"'Morally Invested': The Moral Returns of Charity Among India's Muslims" with Chris Taylor

Visiting Scholar Brown Bag Lecture

Wednesday, October 7, 2015 12:00 PM EDT
Johnson Center, 3rd Floor, Room C

New Islamic charities are re-inventing Islamic almsgiving (zakat) in north India, interpreting it as a as moral and social investment in both Muslim communities and in India’s economy. Almsgivers discuss returns on this investment in macroeconomic, spiritual, and ethical terms. In the process, Muslim reformers are re-imagining zakat as a “principle of economics” and an economic system viewed as distinct from – yet imbricated with – local capitalisms. This talk invites us to reconsider what a “moral economy” is and its role in Islam. Conclusions discuss work in economic sociology on embedded economies and how presumably rational actors are ethically entangled.

Christopher B. Taylor is a post-doctoral fellow at the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies and instructor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at George Mason University. Dr. Taylor received his Ph.D. from Boston University in May 2015 and was a graduate research fellow of the National Science Foundation (NSF).