RELIGION: Islamic Civil Society Occupies a Different World

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

GLASGOW, Jun 22 2006 (IPS) - A mostly invisible dividing line through non- governmental organisations opened up at the world assembly of civil society organisations that got under way in Glasgow this week – between the secular and the Islamic non-governmental organisations.

“The Islamic groups are also civil society, though the groups are not registered,” Sarra Osman Eisa from the Water and Development Foundation, an NGO in Sudan told IPS. “And they are influential groups, they can get a lot of other groups to follow them.”

Eisa herself works with one of the registered groups engaged in development work. There are more than 1,700 groups functioning in Sudan, she said. But while there is no definite number for Islamic NGOs, there are many around, she said.

“We keep hearing of new ideas, and then we hear that a group is established,” Eisa said. “Islam is not just a religion, it encompasses so many systems of belief like how a country should be run, for example. And many of them work in the field of religious education for the young.”

But these are not the kind of civil society groups around at the Civicus world assembly of NGOs. Some delegates at the assembly believe they should be.

“Islamic organisations are excluded by the secular NGOs, they are seen as doing something not quite right, even if that does not amount to terrorism,” Naved Chowdhury from Bangladesh told IPS. “These religious groups are not considered worthy enough, and they are under-represented in all the big debates. No one tries to understand their ideology.”

The perceived under-representation became an issue at a debate on civil society’s response to terrorism at the start of the world assembly.

There are only seven representatives from Muslim NGOs invited to the world assembly called by Civicus and the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO), Amani Kandill, Director of the Arab Network for NGOs in Cairo said at the meeting.

This opens up a huge gap between the secular civil society organisations and Muslims, she said. “Ninety percent of Muslims cannot relate to secular donor-funded civil society groups,” she said.

There is a need for greater recognition of “faith-based civil society organisations” engaged actively in promotion of health and education, Kandill said. The Civicus assembly has not reached out to such groups, she said. “No one is representing the Gulf countries here.”

One Lebanese member complained that no translation facilities into Arabic had been organised at the Civicus assembly. This, she said, was another indication of the low priority at the gathering for Muslim and Arab voices.

The work done by religious groups is acknowledged to be considerable, but is rarely quantified.

“A lot of schools in Bangladesh, the madrassas, run by religious groups reach out to millions,” Chowdhury said. “A few of them have been found to have had links with terrorist groups. But the development work they are doing cannot be ignored, they need to be brought into the mainstream of the development discourse.”

These groups are also civil society, Chowdhury said. “Just because they are religious does not mean that they are not a part of civil society.” The civil society agenda has been taken over by “western educated, urban and secular” groups, he said.

“How many Muslim civil society members have been invited from Bangladesh?” Chowdhury said. “None. So they are missing a huge constituency. They just call the same sort and listen to one another. This is dominated by a western oriented ideological bias.”

Several members from other groups said the low Arab and Muslim representation was a sign of their own lack of interest in joining the Civicus assembly, rather than any exclusion. But one way or the other, the divergence between Muslim and the ‘secular’ groups was at the fore as the meeting began.