Search results

Poverty is a global problem and the phenomenon is alarming in the third world including the Muslim Countries (MCs). This paper analyses Islam's view on poverty based on its ideological norms and values. Poverty has been defined from an Islamic perspective that leads to two poverty levels and hence two poverty lines which are quite different from the conventional of concepts of poverty. The basic Islamic sources suggest that Islam dislikes poverty and it provides a conducive framework for alleviation of poverty. Three broad categories of poverty alleviation measures have been analysed. First, the positive measures which include income growth, functional distribution of income, and equal opportunities to all. Second, the preventive measures which are control of ownership and prevention of malpractices in economics and business that lead to income concentration. Third, corrective measures which include compulsory transfer payments, recommended transfer payments, and state responsibility. The positive measures are expected to lead to high level income and its equitable distribution, the preventive measures are expected to limit concentration of wealth, while the corrective measures are meant for correcting imbalances in the distribution of income and wealth, and to upgrade economic conditions of the worse‐off population in the society. If these measures are applied, the problem of poverty could be solved quite substantially. The paper concludes with some recommendations with respect to poverty alleviation in the context of MCs.

Zakah is an important ethico‐economic institution in the Islamic code of life. It provides a mandatory mechanism for sharing societal resources in a Muslim community. It redistributes income and wealth, plays an important role in poverty alleviation, and thus can contribute to grassroot development. This paper analyzes Zakah's role in this context, and suggests how this institution can be made an instrument of self‐reliance and sustainable development of those who live below poverty line.

This paper discusses the potential role of the institution of waqf in poverty alleviation, particularly in the developing world. It attempts to define a new approach to poverty analysis and suggests a way to make the role of waqf more effective in the poverty alleviation and socio‐economic development of a resource‐poor country.

The papers of this session taken together can be divided into a theoretical and applied parts. There are both interconnections and differences among these two categories of papers. The common thread of interconnection is the theme of ethics, which is shown either to be the groundwork of distribution and reorganization of ownership and market‐institutions interlinkages in the political economy, or is shown to be the groundwork of an ethical approach to the study of economic theory to make sense out of political economy in a human setting. The dissimilarity among the papers is due to an institutional‐economic approach in some papers and a straight‐forward treatment of ethical issues in economic theory seen through the classical economic reasoning.