In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Located in the arid flat outskirts of the northern city of Mafraq is a regional branch of the Islamic Center Charity Society (ICCS), Jordan’s largest ISI. I drove to Mafraq from Amman on a glorious sunny day and spent an extremely pleasant afternoon with the director of an active and caring group of teachers, other employees, and volunteers. As was apparent during the drive, the governorate of Mafraq is sparsely populated with predominantly Transjordanians (those who lived in Jordan prior to the arrival of Palestinian refugees) and Bedouins, and it is also the country’s poorest region . The center, however, is quite large; it has ninety employees and houses a kindergarten, a boys’ and girls’ junior school (grades one to six), a senior school for boys (grades seven to ten), and a center for orphans and the needy.1 The center, including its administrative offices and schools, consists of several buildings surrounding a courtyard that is used as a playground. There is also a very small agricultural project where food is grown for orphans .2 Seven school buses bring well over 1,000 pupils and students to school each day; the largest number of students (672) attend the junior school. The center financially assists thirty-five orphans, fifty-five needy families, and a limited number of university students on a regular basis.3 Several hundred needy individuals receive financial or material aid on an irregular basis. However, while the school fees are subsidized by donations and are kept down as much as possible, they remain quite high. The kindergarten fees are 120 Jordanian dinar (JD) per year plus 55 JD per year for transportation; this fee rises to 160 JD per year plus 75 JD for transportation for students in grade ten.4 Despite the surrounding poverty and the fact that some orphans do attend the school for free, the school is a private one and remains, as the director stated to me, a middle-class school.5 While there can be no doubt that the Islamic Center Charity Society serves large numbers of poor and does an invaluable service, its school in THREE The Islamic Center Charity Society in Jordan: The Benefits to the Middle Class Mafraq is indicative of all its schools and many of its other projects, particularly its hospitals, in that it largely serves the middle class and not the poor. Indeed, the middle class benefits both in terms of services and employment. The nonprofit commercial services established by the ICCS, such as its private elementary and secondary schools, offer the middle class—which is disgruntled with the state educational system that is viewed as too Western, is unable to afford the private schools of the “velvet circles,” and is alienated by the Western curricula of the private schools—an alternative curriculum, one that promises greater religious content and a high-quality education.6 At the same time, these same institutions provide jobs to Jordan’s educated middle-class professionals. These include such positions as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, teachers, and principals, to name just a few. The profits that accrue from these private ventures are directed back into the schools and hospitals and not toward charity activities.7 They go toward improving middle-class services and working conditions. While these nonprofit commercial facilities and services are embedded within the ICCS network of activities , they serve a different audience than the audience for the ICCS’s charity activities. They demonstrate the degree to which ISIs are run not only by the middle class but for the middle class. As in the case in Egypt, in Jordan we see that the various ICCS centers or projects are initiated both from the bottom up—they are grassroots initiatives in which members of a local community approach the ICCS headquarters about establishing a project—and from the top down—as in the case of Cairo’s “trophy clinics.” The ICCS’s “five star” institutions—nonprofit commercial institutions such as the Islamic Hospital in Amman— are established by a decision made by the ICCS executive committee. As in Egypt, the middle-class bias within the ICCS is partly a result of the operational demands of ISIs; they need skilled middle-class employees and they need donors. However, in the case of Jordan, we more clearly see an intentional strategy to target the middle class by providing it with employment and services. The ICCS executive’s decision to target the middle class arises both from pressure within the movement—the...

Share