Muslim Philanthropy within Western Paradigm and Islamic Black Radical Tradition by Faiza Abdulkadir
After completing my BA in International Business, I spent 5 years in fundraising before preparing to pivot into international development. Instead, something better emerged. I first studied an MSc in International Development, and I hated it. The critique and honesty I needed were missing. I later found myself thankful to transfer to an MA in Culture, Diaspora, and Ethnicity (Psychosocial Studies) after meeting a new friend who joined one of my core modules. We instantly clicked, and I remember thinking: “A lot of these folks are here because of work, right? Are we the weird ones here from the ends?” I will always be grateful to her and to my lecturer, Dr Yasmeen Narayan, for introducing me to a vast range of postcolonial, feminist, and decolonial thinkers. Their work became a framework through which I could begin to answer my questions about international development: how funders decide whose needs are legitimised for care and what shapes those decisions.
A decade later, I read Dr Rhea Rahman’s Racialising the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown, and White (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), which asks many of these same questions. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork with Islamic Relief across three continents and seven countries, Rahman extends these concerns further to ask: what does it mean for Islamic NGOs to operate within systems that require them to prove their legitimacy, competence, and compatibility under the Western gaze?
Restrictions and Rules on Muslim Philanthropy within the Western Paradigm
“Racial capitalism, Islamophobia, anti-Muslim racism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy condition the political and economic conditions within which Islamic Relief can exist and function. It conditions who can give, who can receive, and the material, ontological, and epistemological conditions of ‘need’ itself.”
Racialising the Ummah unpacks both the historical and contemporary institutional design of international development and its presumed neutrality, even though the reality of “doing good” in international development has never been neutral. Its roots are colonial.[1] Rahman situates development across her fieldwork in Mali, South Africa, and elsewhere in the Global South as a Western project of modernisation that positions Western culture as superior within a global economy built on the exploitation of colonised land and labour. [2]Western imperial interventions were first framed as a “civilising” project intended to impose order on colonised nations, then as a “modernising” mission to help “underdeveloped” nations catch up. These logics produced fixed binaries: Global South versus Global North, Developing versus Global North, Developing versus Developed, and the West and the Rest. Not only do these binaries create separation, but they also manufacture difference — recasting an extractive relationship as a 'natural' hierarchy that casts non-Western nations and cultures as lagging behind, disempowered, and unmodern. Subsequently, the colonial project later shifted again to an "empowerment" framework that claims to teach communities to help themselves. Throughout these shifts, however, the underlying assumption of Western superiority persisted, justifying ongoing coloniality and white saviourism, which in contemporary life today upholds whiteness in every way and form. It legitimises the role of Western humanitarianism and foreign aid in an infrastructure rooted in racial hierarchy and racial capitalism. It’s the same story everywhere, which is why I think this book speaks volumes to the truth of how they are tools of what Paul Gilroy calls “colonial melancholia”. This refers to the inability of Western nations to grieve the end of Empire by maintaining an imperial identity that devalues local knowledge, culture, power, and political agency.[3]
These structures reproduce the same racist narratives by disempowering minoritised and racialised communities in Britain. This is why the social sector claiming to be for them, can also be a very harmful space. The constant need for communities to prove their legitimacy and readiness to access resources they are either exploited for -or simply should have equal access to. There is always some political agenda to navigate, or endless funding criteria built by Western institutions that have formalised humanitarianism around financial reporting, governance structures, and buzzwords like 'impactful'. It’s a vicious cycle, really, one that has forced communities to burn out from systematic oppression and then having to beg for funding to heal the harm they have been caused. Therefore, the concept of “saving the lives of those in need,” as Rahman argues, sits at the centre of foreign aid and Western humanitarian governance, making sure minoritised and racialised communities remain the ones in need.
