Description
Book SynopsisA free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more atwww.luminosoa.org. 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 logicsno longer the property of God but of the Muslim communityand 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 th
Trade Review"
God’s Property sheds an instructive light on the transformations that accompanied the emergence of these very regimes of accumulation that are pushing millions of Lebanese into poverty today." * The Middle East Journal *
"Highly readable yet complex. . . . This book is an important contribution to our understanding of Islam, philanthropy, law, and public policy through the lens of waqfs." * Journal of Church and State *
