When the Red Crescent set up a health clinic in the town of Anabta, in the Palestinian West Bank, the charitable organisation began asking its local Muslim residents for donations. A contribution to the clinic, it suggested, could fulfil their religious obligation to give zakat, an annual gift to those less fortunate.

For a non-profit group operating in the west, this would all be standard practice. But in the Muslim world the clinic’s moves were part of a small but significant shift in the way philanthropy is carried out.