EA - Effective Altruism for Muslims by Ahmed Ghoor

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Effective Altruism for Muslims, published by Ahmed Ghoor on July 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TLDR: We are finally making progress on EA for Muslims. For the next few months, we have someone working 0.5FTE on furthering the project and preparing it to be launched as its own organisation. We’ve linked a doc outlining our strategy in more detail and added a lot of other interesting info and considerations regarding EA for Muslims. Anyone interested in assisting this project, or wanting to keep up-to-date with its development, can email Ahmed or book a time on his calendly. Announcement: Kaleem will be hosting the “Meetup and Breakfast: EA For Muslims” session on the Saturday morning of EAG San Francisco - if you’re attending EAG, interested in joining the project or are interested in the topics in this post, please join! The “Why?” Scale Muslims are currently estimated to make up about 24% of the world population (1.8 billion people), and, being the fastest growing religion due partially to birth rates, the number of people in this altruistic community is set only to increase if current trends continue. The amount of charitable funding raised yearly through the Islamic institution of Zakat is estimated to be ~$550 billion . However, the total amount of charitable funding is likely much greater because many Muslims donate other forms of Islamic charity throughout the year, which does not count towards Zakat figures. Neglectedness To our knowledge, there are currently no organisations actively trying to direct Zakat, or other Muslim resources, to the highest impact evidence-based interventions, using frameworks advocated for by Effective Altruism. There have been no successful attempts to involve Muslim influencers in the EA community, or research and document the overlaps between ideas of effective altruism and understandings of Islam. The number of Muslims in the EA community is minimal. In the 2018 EA Survey, 7 respondents (out of 2607) identified as Muslim, and in the 2019 version, only 4 (of 1892) identified as Muslim.This is compared to 41 who identified as Jewish (before EA for Jews was started) and 209 that identified as Christian in the 2018 survey. Tractability Although community building within religious communities does pose some unique challenges, there are also comparative advantages. Individuals in religious communities are generally already convinced, by Scripture, that they should be dedicating a portion of their time and wealth to service. Therefore, not much energy needs to be given to convince the community to serve. It’s simply the “How/Where” that is up for debate. There are several philosophical and normative overlaps between ideas of effective altruism and understandings of Islam, which means we don’t have to distort or radically reinterpret religious texts to be in line with EA causes or principles (such as effective giving, animal welfare, or caring about the longterm future). Other reasons: There is a lot of overlap between community building in the Muslim community and community building in Africa and Asia (where Islam is a major religion in many countries). Work is currently being started in the African community building space, showing significant growth potential over the next year. These projects could, therefore, complement each other. Attempts to explore alternative “non-western” approaches to EA frameworks may benefit significantly from Islamic intellectual traditions, which itself inherited Greek philosophy and developed on it for several centuries. The “How?” Short-term Carry out the first phase of community building Focus on engaging Muslims already in EA (low-hanging fruit). Create a closed Facebook and Slack community group. Understand human resource capacity and skill sets within the community, which may inform, in co...