The proposed paper ties into the themes social fabrics and urban practices in Amman, Jordan. It explores the multifaceted relationships between state, city and inhabitants through the lens of performativity of citizenship and gender studies. I use the term city space rather than urban space to emphasise the spatial aspect of performing gender and belonging to a specific city, Amman, rather than urban practices in general. Moving between macro (state) to micro (quotidian), the everyday urban practices and imaginations of belonging to the city can be interrogated by focussing on official and hidden scripts of government-individual interactions. Specifically this paper is based on ethnographies of passport offices and art spaces, arguing that the power dynamics at work are more similiar than initially expected. This means looking at the relation between government practices, or official narratives of belonging to the city, and everyday practices and imaginations of the city's inhabitants. While these scripts themselves are not documented, we can attempt to extract them by focussing on the gendered performativity of everyday practices and experiences of citizenship. Focussing on performativity, a major interest lies in shedding light on the possibility gaps in official national scripts, in contradicting scripts, and how this opens cracks for alternatives in creating and imagining the fabric of Amman.

Motivated by the classical Islamic scripture and the teachings of modern Muslim thinkers, a growing number of self-identified Muslim women in Gaziantep devote their time and resources to humanitarian volunteering. The existing literature overlooks Muslim women’s humanitarian labor for being political tools of Islamist third parties endorsed by the ruling government, which negates any ethical and humane values attached to women’s efforts. Meanwhile, the faith-based humanitarian organizations—that recruit and mobilize women—attempt to portray women’s humanitarian labor solely as an act of compassion with no underlying political motivations or intentions. This paper provides an alternative perspective on Turkish-Muslim women’s volunteering by demonstrating how religious ethics and political rationales overlap inextricably in women’s involvement in the humanitarian field. I argue that drawing on the ethics of Islamic philanthropy and benevolence, pious Turkish women perceive volunteering as “a way of worship”—a necessary practice along with ordained religious duties. Through volunteered humanitarian work, women actualize themselves as benevolent social actors while seeking to expand and consolidate their faith communities. From a political perspective, pious women’s humanitarian volunteering promotes social change towards a religiously conservative and communitarian direction. Because community and family are at the center of their everyday Islamic teachings and rhetoric, pious women’s benevolent work focuses on correcting the cultural ill-effects of neoliberal transformation of the Turkish welfare regime by strengthening familial ties and communal relationships. This paper scrutinizes aspects of women’s religious humanitarian logic and practices through women’s worldview. In doing so it will also demonstrate that women’s moral and political visions are beyond the existing apolitical or over-politicized representations. The data is collected during my two-years ethnographic dissertation field research in Gaziantep, Turkey. I employed multiple qualitative methodologies, including conducting organizational ethnography at local faith-based organizations in Gaziantep, on-site observations at various humanitarian events, semi-structured interviews with managers, and in-depth interviewing with volunteers. I have conducted semi-structured interviews with approximately thirty women from three different local faith-based organizations. With ten of these women, I have conducted in-depth interviews and observed their volunteering practices closely for twelve months between 2019 and 2020. Keywords: Volunteering; humanitarianism; Muslim women; faith-based organizations (FBOs); communitarianism