This logic shapes the ability of how Global Majority communities and Islamic NGOs, such as Islamic Relief, “do good” for themselves or others, even when they have, in many respects, “earned the trust of the West” as Western-founded organisations. However, despite this perceived trust, a predetermined racial hierarchy still requires the legitimisation of their existence, not only as a legal necessity but specifically as Islamic NGOs emerging from a “suspect community.” In the UK, this occurs within systems of surveillance such as the counter-terrorism strategy Prevent, which constructs Muslims and Islam as a racialised project that must be modernised to resemble supposedly superior identities: liberal, Christian, Western, American, and European.[4]
According to Islamic Relief founder Dr Hany El-Banna, one of the organisation’s founding challenges was figuring out “how to get the West to trust you, and the Muslims to not suspect you”.[5] Islamic Relief’s humanitarian work cannot escape the racial logic through which Muslims and Islam are continually othered, even when the organisation collaborates with the Department for International Development (DFID) or operates in Palestine. The organisation remains under strict scrutiny from Muslim donors, state institutions, and government bodies alike. In January 2016, for example, Islamic Relief was effectively shut out of mainstream banking when HSBC terminated its relationship with the charity because of “the nature of our work”. [6]Israeli authorities accused Islamic Relief of being a terrorist organisation in 2014, claiming that its humanitarian work in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, ongoing since 1994, functioned as a front for Hamas.[7] As Rahman notes, “not working in Palestine would invalidate Islamic Relief’s credibility as Islamic to many global Muslims,” even as Palestine remains one of the organisation’s most contested areas of intervention. Meanwhile, Germany and the UAE accused Islamic Relief of connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, allegations Islamic Relief denied, for which no illegal activity was formally established.[8] Collectively, these examples illuminate the institutional logic of Islamophobia that positions Islamic NGOs as inherently suspect within Western humanitarian governance.
The Islamic Black Radical Tradition as Liberatory Practice
“Despite its ubiquity within Islamic Relief and beyond, I found examples of ‘doing good’ that refused rather than upheld the pervasive frames of white supremacy. I frame these liberatory practices of doing good as exemplars of what I call an Islamic Black radical tradition.”
Liberatory practices have never required reinvention or institutional approval. They have long existed within collective consciousness as forms of survival and resistance outside Western paradigms of reporting, funding, and programme design. Rahman frames these practices as part of the Islamic Black Radical Tradition, positioning Islam and Blackness as forms of political solidarity. When a Black Muslim staff member at Islamic Relief’s Washington, DC office asked Rahman, “We’re American Muslims, why aren’t we doing more in Black communities in the US? What did Malcolm X teach us?”, the question foregrounded the importance of collective solidarity in opposing white supremacy and dismantling racial hierarchies.
The Islamic Black Radical Tradition draws from George Lipsitz’s understanding of “Blackness as politics rather than a pigment, a culture rather than a colour,”[9] rooted in Cedric Robinson’s conceptualisation of the Black Radical Tradition as the collective development of consciousness through historical struggles for liberation.[10] Within this tradition, Rahman includes Malcolm X, also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (May God rest his soul), who framed Islamic ethics as a collective Muslim responsibility to actively oppose white supremacy and foster Black self-determination.[11] It is within the political framing for the “moderate Muslim”[12] that Rahman situates the conditions under which Islamic Relief can operate as an NGO. Rahman acknowledges the global experiences of Blackness and Muslimness not by flattening them into a hegemonic framing, but by positioning them as liberatory practices rooted in relationship-building, care, resistance, and healing.
Through her fieldwork with Abdullah and Da’wud, Islamic Relief staff in South Africa, whose grassroots practices centre Black-led community self-determination over institutional charity, Rahman illustrates what this tradition looks like in practice.[13] Abdullah’s ethic of radical openness and community participatory, alongside Da’wud’s shift from charity toward economic self-sufficiency through women’s empowerment and political education, both demonstrate what Rahman calls imaginings of “doing good” otherwise: not imposed from above, but flourishing within communities living at the margins of institutional regulation.[14]
In my previous JMB Uncharitable paper, Relationship Building as Resistance: My Love-Hate Relationship with Fundraising, I explored a similar practice and vision about the importance of relationship-building as a form of collective resistance.[15] Rahman’s work both affirms and deepens that belief because of my survival as a Black British Somali Muslim Woman living in Britain. My liberation and drive are fuelled by the relationships I have built from childhood to adulthood. Whilst I recognise not all relationships may be positive at times, individualism is a trap of capitalism that so often at times, we nearly trip up over, but for what? This simply stops us from any ‘doing good’ for ourselves or others.
