Trans-faith Humanitarian Partnerships: The Case of Muslim Aid and the United Methodist Committee on Relief

摘要

Amid tentative recognition of the work of faith-based organisations in responding to humanitarian crises, I examine a novel inter-faith partnership between Muslim Aid, the United Kingdom's second largest Islamic humanitarian agency, and the US-based United Methodist Committee on Relief, the official humanitarian agency of the United Methodist Church. In doing so, I look at why there are so few partnerships among Christian and Islamic humanitarian organisations, given the culturally plural circumstances in which humanitarian crises usually occur, and at what the case study here reveals about the necessary prerequisites for such partnerships. On the basis of ethnographic methods, including interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation, I examine the origins of the partnership in August 2006 amid Sri Lanka's civil war, and its subsequent development up to September 2008. Rather than trumpeting the partnership's successes, I emphasise its novel nature and the significant precedent that it represents.