Ebrahim Moosa – Radio Islam – Opinion | 23 November 2016

Of all of South Africa’s claims to fame, one of the most notorious is oft-repeated statistic that ‘South Africa is one of the most unequal, if not the most unequal society in the world’.

Regrettably, unlike many other widely considered notions of our country, this is one tag that is impossible to puff off as just another wispy concoction.

Depending on the variable used to measure inequality, the time period, and the dataset, South Africa’s Gini coefficient ranges from about 0.660 to 0.696. The Gini coefficient is the measure of income inequality, ranging from 0 to 1. 0 is a perfectly equal society, whilst a value of 1 represents a perfectly unequal society.

Says Professor Haroon Bhorat of the Development Policy Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, this characterisation unassailably renders South Africa one of the most consistently unequal countries in the world.

Postulates are many on the meaning and eventual repercussions of this untenable status quo for our fragile nation.

Author and commentator, Moeletsi Mbeki, in 2011, famously predicted that South Africa’s “Tunisia Day” was soon coming.

“South Africa is a bomb waiting to explode, all it needs is a little match to spark it and it will go up in flames,” Mbeki subsequently warned.

“South Africa is a country with huge amounts of tension in terms of the underperformance of its economy.

“We have a 40 per cent unemployment rate among Africans and 30 per cent unemployment rate amongst coloured [people] which are the two largest populations in this country.”

With those levels of unemployment, the outspoken brother of South Africa’s former president said, the country was bound to have tensions, political and social instability including locals venting their anger and frustrations on foreigners.

The Muslim and Poverty

“Poverty,” said the Messenger of Allah, Sayyidina Muhammad SAW, “almost leads to disbelief.”

It should not be mistaken from this that the poverty-stricken are to be chastised or considered the authors of their own tragedies. However, what is implicit from this Hadith is that poverty-alleviation should be the conscious undertaking of Muslims in order to safeguard society from the inherent dangers of the poverty menace, which has been likened to Kufr.

Sayyiduna Abu Sa’id Al-Khudry (radiyallahu’anhu) reports that Rasulullah (sallallahu’alayhi wasallam) once made the following du’a:

‘O Allah I seek refuge in You from disbelief and poverty.’

Someone enquired: ‘Are these two equal?’

Nabi (sallallahu’alayhi wasallam) replied: ‘Yes.’

(Sahih Ibn Hibban, Hadith: 1026 – Al-Ihsan)

In understanding this ‘equivalence’, we have to appreciate that poverty creates a fertile environment for the spread of fatal diseases, bad morals and common devastation. This is no ideal terrain for the call of Islam to thrive.

It was the practice of the Prophet SAW to further repeat a supplication in which he would beseech Allah for independence. He SAW would say, “O Allah! I ask You for guidance, piety, chastity and self-sufficiency.”

As a Muslim community stationed in South Africa in the midst of a sea of poverty, a grasp of the noxiousness of inequality and the sullen view of it within our faith should be sufficient cause to propel us to ward off its perils from fellow patriots, and in doing so, unlocking dormant frontiers for the progression of Islam.

“It is a recipe for disaster to have conspicuous displays of opulence in our communities, only to have abject poverty the lot of the locality next door,” cautioned Shaykh Ihsaan Taliep of the International Peace University of South Africa in a Khutbah recently.

It was untenable to perpetuate the status quo of ‘parallel and unequal development’, he said, calling for a process of twinning established Muslim communities with their underprivileged neighbouring townships with a view to fudge the inequality gaps.

“Let us not chide the church for winning the hearts through food parcels. Rather, let poverty alleviation – cemented by our own principles – become our mission. Strive to meet the needs of the indigent – but without compromising their dignity,” Shaykh Taliep said.

“Poverty alleviation is [one of] the greatest means of Dawah in South Africa at the current moment,” he declared.

Practical Dawah

Some may argue that such social commitments distract Muslims from the direct propagation of Islam and the efforts to help people understand it, which are key responsibilities for the Muslim.

Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi suggests these efforts should rather be seen in this way:

“Social involvement,” he writes, “is itself a practical form of da’wah which reaches people in their own environment. Or one might say: It is a call to Islam accompanied by action. After all, calling people isn’t just talk; rather, it is participation in others’ affairs and seeking solutions to their problems.”

“I advise the young,” Sheikh Qaradawi says, “to abandon their daydreams and their unrealistic idealism. They must come down to earth and identify with the masses, those who live from hand to mouth in the downtrodden parts of the big cities and in the impoverished and totally forgotten villages.

“In such places once can find the uncorrupted sources of virtue, simplicity and purity in the midst of life’s harsh realities. There one can find the potential for social change, the opportunities for effort, struggle, movement, help, and reconstruction; there one can mix with the masses and show kindness and compassion towards the needy, the orphaned, the broken-hearted, the weary, and the oppressed.

“The realisation of such objectives, which is in itself a form of worship, requires collective effort, the formation of committees dedicated to eradicating illiteracy, disease, unemployment, lack of initiative, and harmful habits such as addiction to smoking, alcohol and drugs; and to exposing and combating corruption, deviation, oppression, bribery and other practices.

“The struggle to relieve the suffering of the poor and to provide them with proper guidance is indeed an acceptable form of worship, the significance of which many Muslims fail to realise, even though Islamic teachings not only encourage charitable deeds but commend them as individual and collective duties.”

“A Muslim,” he adds, “lives his life as an overflowing spring of goodness, mercy and blessing. And by doing good and enjoining others to do the same, he guards against the infiltration of evil”.

In the context of South Africa, there are very few societal ills today more deadly than the deep-seated evils of poverty and inequality.

Tackling them comprehensively, no doubt, requires ample resolve and fortitude. But for the Muslim, the endeavour is both imperative and rewarding.

As the Prophet SAW exhorted: “Blessed is he whom Allah has made a key that opens the storehouses of goodness and a lock that shuts out evil”.