341: Giving With Strings Attached

What does it really mean to do good, and who gets to decide? Saadia sits down with Dr. Rhea Rahman, an anthropologist at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and the author of Racializing the Umma: Muslim Humanitarians Beyond Black, Brown, and White. After more than a decade embedded with Islamic Relief, the largest Muslim NGO in the West, Dr. Rahman asks the questions most of us avoid: when Muslim organizations fly across the world to help, whose definition of "help" are they using? The episode gets into: The "good Muslim" trap-how Islamic charities are pressured to depoliticize themselves to gain Western acceptance Racial hierarchies inside Muslim communities and why South Asian Muslims are often disconnected from Black Muslim struggles The savior mentality immigrants unknowingly inherit and the hard work of unlearning it A radical reframe of Zakat: it's not charity. It's returning what was never yours to begin with What abolitionist Muslims and mutual aid movements are building as an ...