Despite its roots in a religious entity, OISCA [The Organization for Industrial, Spiritual and Cultural Advancement] is registered as a non-religious group. Many of the staff express ambivalence about the religious aspects of OISCA’s vision, staff composition, and history. In an avowedly “secular” Japanese society—an environment crafted in the immediate years after the Second World War by the U.S. Occupation, which was intent on eradicating the principles of “State Shinto” that were seen as the basis of an evil imperial regime—the term “religion” often triggers an allergic reaction. The terrorist attacks by the cult Aum Shinrikyō, in 1995, have not helped either. Wedged between a religious heritage and demands for secularity, OISCA offers a telling case in which religion and aid work entwine in complicated ways. How does the religious-secular boundary sharpen or blur in the trainings described as “person-making” (hitozukuri)? What kinds of persons are made in these activities?

There’s something attractive about a neat typology, and also something we seem to loathe about the compartmentalization entailed. So what I want to do here is open up some more conversation on this ambivalence.

Since the process of understanding divine law is not a uniform or singular one, there are multiple interpretations of what divine law is, and, consequently, there are many schools of Islamic legal thought. The sharīʿah-fiqh distinction is one that is clearly recognized in Islamic jurisprudential texts and beyond. While I am still in the process of undertaking a thorough historical study, I suspect that the conflation of the terms sharīʿah and fiqh became normative among Muslims in the modern era—particularly in the context of Islamist-based resistance to imperialism. Regardless of the precise genealogy, the use of the term sharīʿah rather than fiqh in contemporary Muslim discourses has political motivations and ramifications; in other words, it is essentially about power.