Currently, irrespective of one's religious, ideological, and political inclination, poverty is seen as a destructive force in all aspects. Subsequently, various strategies have been formulated to alleviate poverty. But what are actually the components of the destructive force of poverty in the vision of contemporary Muslim scholars? What kind of Islamic strategies have they formulated out of this vision? This article seeks to answer these two main questions by first investigating into the contemporary vision of poverty that has been adopted by Muslim scholars, followed second by an investigation into the strategies for poverty alleviation they proposed, and third, by critically analyzing their vision of poverty and strategies from an Islamic perspective. Based on a textual analysis of references, this article displays an inadequacy of the vision and strategies of the contemporary Muslim scholars for ignoring material-spiritual definition of poverty, as well as for formulating strategies for poverty alleviation using an exogenous, top-down approach. In a nutshell, this article attempts to provide a justification for rescrutinization of the vision of poverty from an Islamic perspective, and for a reconstruction of the poverty alleviation strategies based on the faith of the Muslim communities themselves.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have become applicable since January 2016 and is expected to be fully implemented in 2030. This article examines how Indonesia, Malaysia, and Negara Brunei Darussalam (NBD) as three Muslim countries in Southeast Asia with different economic, social, and political conditions commit to respond to the SDGs. The study used content analysis method to analyze the long and medium-term development plan documents in three stages. The researchers interviewed the planners to get an overview of the process of achieving the SDGs. The results of this study showed that the three countries have their own specific institutional agencies that undertook similar steps in achieving the goals, i.e. aligning the existing plan documents with SDGs, examining the indicator and data availability for monitoring and evaluation, establishing communication, and building the capacity with all stakeholders. The three countries have already internalized the SDGs in their planning development. However, when it comes to SDGS targets and indicators, Malaysia and NBD have a lower score than Indonesia because as a country with a lower level of development, Indonesia has more desired outcomes with quantitatively explicit and specific indicators.
This paper aims to suggest an integration of dimensions, especially economic, social, environmental, and politics that are embedded in Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within a framework called Umran. This Umranic framework hails from the idea of distinguished Muslim philosopher, historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun, that is based on Islamic doctrines. As the present integration of the dimensions seems to be problematic, an exploration into the integration within Umranic framework is believed to be potentially a contributive endeavor. Based on an overview of literatures and a content analysis, this paper found that integrating dimensions of SDGs within the Umranic framework appears in the triangle of relationship between God, humans, and environment. This triangle exists in the form of an Islamic economic system. In this system, economic activities of natural resource utilization in various types of ownership undertake the sustainability dimension, that is the environmental protection and the promotion of equitable distribution, followed by the implementation of management of ownership and distribution rights according to Islamic rules. The pre-requisite on the part of the players is the high levels of spirituality. The application of this Islamic economic system followed by its political dimension will guarantee the achievement of SDGs even though it needs adjustment to a number of SDGs’ indicators that are not in accordance to Islamic teachings.
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