Religion and development in the middle east and North Africa (MENA): Poverty relief or social transformation

Introduction The role of religious actors, values and institutions in shaping public policy interventions, in terms both of policy formulation processes and of outcomes for end users, has become much more prominent in development studies and social policy in the last decade. This flourishing academic literature has so far paid little attention to the Middle East and North African region, in part perhaps as a result of the hegemony of political science (a discipline that typically does not engage with religious topics except for their salience to security issues) in Middle Eastern studies and the dominant concerns with issues of international security and geo-politics. Yet the study of development, social welfare and social justice issues has never been more urgent in the MENA region as now, and no doubt made so by the civil unrest which has swept across MENA countries starting with Tunisia in 2011.