During Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting and increased dedication to prayer and charitable activity, I regularly receive calls from my mother commending me on the civic work I do in and on behalf of the community in which I live—Greater Indianapolis, Indiana. This commendation, however, is usually the preface to an important admonition:“Just don’t forget that charity begins at home.” Lest anyone think my mother uses Ramadan as an opportunity to solicit me for funds to support herself, I had better explain. Even though she has lived in England for many years, for my mother, as for most immigrants,“home” is the land of the ancestors. In my family’s case, this would be that part of the world known to most as India and Pakistan. When my mother reminds me that “charity begins at home,” she is reminding me that successful South-Asian Muslims now living in the West have a responsibility to those family members and others whom they’ve left behind. I say that my mother is “reminding” me of this responsibility because, in many ways, it’sa responsibility of which I’ve been aware from a very young age. Even though my immediate family lived all over the world as I was growing up, the bulk of our annual charitable contributions would be forwarded to my maternal grandmother in Lahore, who, as matriarch of our extended family, would distribute the funds as needed to our less-fortunate relatives and friends in South Asia.

That the adage “charity begins at home” may well have first been coined by Charles Dickens1 and that my mother lives in England are strictly coincidental. This principle is deeply embedded in the ways Muslims think about charitable giving, as it is in the thought of a wide variety of religious traditions and cultures. 2 In his grand classical synthesis of