Working with the suffering of the other through ummah activism :|performative humanitarianism in the Mahalle

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic attempt to ask “what happens when the world is represented through suffering of the Other” to the milieu of Ummah activism on the sufferings within Palestine and Syria based in Fatih. Throughout the study I address the affective conundrums of places such as protest sites, such as how the Ummah is sensed and performed throughout emoscapes of Islamic humanitarianism; as well as discursive inquiries, such as the kind of metanarratives that link these affects to define and describe the imaginary and the embodied existence of the Ummah. After discussing humanitarianism thoroughly in the beginning, I employ a redefinition of the Ummah as a virtual community of the post-Islamist times in order to present a backdrop analysis for understanding practices that expresses the imaginaries of the Ummah through suffering. As an ethnographic field, I take mahalle (neighborhood), the politico-spatial metaphor for the ideological resemblance and affective kinship as an imaginary unit (of the larger Ummah) for analysis. Within the mahalle, I take fragments of some pre-field encounters with Islamic humanitarianism as a starting point. Then, I follow the activists as they move to perform care in the name of the Other’s suffering; moving to mourn, to inform, to protest. By using participant observation in protests, seminars and a conference, and conducting in-depth interviews with five activists; I try to show how Muslim activists incorporate sites, narratives, objects and images to “feel” the Ummah when mobilizing for Syria and Palestine.