasty decision.

On the other hand, the zakat obligation can be met by direct giving between individuals and families, a practice which became more favoured in Nablus at a time of loss of trust in the legally constituted committee. Here Schaeublin contributes to an academic debate about the extent to which Islamic traditions of charity are sui generis. Avoiding the temptation of Islamic exceptionalism, he finds that in Nablus two models of the relationship between giver, receiver and God co-exist in tension. According to one model, the giver’s generosity is rewarded in the Hereafter; according to the other, all wealth belongs to God, and wealthy donors are merely channels of divine provision.

Nablus under Israeli occupation, beset by a stagnant economy, by travel and security restrictions, and by the constant threat of military violence, comes across as an almost encapsulated community with a strong sense of urban identity. Schaeublin devotes several pages to explaining how he succeeded in gaining acceptance by his interlocutors, despite immediately standing out as a young Swiss non-Muslim male fluent in Arabic. His flair as a fieldworker, coupled with a strong sense of professional ethics, is evident The people of Nablus are constantly looking out for each other – by forming moral judgments about neighbours, but also by detecting when a family is in material need, by trying to conceal one’s own family’s needs as a matter of honour, and by spotting opportunities to do someone a good turn, preferably discreetly. Here Schaeublin coins a Foucauldian neologism, “lateral disciplining”, but he is also influenced by Erving Goffman’s classic The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959). He set out consciously to be the perfect guest and has arrived at persuasive insights into the social dynamics of Nablus, portraying the practices of zakat and sadaqa as continuous with the importance of not humiliating the recipient of a gift, with everyday Islamic greetings and countergreetings, with the correct behaviour at a funeral and during Ramadan.

Schaeublin presents the building up of institutions of mutual aid as a practical expression of the Palestinian virtue of șumūd, “steadfastness”, which also motivates the assertion of national cultural values and the determination not to give up land or to emigrate.The practice of zakat, both formalized and informal, had a symbolic value for the people of Nablus. In the absence of quantitative data, Schaeublin’s book gives an engrossing portrait of a city where extremes of poverty and misery were held in some check by a moral order grounded in an Islamic commitment to human dignity amid adversity.  It remains to be seen how much of this fragile local homoeostasis will hold out as the fundamental clash between Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms remains unresolved.

Nablus between Schaeublin’s fieldwork in 2013–14 and the eve of 7^th October 2023 would seem in essentials to have changed relatively little, except for living conditions gradually deteriorating, Palestinian nationalism apparently losing its potency, the ageing PA leadership presiding over political torpor with an iron grip. In retrospect, it is now clear that the Netanyahu government was engaged in a classic “divide and rule” strategy by Israel to make sure that the Hamas-led Gaza strip and the Fatah-led West Bank would remain disunited. Hamas’s exorbitant attack on Israel on 7^th October 2023 provoked the massive reprisals by Israel in Gaza which the world’s media could not ignore. The repercussions in the West Bank, including sharply increased repression and violence, have been less carefully reported.

At a time when the main international demand is for the mapping by experts of shifting geopolitical fields of force, Schaeublin’s style of “slow” ethnography is bound to be overshadowed. But like all the best ethnography it leaves room for future interpretation. For the Hamas-led political opposition (muqāwama) the core antidote for the “social suffering”^[2]“Social suffering” was the theme of an influential number of Daedalus edited by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret Lock, 125.1, Winter 1996. of Palestinians was faith in martyrdom. Schaeublin’s emphasis on steadfastness (șumũd) suggests that faith in ultimate justice has been a vital alternative source of meaning. But can the sheer weight of injury have a numbing effect on this resource?

Note of Emanuel Schaeublin:

Since 7 October 2023, Nablus has been struck by economic hardship. Many breadwinners lost their job—due to the breakdown of the security situation in the Northern West Bank. Settler violence, Israeli military operations and the deployment of checkpoints are restraining people’s ability to move around or to move goods from one town to the next. This is affecting Nablus’s markets, which were an attractive shopping destination for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship during the time of my fieldwork. People from Nablus I speak with on the phone don’t know what to expect. Engagements and weddings are called off because many can no longer provide proof of a stable income.

The past months have put the socially distributed responsibility to look after people in need to another test, just as during the first and the second Intifada in the 1990s and early 2000s. According to press reports, the Nablus Zakat Committee started a local fundraising campaign to address increasing hardship. The launch took place in December 2023 in the Chamber of Commerce in the presence of personalities serving on the present or previous committees. The presence of former members with different political backgrounds highlights the broad social coalition supporting such an institution in times of crisis. According to the acting president, annual spending in 2023 was roughly 1.5m Euro in various kinds of aid to households, orphans, etc.

My book on zakat giving and references to God in everyday interactions is written from an outsider’s perspective. Since moving back to my home town Zurich in 2015, I have recognized many things that I learned to attend to while in Nablus: utmost discretion and feelings of shame surrounding abundant wealth or the lack of it, lateral disciplining among neighbours as a constant part of social life, and subtle hints at some form of ultimate justice underpinning financial dealings of all kinds. All this also shapes life in a post-Protestant city such as Zurich. My attempts to conduct an ethnographic study focusing on such themes in Zurich and its political economy, and comparing such material with my findings in Nablus, have not yet come to fruition.

As regards my book on Nablus, I hope that my findings will be put to the test by anthropologists with different positionalities conducting research on zakat and sadaqa practices in the towns and villages of the northern West Bank.