In the lead up to Ramadan last year, a charity which exclusively works and supports our brothers and sisters in Gaza approached a number of masājid for a tarawīh fundraising slot. The year before, they had been granted a respectable 38 slots from various masājid, but at the start of Ramadan last year, only 10 masājid had offered them the opportunity to fundraise. This year, only three have confirmed.
In the wake of a genocide where the death toll is beyond a statistic, where the majority of homes, public buildings, and infrastructure have been razed to the ground, for the charity to receive such a poor response from masājid is concerning to say the least.
Masājid employing market practices
What turned concern into disbelief, however, was hearing the responses the charity had been given by masājid after requesting the opportunity to fundraise.
The three comments which stuck out most prominently were,
We need to prioritise charities who are touring with a Qāri, so if anything is left after that, we will let you know.”
Please fill in our form, and one of our sales team will contact you to discuss the packages we have on offer.”
What can you offer?”
What was essentially being said was “We will allow you to fundraise as long as we make something from it ourselves.”
As a trustee of my own local masjid, I completely understand and sympathise with the need for masājid to collect funds to operate services for the community. They, like all charities, see Ramadan as the most opportune time to fundraise in the year.
However, it is clear that there is little or no potential for masājid to take advantage of a significant “daily” collection in Ramadan just for themselves. People may give charity to their masjid on a couple of days at most, but would then quickly seek out other charities and predominantly those supporting people in crisis zones. What this essentially means is that within the blessed month, a masjid need simply reserve a night or two of fundraising for itself and offer the remaining slots to other charities. This, to my knowledge, has been the way that most masājid have typically operated their fundraising schedules during the blessed month, but that model it seems, is now changing.
In the last few years, it has become apparent that some masjid committees, often facing rising operational costs, have adopted what are viewed as “innovative” ways to increase the amount of money raised during Ramadan. Chief among these are two methods.
The first is levying a charge on the donations charities collect from their congregations. For example, a masjid will stipulate that in return for a fundraising slot, it will receive 15 per cent of all donations collected by the charity that evening.
The second method is by offering packages which charities need to purchase in order to secure a fundraising slot. These packages may have slight variances, but the masājid essentially seek to capitalise on the strength of their congregation and the scarcity of odd nights which are valued by charities for their potential to earn significant revenue. Put more plainly, the more virtuous the night, the higher the cost to secure it.
These practices, when combined with a masjid’s own fundraising slot(s), have significantly increased Ramadan revenues, but also mark a notable shift in how charitable access to the masjid is structured.
Commodification of sadaqah
While some may laud the ingenuity of these schemes, when one takes a moment to look beyond bank balances, it becomes clear that the Muslim community is unwittingly investing itself in an idea which sits poorly with our faith.
Around a decade ago I wrote an article about the corporatisation of the charity sector and how we were witnessing its change from an essentially altruistic institution to an industry or market where charity is commodified to be bought and sold. I never imagined ten years on, this same logic would find a home within masājid themselves.
Rather than welcoming and supporting charities working sincerely with great commitment and heart, some masājid are now leveraging the plight of our brothers and sisters in the Ummah to generate funds or are using it as a way of securing the presence of a melodious reciter. In such a framework, we risk reducing the spiritual into something we consume, instead of something that forms us into people who give, act and sacrifice.
Value of transaction over virtue
Sadaqah by its very nature necessitates giving up, sacrificing one’s wealth and resources for a virtuous transaction with Allah, rather than a material transaction with His creation.
Allah, the most High, says,
You will never achieve righteousness until you give from that which you love.” [1]
The idea of sacrificing that which you hold dear, that which you would rather hold on to — for the sake of Allah — means, at that moment, to deplete your material state rather than increase it. And by doing so, you build, as the Sharī’ah intended, bonds of affection between one another.
To demand some form of material recompense for giving sadaqah or facilitating the collection of sadaqah may not necessarily come from poor intentions, but reflects a shift in the way we think. This is rooted, not in the beauty of our selfless and generous tradition but, in a market logic which prizes material self-interest. Again, while there is no doubt that the intention of masjid committee members will be the benefit of their congregation, we have to be clear that the value being taught here is not one of virtue, but of transaction.
There is nothing wrong with material transactions while they remain within the confines of the market, but when the distinction between the market and masjid becomes blurred, Imams and community leaders must ask themselves what ethic, what value system is being taught to congregations when sadaqah becomes commodified? Are we inadvertently framing ourselves as competitors, as somehow in opposition to one another, rather than as one community?
