'It's getting very cold again' for Muslim charities, says IRUSA's Khan

When Anwar Khan co-founded Islamic Relief USA back in 1993, the organization wasn’t initially met with enthusiasm. “Many of the people in the mosque and in the traditional Muslim community, they were telling us, ‘Why are you here? We have enough humanitarian organizations,’” Khan recalled. Khan, at the time just 22 years old and fresh to the United States from England, disagreed. In the decades that followed, Islamic Relief USA, or IRUSA, grew to become the largest Muslim faith-based nonprofit in the U.S., and among the largest in the world. In April, Khan announced he’d be stepping down as IRUSA’s president, his most recent role in an organization he’s been at for over 30 years. “The options were I can stay here until I'm not wanted, or I can leave when I am wanted, which is now,” he told Devex in an exit interview. “I didn't want to be that guy that stayed on too long.” Khan achieved a lot in those 30 years. On his watch, IRUSA raised more than $1.3 billion and recruited 34,000 volunteers; in 2022 alone, it reached around 6.6 million people across 42 countries, providing everything from disaster relief to longer-term development interventions like job training. But he’s also encountered some significant storms. These have been both global, like the post-9/11 surge of Islamophobia and the current conflict in Gaza, as well as closer to home, like the fallout from anti-Semitic comments made by IRUSA staff, and accusations of terrorist ties leveled against IRUSA affiliate Islamic Relief Worldwide, or IRW. Now, with college campuses ablaze with calls for a cease-fire in Gaza and a U.S. election looming on the horizon, Khan’s departure coincides with what seems to be a historical turning point. “One of the reasons I was a little bit shy of leaving after 30 years was I thought this was going to be an incredibly important year,” he admitted. Election years are always difficult for Muslim nonprofits, Khan said, noting that “2016 was really, really difficult.” Shortly before Donald Trump was elected, IRUSA was working with the American Red Cross to respond to major flooding in Louisiana when they were told to leave by local officials in one of the parishes. A similar incident occurred in southern Illinois. The backlash, Khan said, was “simply because we were Muslim.” Khan was relieved that the 2020 election didn’t bring with it the same uptick in Islamophobia that the previous election had. Still, his tenure at IRUSA was long enough that he knows when to be worried. After the Sept. 11 attacks, Muslim humanitarian organizations — and their donors — were targeted. The same happened in 2016. After the Israel-Gaza war began last October, “many Muslim organizations are feeling it’s getting very cold again,” he said. “We're feeling civil society space is restricting again,” he said, citing the arrests of protesters taking place at universities across the country. “We’re talking about other things, but not talking about children dying in baby incubators. We're talking about everything on campuses and what's going on in Gaza, except for the actual humanitarian disaster that's happening right now.” IRUSA has also faced tactical challenges in delivering aid. IRW, the umbrella organization under which IRUSA sits — albeit legally independently — has long been barred from working in Israel due to alleged ties to Hamas. In its dealings with Gaza, IRUSA has had to seek other partners in order to wire funds, which include the World Food Programme, Catholic Relief Services, ANERA, and others. This is not a new development, Khan said, as banks have long been unwilling to work with Muslim organizations attempting to send money to places like Gaza and Syria, and increasingly, Afghanistan and Yemen. “Once the banks see that we're sending money from one Islamic organization to another, it's nearly impossible,” he said. Khan sees these restrictions as a canary in the coal mine for other organizations. In the last 10 years, it’s become more difficult for anyone, faith-based or not, to send money to conflict zones. “Often these restrictions start with minorities, whether they be ethnic or faith minorities, and then it spreads to the rest of the community,” he said. “If civil society space is restricting on us, that's a good sign of what's going to happen in the next few years to everyone else.” Cutting funding to Hamas has been a priority for Israel and its allies, including the United States. Israel claims to have found social media posts from leadership and staff of roughly two dozen organizations that express “implicit or explicit” support for Hamas, IRW among them. These claims have not been substantiated, though both IRUSA and IRW have previously grappled with staff making anti-Semitic social media posts, which dealt blows to the organizations’ reputations in the past. Khan is unequivocal that the actions of individual staff do not reflect the view of the organization, and denounced anti-Semitism as antithetical to the work IRUSA does as a humanitarian organization. When it came to IRUSA’s handling of anti-Semitic sentiments, which occurred around a year before the more public instance at IRW, he said they immediately parted ways with the offending individual, and the entire staff spent an afternoon at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. “We found it was important to let our friends and others know that, look, a mistake was made and we have tried to address that mistake, and this is how we're going to do a better job of making sure that that doesn't happen again in the future,” he said. While IRUSA didn’t receive the same scrutiny as IRW, Khan said, the association between the two organizations didn’t do IRUSA any favors. “From the beginning of Islamic Relief when it was started here in America, we knew that there would be less understanding if we made a mistake than if a white Christian organization or secular organization made a mistake,” Khan said. “We gave an excuse for people that were looking for an excuse to attack us when this happened.” While it’s undoubtedly a difficult time to be a Muslim charity, there’s also an enormous need for their services. By some estimates, over 80% of the world’s population adheres to some form of faith. When disaster strikes, Khan pointed out, local houses of worship are the first ones to help — they’re there before Western-based organizations parachute in, and they’re there long after they’ve departed. As the development sector continues to fumble its way toward localization, Khan feels organizations like IRUSA are ideally suited to bridge the gap. “Often what happens is people come, do their project, they run off, and they're seen as just instrumentalizing the locals,” he said. “This is where localization and faith and development intersect.” As for what’s next for IRUSA, Khan is hopeful — “I’m still an idealist after 30 years.” But he is also seeing a lot of polarization; an every-man-for-himself mindset that he hasn’t seen in a long time. “As a Muslim humanitarian organization leader in 2001, I felt very alone. In 2016, I didn’t,” he recalls, and credits joining alliances such as InterAction, the Charity & Security Network, and others for helping IRUSA become more visible to both the public and other humanitarian organizations. “We were under attack in 2017, and our colleagues came and supported us. I'm very grateful for that,” he said. “Now, we’ll see what happens in 2024.”