Chapter 5 addresses undercover investigations of street begging, a topic that illustrates the new genre’s prioritizing of journalistic considerations over humanitarian aims. Beggary’s conflation with fraud in the public imagination made the practice a unique object for incognito investigating. Undercover journalists sought to reveal not the sufferings of those driven to public humiliation but the exploitation of charity by a cadre of swindlers. Despite failing in this ambition, such would-be exposés were perennially popular with newspaper audiences, who saw in them a simulation of their own hypothetical shipwreck but also a low-life equivalent to the specialist expertise and terminology characteristic of all professions. Undercover investigators thereby forged the troubling connection between respectability and criminality that informs the portrayal of beggars in fictional works such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (1891), a Sherlock Holmes story in which a respected businessman is exposed as a professional beggar.

This chapter explores the various ways that those in the ghetto at the communal and individual level tried to support the poorest of the ghetto. This chapter discusses how charitable groups, Jewish communal organizations, Judenrat, individuals and informal networks attempted to employ many means to support those who were most economically fragile. It examines how foreign aid was able to continue to enter the ghetto albeit at a far reduced rate. It discusses how Judenrat established formal public welfare programs and encouraged the creation of private charitable programs. It also discusses private individual efforts to provide support for the most vulnerable.

The Majid Society, at the heart of this chapter, aspires to offer development. The development approach has not, however, replaced a religious culture of aid. Instead, the chapter explores how development can be expressed through the language of Islam and financed through Islamic charity. The chapter explores the organization’s training facility, the “productive families” approach, a program tackling illiteracy among mothers, and the use of microcredit schemes, all of which the Majid Society directed at female beneficiaries of aid.

The welfare association was established in 1998 at the initiative of Prince Majid bin ʿAbd al-ʿAziz (1938–2003). This raises the question of how far royal charity organizations can be considered part of Saudi civil society. With a focus on national development and capacity building, the Majid Society resonates strongly with the public discourse of poverty as initiated and moderated by the Saudi state. The chapter critically looks at state approaches to poverty and how the Saudi state has come to dictate the ways poverty is discussed in public. This raises the question of how far charity organizations act in support of the state, complementing state efforts rather than challenging the status quo.

Chapter 5 focuses on the elusive boundary between the lazy and the industrious in the post-1908 Young Turk era. In this tumultuous period, the Ottoman culture producers employed the concepts of work and laziness to further develop the exclusionary language characteristic of the culture of productivity against their rivals. Surveying political pamphlets, journals, memoirs, and the daily press, this chapter shows how various ideological camps entered into a cultural struggle over who should be regarded as lazy and useless based on a putative association with “super Westernization” or with “anti-progressivism.” In the relatively open political atmosphere immediately following the 1908 revolution, the polemics between various political agents, usually dubbed “Westernists” and “Islamists,” signalled a vital debate on the ideal citizen required by the nation. Their views of these issues diverged greatly, as did the question of who should be labeled lazy and unproductive. Such labels marshaled the exclusionary language that has been in development, revealing a variety of models of reform in the public sphere and how each one regarded the other as the cause of laziness.

My third chapter – ‘Performance: The Singer in Action’ – is an extensive consideration of the practice of singing in the streets. Its focus narrows repeatedly upon the act of performance itself: from citywide topography and issues of calendar and clock time; to performance in specific sites; to voice, body, and audience engagement; to the singer’s relationship with the physical ballad sheet in performance. I explore how balladeers overcame numerous challenges – geographic, sonic, social – by means of specific strategies, from the pitch of their voices, to the use of props, to borrowing the psychological weaponry of beggars. The chapter is therefore also in conversation with histories of charity and disability, as well as aspects of human geography. I am especially interested in the creation and maintaining of crowds, the appropriation of public space, the manipulation of codes of moral obligation, and above all in the musical and theatrical aspects of singing: it is central to my argument that we take ballad-singers seriously as being, on some level, artists. This is most evident in my discussion of voice, which – though it borrows heavily from musicology – is unrepentantly historical and leads us inevitably back to issues of class-consciousness.