The Problem

bismillah
I have been invited to become a member in the Muslim Unity blog and have posted my second post over there which I think is worth giving a mention here.

wassalam

Edit: I made changes to the post and decided to post it here;

The Problem

So we want to know what is the solution to our problems as the ummah of Muhammad (pbuh). First, we should know what our problems are and then from that we need to know what their source is. Fix that source and you solve our problems.

We all know that we have many problems, we have the problem of starvation within our community, the problem of unemployment, the problem of illiteracy, etc. Different people would priorities our problems differently. For example, I have spoken to people who believed that our most important problem is that we have no Islamic education. I have spoken to people who believed that our most important problem is that we are not united. I have spoken to people who believed that our most important problem is poverty. Personally, I don't believe that any of these are true, but I will not argue about it because it doesn't matter at all. As I said before, we have alot of problems and to solve them we will have to fix the source, fix that source and you solve your most important problem and all others as well. Think of a plant that grew in your garden and you want to get rid of. If you cut its branches or even its stem, it might disappear or remain out of sight for a while, but it will indeed return as long as the roots are still intact. Cut a branch off, it will grow back again. Until you remove the plant from the roots, you have not solved anything truly.

More realistically, I will use the well known group; the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Ikhwaan al Muslimeen. The Ikhwaan are well known for establishing schools, hospitals, charity organizations and trying to take care of the Muslim community. This is all good, but does it solve anything? If you feed a man today, he will get hungry tomorrow. Cure his illness, he will come back tomorrow with another. Teach him Islam, you still have more than a billion Muslims in the world alot of who don't even live in Muslim countries. The question we should ask ourselves before we start doing anything is, 'why?' Why is it that the Muslims of Niger are starving when there are markets selling food right there in their country itself? Why is it that today the Nile isn't producing any food when during the Islamic caliphate, Egypt was called the bread-basket because it produced enough food to feed the whole of North Africa? Why is it that our children require charity organization for them to learn their own deen, their Islamic aqeedah, the most important thing they could possibly learn? Well to answer these questions, let us look at another scenario. Imagine now a factory with a manager. This manager is lazy and completely useless. No, not only is he useless, he is also a burden on the company as he steals from its profits and damages its machinery. So you, the owner of this factory (if you had the mentality of the Ikhwaan) decide that you cannot remain like this forever, so what you do is that YOU yourself begin doing the manager's job while keeping that very incompetent manager in his office. You clean, you fix, you make the transactions, you make the schedules and attend meetings, you do absolutely everything. The manager breaks something from here, you fix it from there, he steals from here, you try and work harder to make more profit to cover what he stole. Does it make sense? No. Is it what's happening? Indeed it is.

A government is the body that has the ability and the authority to govern the people and controls the public and foreign policy of the state as a whole. So if people are not being educated, you don't start building schools, you go account the manager who should be educating the people, the government. If people are starving in a land known to be rich, then the problem is with distribution of food and resources or the use of the lands, both of which are in the hands of the government. Whatever the problem you think that is the most vital to our ummah, the answer will always lead to one and one source only. The government. It is the responsible body that represents and whose duty is to protect and promote the people it is governing. The prophet (pbuh) said that we are all shepherds responsible of our cattle. The ruling regime, likewise, is a shepherd responsible for its people. Any problem the people face as a WHOLE majority, then the source will most likely be straight from the party responsible of the people; the government.

Another way to look at it is to ask yourself, "what if?" What if the governments in the Muslim world were abiding by the Shariah and ruled as Allah would want them to rule. Would we still have the same problems we are facing today? I am not saying that magically everything will be solved overnight if the right system replaces today's corrupt ones, everything requires work and patience and Islam is no exception. Allah will neither cure our problems while we sleep nor will working for one aspect of Islam (prayer and other private worships) achieve everything (political hegemony of the deen) without its relative work.

It is the governments duty to govern the people. It is the sole purpose of the government to do so and if it is not doing so then it has failed. In such a case, the only option is to fire it and employ another one that can achieve something.