As Gorski (2005, p 189) argues, the revival of interest in religion in the social sciences is due to a variety of historical and intellectual forces that have converged in the post-Cold War era:

• • growing criticism of enlightenment thinking, the decline of modernism and materialist Marxism and the increasing post-modern awareness of the need to respond to multiculturalism;

• • the increasing importance of cultural analysis in the social sciences;

• • the emergence of a new generation of macro-sociologists whose political leanings have been formed after the fall of the Berlin Wall;

• • a generalised revival of religious activism across the globe including the Western nations.

These are welcome developments as they facilitate the subject matter of this book. However, I would add further that in the case of Middle East social policy and of Islamic welfare, a focus on religion in public policy has been a long time coming. It is a gap that came to my mind some time before 9/11 as part of a simple awareness shared by many others that much more was going on in the Middle East than oil, repression of women and war. Indeed, it was/is the simple (or simplistic?) belief that we could still find new possibilities for positive social action in this region and that this could be based on the pragmatic premise of building on what already works.

This book thus marks a preliminary attempt to consider the role of religion in social welfare from the perspectives of local social actors in a Middle Eastern context. Drawing on the case of Lebanon and using supplementary evidence from Egypt, Iran and Turkey, it has embarked on the objective of exploring the dynamic characters of religious identity and values as these provide real solutions to real social problems. My underlying concern has been to understand how religious welfare is conceptualised, how it is applied in practice and what value it effectively holds as a basis for social policy in Lebanon and the wider Middle East region.

The primary objective of this book has been to describe and understand how welfare providers and users in Lebanon perceive religious welfare, employ it to achieve goals of human well-being and finally evaluate its impact on their lives. I have supplemented these subjective perceptions with my own fieldwork observations.