Social Service in Islam

Core Principles of Social Service in Islam

• Islam advocates peace and security, its messenger being described as "Mercy unto the worlds"
• Service to mankind is viewed as service to the Creator, signifying its high importance.
• Service should be universal, encompassing all creatures regardless of race, language, or nationality.

Preface Insights

• The book studies this concept of service in Islam using Quranic teachings and Hadiths, addressing misconceptions that depict the religion as hostile.
• Islam's early caliphate embraced service, leading to a golden era marked by the absence of havoc in the intoxication of power.
• All-encompassing and universal service towards creatures is an important aspect of Islam.
• Islam and its followers are being depicted as hostile and combative, so this book has additional importance.

Contents Overview

• An overview of contents: The book covers a range of topics from the necessity of service and its role in worship, to specific acts of kindness and the importance of sincerity.
• The books content outline covers: reformation of wrong concepts, and the role of public service organizations, all within an Islamic framework.

Foreword Key Points

• Humanitarian service is a major concern within Islam
• Followers are expected to identify individuals worthy of receiving honor through acts of service.
• Muslims share an unbreakable bond, necessitating mutual support and a commitment to safeguard humanity's well-being with impartiality and without prejudice.
• Islam encourages Muslims to serve human beings in any way possible, both individually and through state welfare activities
• Some people carry wrong notions about service

Introduction

• Human beings are considered the most exalted of Allah's creations
• Family members offer congratulations and aid to new parents, prioritizing the infant's needs such as food, medical care, and cleanliness
• Maintaining cleanliness of the baby is a unanimous decision
• The growth of a child often results in an increasing acceptance of their playful misbehavior
• The young are given the best education
• Constant care is vital for a child's healthy and successful life

Innocent Nature of a Child

• Innocence plays a significant role in the relationship with a child
• A child's heart is free from enmity, grudge, or malice, and showers love and laughter on everyone.

Deviation from Nature

• As children age, their personalities develop, and they begin to think for themselves
• Understanding of rights becomes important, leading to defense of what they believe is rightfully theirs, sometimes at the expense of innocence.
• Terms like love, sympathy, service, and sacrifice slowly change in meaning.
• Close-knit families are shattered
• A child who was once scattering smiles and affection, now spits flames of hatred and closeness is rejected

Reforming Role of Islam

• Islam seeks to ensure individuals receive consistent love throughout life, like when they were children
• Islam guides that the clash of interests should not diminish love, advocating help for the weak and service from the strong.

Godliness and Service

• A natural inclination to serve exists within everyone
• A person's capacity for kindness diminishes when overwhelmed by personal motives, lust, or self-serving inclinations.
• Humans should align with God and worship, as service to humankind parallels worship to God
• Love towards God requires affection towards all creatures

Godly People

• Those with fear of God adopt a sympathetic attitude.
• Godly individuals do not usurp rights, coerce, or perpetrate injustice, but seek only God's pleasure.
• Their enemies acknowledge their nobility, civility, and sympathy
• Departing from the fear of God leads to straying from righteousness and trespassing on others' rights.

Service Requirements

• Service necessitates an empathetic and compassionate heart
• Individuals can only serve others with qualities like altruism and empathy
• A good life requires conquering avarice, malice, and egotism, serving with sincerity
• Noble character, instilled by Islam, can rebuild morals, sometimes requiring legal enforcement.

Divine Tests

• Power, wealth, and authority serve as a test to determine if one helps others, with greater resources implying a severer trial.
• Allah raises some above others to test them with gifts

Serving With Compulsion

• Service should be rendered willingly, not extracted
• Compulsion leads to exploitation, violated rights, wounded feelings, and sullied self-respect and ultimately bondage.

Serving With Honour

• Service is a matter of honor without strings attached
• Genuine service elicits love and respect, leading to influence over others' hearts
• The reward for sincere service in the Hereafter is limitless.

Chapter 1: Islam and Service to Mankind

• Moral sciences focus on service to people and good behavior, emphasized by all schools of thought and religions
• Islam's prophets extracted a covenant from the people of Israel to recognize the rights of people and serve them kindly.