Market logic goes beyond masājid
To suggest that this is solely a masjid issue, however, would be deeply misleading. The same market logic has quietly embedded itself across other religious institutions that shape Muslim consciousness, including “da’wah” organisations.
This is not an accusation of bad faith, nor a denial of the sincere and often valuable work many of these organisations do. Rather, it is an observation that even spaces explicitly devoted to cultivating virtue and ethical sensibility have not been immune to the gravitational pull of commodification.
When institutions formed to teach sacrifice, sincerity and service, begin to structure their activities around monetised access, exclusive tiers, or revenue-sharing arrangements, it signals not individual moral failure but the normalisation of a wider ethical framework that is increasingly taken for granted.
Consequences for the Muslim community
Some of the popular methods “da’wah” organisations employ are incentivising high-net-worth (HNW) donors to sponsor their events and “earn” a reserved front row space to pray behind a celebrity reciter or have a private session with a well-known Imam.
Even “Islamic” podcasters have not remained immune to the trappings of commodified sadaqah. While outlining the virtues of supporting their work, they have subscription models where higher paying packages unlock exclusive access to online content and even the chance to connect personally with their guests.
The unwitting outcome is one which frames people as competitors for resources and not as a community seeking the common good for all. If these are the ethics of our “da’wah” organisations, it is difficult to see how such a mindset would not filter into the consciousness of the Muslims they educate through their institutions.
In all of this, the truth is that charities themselves are no less to blame. In general — and not aimed at any specific organisation — it was charities who were among the first to fully adopt modern, market-driven fundraising practices, often in the name of efficiency, scalability, and impact. Donation targets, performance metrics, branded campaigns, donor segmentation, and competitive Ramadan calendars became normalised. The underlying logic was simple and rarely questioned: we want to collect more money, so what works best?
Yet in pursuing that question almost exclusively, deeper moral considerations were jettisoned: questions about what such methods were doing to intentions and the ethical fabric of the community. Fundraising increasingly became something to optimise rather than discipline. Now, having created their Frankenstein, charities are beginning to experience the troubling downstream effects of their handiwork: finding themselves priced out of masājid, competing not only with each other but with the institutions meant to support them, and struggling to navigate a landscape they helped to create.
Invisible doctrine affecting us all
There is a pervasive yet, as George Monbiot suggests, invisible logic in society which has institutionalised the way we think. Its power has been to filter our thoughts, our imagination, our sincere intentions within its own framework, its world-view, and committed us to creating a society entirely in its image.
In such a society, self-interest is the highest ethic. And values such as justice, compassion, concern, and sacrifice are reduced to mere soundbites, leveraged only to realise outcomes which promote and encourage more individualistic and self-serving values.
We, therefore, become competitors for resources, not collaborators for the common good. We encourage people to engage with our initiatives not altruistically, but by incentivising them with some form of material benefit. We often undermine the works of others because we see them as threats to our funding streams. We try to second volunteers for our own organisations without any thought to other organisations who may also need support.
In short, we more resemble a market than we do a community.
A call for a return to sincerity and co-operation
If we are serious about becoming a community — that is, a brotherhood bound by shared ethical commitments rather than competing funding streams — we must be honest about what this requires of us.
Rejecting market logic will not be easy. It will almost certainly mean slower growth, fewer headline figures, and less immediate financial certainty. It will require trust: that giving without extracting value in return is not loss but obedience; that Allah places barakah where sincerity exists; and trust in one another as collaborators rather than competitors. It will feel risky, particularly in a climate where survival is often framed as dependent on constant expansion and optimisation.
Yet the alternative is far more costly. A community that organises itself as a market may generate impressive revenues, but it will quietly erode the very values that once gave those resources meaning. If, however, masājid, charities, and “da’wah” organisations reorient themselves around the ethics of our tradition, seeing themselves not as rival institutions but as interdependent parts of a moral whole, something far more durable becomes possible. Co-operation would replace duplication and create efficiencies, while success would be measured not by who raised the most, but by how faithfully we served. In doing so, we may yet recover a form of collective strength that does not merely sustain institutions, but reforms the heart, and once again becomes a force for justice, compassion and mercy in a beleaguered world.
Source: Islam21c
Notes
[1] al-Qur’an, 3:92
