Building a House in Heaven: Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in Egypt

3. A Space and Time for Giving

The mosque floor is covered with dark green carpet. An empty well sits in the center of the room; rusty pipe remnants protrude from the well. Scattered columns with historical engraving support the foundation of this side of the mosque. Several long tall shelves in the corner are filled with women’s shoes, left by the women praying, or in the case of the widows coming to collect their aid, plastic flip-flops. Women volunteers, organized by committee, sit on the perimeter of the room; all veiled, mostly elderly, they guard the few chairs in the building. As a visitor, I am allowed to sit on one of the chairs. Every first Tuesday or Thursday of the month, upward of two hundred women swarm into the mosque to receive their aid. They must first attend a brief sermon [khutba] given by one of the Quranic reading-group leaders [daʿiya] and then perform the noon prayer. The look of dread is apparent on many of their frowning faces, sweat dribbling down their black abayas [loose traditional cloaks], as they kneel on the ground, waiting impatiently. After the prayer, the women’s names are called out one by one, and each woman must present an ID card to the Hagga, sign on the line indicating her monthly aid amount, and verify her address and number of children. Many of the women are illiterate and so the Hagga reads the information to the women and then requests their khitm, a small stamp that they carry around with them and use in lieu of a signature. After receiving their envelopes, the women symbolically kiss it and softly utter “al-humdulillah” [Thanks Be to God]. On their way out of the mosque, many stop by another Hagga and ask if there is bread today. The Hagga hands them a small voucher, and the women scurry off to collect their shoes or slippers and proceed to the warehouse for leftover bread collected from local bakeries. (author’s field notes, March 15, 2006) • CHAPTER 3 • A Space and Time for Giving • 55 • ThisscenefromtheSalahal-DinMosqueinthemiddle-classneighborhood of al-Manyal describes a procedure that occurs at literally thousands of mosques in and around Cairo. I visited more than a dozen such zakat committeesscatteredaroundtownandfoundverylittlevariancebetweenthem . Thewomencomefromnearandfar,collectingbetween25and200LEfrom the charity committee at a local mosque to supplement the meager social securitybenefitsavailablefromthestarvedwelfarestatebudget.Manyofthe women, with no formal education and little or no family support, work as well,peddlingKleenextodriversatbusyintersections,housekeepingforthe wealthy, or sewing garments for two LE apiece (about 20 American cents). Support from zakat committees often came with the requirement to attend moral and religious instruction (irshad dini) on topics such as cleanliness ,organization,honesty,consistencybetweenwordsandactions,neighborly relations, relationships with relatives, marital relations, and other disciplinary and behavioral issues. Zakat committees in mosques across the country coupled direct aid with religious lessons. The Hagga, a softspoken austere yet energetic woman now in her late seventies, was a founding member of the Salah al-Din Mosque’s zakat committee in 1971; the committee officially became the country’s first women-run zakat committee in 1973 (Figure 9). The Hagga explained to me why religious lessons are given along with aid: “We want to raise the level of the women, teach them manners and cleanliness. Yes we want to help them, and we give them monetary assistance. But they also need education. God gives rewards (thawab) for knowledge sharing. . . . So we combine charity with religious lessons, which has an effect on human development” (interview, Cairo, March 22, 2006). The Hagga articulated a postcolonial civilizing narrative; helping the women meant giving them money and educating them in how to lead a proper life. The organization linked receipt of monetary aid with disciplinary practices, including religious and moral lessons, thereby grafting “morality onto economics” and using assistance as a “sacrament of moralization, control, and dissuasion.”1 The veiled recipients attendedprayers,listenedtosermons,andfollowedtheordersoftheHagga because they knew that the zakat committee members had discretion over how strict or lax they were with respect to contingencies for aid. The women thus performed such “technologies” of the self and complied with invasive social-research practices that investigated the details of their situation , home life, and neediness. The women did so because aid was contingent on their willingness to submit and they needed this aid to survive.2 56 A SPACE AND TIME FOR GIVING Figure 9. Entrance to the zakat committee at Salah al-Din Mosque in al...