Quran and Service to Humanity

• The Quran emphasizes a firm contact with God through worshiping Him alone.
• Secondly, humans should behave respectfully to another
• One should realize other peoples rights
• If you are strong, help the weak etc
• The Quran stresses teachings through constant repetition

God's Blessings

• Those with comforts should help those without.
• Facilitating conveniences is demanded by the Quran
• Well-endowed individuals should feel obliged to aid the needy.
• Fellow individuals possess a share in our God-given gifts
• Sharing makes thanks to Him complete; lack of service indicates flint-heartedness.

Quran Passages on Service

• God helps those who believe, are patient, practice self-restraint, and do good
• God does not want those that reject signs and are companions of the left hand
• Al Balad 8-20 covers those examples
• The Prophet said: On the Day of Judgement, God tests peoples humanity

Service in All Circumstances

• Islam fosters goodness in its followers by ensuring their physical, intellectual, and material resources benefit others materially and morally
• Followers should seek to provide peace wherever they are

The Prophet Said

• Avoid sitting by the side of the roads.
• Pay the dues of the road i.e. Keep the eyes down cast, desisting from cruelty
• Returning salutation of peace, advising the good and rest-raining/preventing from the vice.
• Those who are poor should be taken care of; if they are jobless, they should be assisted in finding employment
• Those who are illiterate, they should be taught; and if they are oppressed, they should be assisted in fighting back against their oppressor
• Should not take advantage of inadequacy, want, or ignorance
• On the other hand, everyone ought to make an effort to assist the less strong in overcoming their challenges
• Islam hopes of creating a society that is devoid of all forms of injustice and built on compassion for another
• Both serve people and help in their name has been rightly considered as worship in lslam

Chapter 2: Service is Also Worship

• Worship's sole purpose: The Holy Qur'an says: worship should be the sole purpose. (Al-Zariyath 56)
• Worshiping Materially: Worship is offered to gain nearness and acceptance of God.Worship is physical as well as material
• Giving with a sense of worship: service is trendered with a sense of worship, to attain nearness to God
• Real worship: In Islam, service to man is not a mundane act but it is real worship. and must be looked at in its entirety

Prayer/Zakath

• Prayer : zakath is its monetary equivalent. Prayer is both a declaration of the Exalted Highness of God and a confession of man's subordination
• Zakath and declaration of wealth: Zakath is a manifestation of the milk of human kindness in man, demonstrating that he is willing to spend his money for the benefit of others
• The Qur'an frequently mentions prayer and alms gtvmg
• Performing zakath and charity: Worship Allah offering Him sincere devotion, being true (in faith); to establish regular prayer;and to practise regular charity
• Obey the lord: The best you can, be grateful and be thankful, bow, prostrate and be charitable

Zakat and Ramadan

• Worship in purity: Worship with purity and single mindedness, worship has been explained in the form of prayer and zakath
• Complete with virtue: Only in adhering to these the offer of worship in its entirety. Worship could not be conceived without the attendant virtues
• Jointly using "goodness'' and prayer: Bow prostrate yourselves, adore your Lord; do good

Altruism

• God's creatures: All acts of kindness also are worship,
• After mentioning the Prophet Abraham and certain Prophets of his family it is said: Be inspiration to do good deeds to establish regular prayers and practice reg charity, service to us only
• Serve Allah in sincerity, not just speech
• Material help is a part of physical worship
• Material gifts are a substitute for physical worship, and is set right by it whether there is deficiency or inadequacy in physical worship

Reward and Atonement

• Ransom and sacrifice the indigent: For those who can observe fasting but do not observe, there is a ransom; give more, the better
• In cases of unintentional errors or actions that have consequences in Islamic law, performing acts of service or charity is used a tool of atonement
• Fidya/Ransom for not observing fasts : Those who can observe fasting but don’t should give to those indigent

Sadaqai-Fitr is good for..