“As long as Islamic Relief remains constrained within the structures of power of our current world, it will remain limited in its imaginings and practices of doing good. It was in those working at the margins of institutional regulation that I found imaginings of ‘doing good’ otherwise.”
Racialising the Ummah is essential reading. It offers a critical intervention without easy answers, providing a clear historical and contemporary account of what it means to “do good” within Western humanitarianism while exposing both structural oppression and the liberatory possibilities that exist within an Islamic Black radical collective consciousness.[16] So often, Islam and Blackness are treated as separate entities which is why I was so drawn to this book as a fundraiser and as Faiza. Rahman illuminates both the historical foundations and contemporary conditions of international development while insisting that the horizon of possibility remains open and in our hands for liberation. Islamic Relief itself, since its founding in 1984, demonstrates that contradiction and resistance coexist. As Loubna Qutami writes, drawing together Black abolitionist, Indigenous decolonial, and Palestinian thought: “a broken system cannot be repaired but must be abolished.”[17]
You can purchase a copy of Rhea Rahman’s Racialising the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown from: Rhea Rahman’s Racialising the Ummah: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517920272/racializing-the-ummah/
Sources
[1] Rodney, W. (2018). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Verso. See also Nkrumah, K. (1965). Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Thothe positions of Global South versus Global North, Developing versus Developed, and mas Nelson & Sons.
[2] Bhattacharyya, G. (2018). Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival. London: Rowman & Littlefield. See also Gilmore, R.W. (2002) 'Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography', The Professional Geog,legitimatesstructurerapher, 54(1), pp. 15–24.
[3] Gilroy, P. (2006). Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Gilroy adapts the psychoanalytic concept of melancholia to describe how Western nations, unable to mourn or reckon honestly with the loss of empire, develop a pathological attachment to imperial identity that manifests as hostility toward racialised others and a devaluation of non-Western knowledge, culture, and political agency.
[4] Aktay, Y. (2004) 'Diaspora and Stability: Constitutive Elements in a Body of Knowledge', Islamophobia Studies Journal, 1(1), pp. 1–20.
[5] Gavin Seal Media (2013) 'An Interview Dr. Hany El Banna with Gavin Produced for SIFE.' YouTube. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8CncQSEaZXNM
[6] Gadher, D. (2016) 'Terror Fear Makes HSBC Cut Ties to Muslim Charity', The Sunday Times, 3 January. Available at: https://www.thetimes.com/article/terror-fear-makes-hsbc-cut-ties-to-muslim-charity-s9hn7xl5p
[7] Haghamed, N. (2020) 'Islamic Relief Is a Charity, Not a Terrorist Group. We're Going to Court to Prove It', The Guardian, 27 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/27/islamic-relief-charity-terrorist-court-israel-palestinians
[8] IRW (2019b) Islamic Relief Worldwide internal report.
[9] McKittrick, K. and Woods, C.A. (2007) Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. Toronto: Between the Lines; Cambridge, MA: South Eoftennd Presswe so often trip.
[10] Lipsitz, G. (2017) 'What Is This Black in the Black Radical Tradition?', in Johnson, G.T. and Lubin, A. (eds.) Futures of Black Radicalism. London: Verso, pp. 108–119.
[11] Robinson, C. (2000). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, p. 171.
[12] Curtis, E.E. (2015) '"My Heart Is in Cairo": Malcolm X, the Arab Cold War, and the Making of Islamic Liberation Ethics', The Journal of American History, 102(3), pp. 775–798.
[13] Sayyid, S. (2014). Recalling the Caliphate: Decolonisation and World Order. London: Hurst.
[14] Chari, S., Hunter, M. and Samson, M. (eds.) (2022) Ethnographies of Power: Working Radical Concepts with Gillian Hart. New York: New York University Press.
[15] Kundnani, A. (2023). What is Antiracism? And Why It Means Anticapitalism. London: Verso.
[16] Khabeer, S.A. (2016). Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States. New York: New York University Press.
[17] Loubna Qutami, “Toward a Theory of Palestinian Liberation,” in The Futures of Palestine, ed. Alex Lubin (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), 318–319.