Drawing on Mauss's classical essay on “The Gift,” the authors examine the relationship between Western development nongovernmental organizations and their Southern counterparts. It is argued that what starts out as a seemingly free gift is transformed into a heavily conditional gift when it reaches the ultimate recipient. Despite the apparent one-way flow of goods, there are in practice symbolic forms of reciprocity that tie together the Northern donors and Southern receivers. While the complexities of this relationship do not make partnerships between North and South impossible, they certainly make them problematic: there is no such thing as a free gift.

Drawing on fieldwork in Istanbul,Turkey, the article analyses the role of the Muslim fivetimes-daily prayer (sal t), within the Islamic tradition. It is argued that the prayer, with its intricate ritual format, provides practitioners with a formidable resource for strengthening their commitment to Islam and asserting membership in a community of believers while at the same time enabling religious Muslims to pursue new and diverse interpretations of Islam. The character of the sal t as a mobile discipline that can easily be inserted into very different forms of life has become especially important as religious Muslims have increasingly been incorporated into liberal society in Turkey in the past decades.

In this article, I emphasize the endeavor of religious Muslims to weave Muslim practices and institutions into the heterogeneous lifeworlds of modern society. Pairing a practice–theoretical approach with a phenomenological one, this article shows that an important aspect of “inhabiting Istanbul in a Muslim way” is the active perception of this heterogeneous lifeworld, which foregrounds certain of its elements as distinctive. Through these strategies of inhabitation and perception, I suggest, social heterogeneity can be at once recognized and transcended.

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