Suchergebnisse

Up to the twentieth century, Islamic charitable endowments provided the material foundation of the Muslim world. In Lebanon, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition of French colonial rule, many of these endowments reverted to private property circulating in the marketplace. In contemporary Beirut, however, charitable endowments have resurfaced as mosques, Islamic centers, and nonprofit organizations. A historical anthropology in dialogue with Islamic law, God's Property demonstrates how these endowments have been drawn into secular logics—no longer the property of God but of the Muslim community—and shaped by the modern state and modern understandings of charity and property. Although these transformations have produced new kinds of loyalties and new ways of being in society, Moumtaz's ethnography reveals the furtive persistence of endowment practices that perpetuate older ways of thinking of one's self and one's responsibilities toward family and state.

AbstractOn August 4, 2020, one of the largest nonnuclear explosions in history rocked the city of Beirut, leaving over 200 people dead, 6,500 injured, and 300,000 homeless. As Beirutis debated strategies for rebuilding, another reconstruction project haunted their discussions: the postwar reconstruction of Beirut's city center, overseen by the private company Solidere. For many, Solidere stands for a neoliberal reconstruction project that placed profits over people, expropriating rights‐holders for company shares. While most organizing against Solidere in the 1990s failed, this article turns to a little‐known but more‐successful mobilization involving Solidere's expropriation of parcels and buildings that had been endowed as inalienable Islamic trusts. Many Beiruti Muslims rallied against these expropriations, citing endowment inalienability and resulting in publicized recuperations. Yet, archival and ethnographic research shows that this mobilization led to the recuperation of only some of these endowed properties. Many others were taken to market in order to allow for the perpetuation of the few. This chapter in the reconstruction of Beirut's city center complicates our understanding of capitalism, alienability, and inalienability, illustrating both the constant work needed to create free markets and the continued effectiveness of discourses of inalienability that perpetuate other forms of value and property under capitalism.

This essay engages Beshara Doumani's Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean. It highlights Doumani's significant deconstruction of the culturalist assumptions of the category of the Arabor Muslim family. Based on the wealth of the archive uncovered by Doumani, the essay calls for further engagement with the Islamic legal tradition in the analysis of sharia court records in order to better understand the relation between state, law, and community. Finally, it elaborates on Doumani's important contributions to the anthropology of kinship.

The Planning Moment elaborates the myriad ways that plans and planning practices pervade recent global history. The books twenty-seven case studies draw attention to the centrality of planning in colonial and postcolonial environments, relationships, and contexts