ABSTRACT
This chapter aims comparative historical analysis is to demonstrate a unifying spirit of the age, its genealogy and causes, while still drawing attention to some important differences between and within Christianity and Islam. The genealogy provided here can only be suggestive. Nevertheless, the genealogy is essential to the understanding of the four ethnographic chapters, since the organizations in question are transfused by the traces of the Christian and Islamic aspects of this global history. This double problematization requires us to walk through the historical junctures where Christian and Muslim ethics of interdependence and renunciation were produced, undone, and remade in response to changing social circumstances. The chapter portrays the ruptures that led to the crystallization of an ethics of interdependence in both religions, despite their less similar beginning points (renunciative redistribution versus bellicose redistribution). The crystallization of St. Augustine's position as the Christian position demonstrates that charitable ethics develop not through simple diffusion, but through differentiation.
