PARTICIPANTS

Saad Ibrahim
Ibn Khaldoun Center, Cairo

Saad Eddin Ibrahim is an Egyptian sociologist and author, and one of Egypt's leading human rights and democracy activists. He is credited for playing a leading role in the revival of Egypt's contemporary research-based civil society movement. A professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo, he is the founder of both the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Cairo and the Arab Organization for Human Rights. Ibrahim has supported fair elections when they were viewed as incompatible with Egyptian politics, and has promoted international democratic alliances. 

Paragraph Statement

Question: What do you think is the most important issue involving religion that confronts international NGOs?

Muslim Faith-Based Organizations (MFBOs), Muslim NGOs, and the World System

Muslim Faith-Based Organizations (MFBOs) have existed for centuries, but entered the world’s consciousness only toward the end of the 20th and early 21st centuries.  One end of a complex continuum of these organizations is occupied by militantly radical, political organizations whose archetype is Al-Qa’eda. They include liberation or resistance groups such as Palestinian HAMAS and Lebanese Hizbullah. At the other end of the continuum we might place non-violent and largely justice or development-oriented groups whose archetype is the Islamic Relief Organization (IRO).  Included at this pole would be Islamic usury-free banks and Muslim Community Development Associations (MCDAs).  Given such stark differences in goals and understandings of the same faith, it is crucial that social science not fall into the simplistic stereotyping prevalent in the media and, unfortunately, in some policy circles.

Critical questions to be asked include: Do all Muslim organizations recruit membership from similar pools of the faithful? Is it the case that organizations begin toward one end of the continuum and move toward the other?  Under what conditions do MFBOs evolve in either direction? What is the significance of the fact that organizations at both ends of the continuum display global out-reach in recruitment, resource mobilization, targeting and impact?

For nearly a century, the social science community downplayed the role of religion in public affairs, seeing faith in retreat vis-à-vis the advancing forces of modernization. The latter was a Nation-State centered to an obsession. Within international relations circles, the obsession was with the actions of Nation-States to the exclusion of other groups and movements. The march of events in recent decades since the fall of Berlin Wall and 9/11 has been humbling to both of these disciplines. One of the challenges to researchers is to examine with fresh eyes the conditions under which radical MFBOs are created and whether there may be lessons to be learned regarding pathways to de-radicalization.

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