Africa Seminar – Da‘wa as Development: Kuwaiti Islamic Charity in Africa

Direct Aid (formerly Africa Muslims Agency), Kuwait’s largest charity focused on Africa, carefully mediates between Gulf donor wishes, aid recipient needs, Kuwaiti and African government regulations, and various development priorities. Since the 1980s, Direct Aid has been centralizing religious and development work in complexes that comprise orphanages, schools, clinics, and mosques. The Islamic NGO therefore cannot be confined to narrow Western categorizations of Gulf Salafi da‘wa (proselytizing) institutions. Direct Aid’s approach is strategically grounded in comprehensiveness/“holism,” which serves to blur established categories of “charity,” “relief,” and “development” to become da‘wa-as-development. What is the cultural and religious impact of Gulf funding in Africa? How do Kuwait headquarters interact with African beneficiaries? Based on multi-sited fieldwork, this talk examines Kuwaiti-funded projects in Tanzania and Senegal.

The lecture will be given by Mara Leichtman, associate professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University. She is author of Shi‘i Cosmopolitanisms in Africa: Lebanese Migration and Religious Conversion in Senegal and co-editor of New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, Power, and Femininity. As a Fulbright Scholar at American University of Kuwait, she launched a second project on Gulf Islamic humanitarianism in East and West Africa. She is spending Fall Semester 2024 as a visiting research fellow at Aarhus University.