• Cleaning the fast : Sadaqai-Fitr it cleanses from trivial and unwanted things
• Provide livelihood: create a livelihood for the indigent

When Fidya Becomes Necessary in Hajj

• In HAjj, spend monetary : Incurr monetary spending, with a graceful combination of material and physical worship
• Important to make matters easier: complete the hajj, butif you are prevented, send and make a sacrifice to Allah, but if you are not able to then fast for for 10 days
• Giving frees them of punishment: Physical and worship can be equated

Returning to divorced wives

• Reclaimed that wife should not be one’s mother: But those who divorce their wives by Zihar, then wish to go back on their words they uttered, he should free the slave
• Can instead :Fast or give to someone who have done bad, without being able to do so

Commandments Relating to Accidental Murder:

• Muslim accidentally murders : liberate a Muslim slave and pay the blood money as well!
• You can also try: For those who find the slave is beyond their means, fasts over 2 months (repenance to God)

Expiation Feed ten

• Freedom is important: expiate ten indigent, food/clothe or give up slavery
• If you cannot, atone through fasting: if that is beyond your means, fast over 3

Instructions for the Indigent

• Freeing slave, clothing poor
• Helping the needy
• construed to be sub

The Importance of contact and Proximity:

• Physical worship has an unusual significance in developing the contact of man with God
• Help without contact and relationship is superficial: Without contact nobody could achieve the proximity with God
• Be mindful, not superficial : by declaring service to mankind as equal to prayer.

Chapter 3: Servitude to all

The problem: self-centeredness:

• There are the self centred: Only concern is their survival, motivated by self-interest, and care the least about everything else
• The need: Others want to utilise others to further their agenda. They are uninterested in other peoples pain, distress, other suffering.

Family Fetters for those close:

• This affinity cuts of man from comprehensive contant: Some people have the motive to serve but their outlook is limited. Concerned like their welfare with that of their wives, children, family and tribe, they don't have time to think about others, and will harm them.

Both the individual and society have important:

• Roles to play
• Islam diminished individual of important
• Expands the way to conceive service
• Instills those that he has the sense for himself also not to be limited, but also to society and the earth

The concept of Ummath:

All the adherents of islam there are the members of ummath, there is religion even though without any consanguineous affinity.

• There every man in brotherhood has right: rights are secure as though in every region,
• This includes. solicitude, love, sympathy, civility and cooperation
• God ease peoples' trouble: On the Day of Judgement God will lessen the hardships of the man who lessens the hardships of a believer in this world. God will ease in this world and a cover the parts of a Muslim, covered by good in this.
• Islam gives important to those returns of mutual help
• The body suffers: Look to the whole as an organic as the

Ummah and wellbeing

• The importance of the wellbeing in result with the growth of national is impulse, that a lot with that that
• They need to remain in the same national is identity/respect

Help everybody

• Islam does not only adherents for community of Ummath but also
• Islam is the total opposite of being blind to just nation
• Serve all and much will be blessed amongst God

Some traditions to follow to love the earth

• God is never not merciful to one who does not for other: i. Gazreth Jahir said in Abdullah tells the profit said does
• mercy and those who are more for 2 help other with kindness: Gazweth Abudulah shows Umar
• the way never will you people for fair if you're more full of : gazweth Abdullah

How the Prophet came and his companion

• Gazreath A Buhera tells a companion was sitting and was it the prophet, good and bad: All well silent for the question

Importance

• Emphasize importance what it meant
• Islam has the view and can support for people in need with us to 1/2 or something

What Islam provides

• Islam is a kind of help, people with kindness for relationship with human
• Islam will consider every men
• Show up and help him by Al Nisa

Show kindness to all and that way you earn respect in Quran

• The book for us

Kindness means you have to thank God to the parents

• The book for us

Show the one you thank is God that you are

God is great

One may suffer because our civilization

• A little bit on a person on how to be good
• Is God a person for great reward
• He tells how we need to do to help more for what we could

Chapter Four;

• Neediness should deserve is need and it from Islamic
• What Allah would like it from you to

Care for the Orphan

• All of you must know
• That you are to never use their property
• You would cat themselves to help
• What for them for themselves

Helping the Needed

• Help the needy, they should meet their work
• You show them how to help others with that way they go, that is really

In Islam

• It never it and that it's the point It always about this for the sake it shows Help what every is meant

It's important for to be help then

• Even the petitioner what needs they'll feel It tells that it's never the right it is said What the petition is that what is needed from the outside of the help that is Always okay to fall back on

If a ill person or has a need

• Also is where where also is needed
• Never Neglience, Help may Worsen is. Condition Helps that of Allah