Islamic Perspectives on Social Work Practice

Abstract

Social work practice in most Islamic and developing countries has followed the western model in the belief that professional practice is universal. After fifty years of social work practice in these countries, however, we find that this model has largely failed due to its exclusion of religious values and spiritual aspects. During the last decade, westem professionals realized that the inefficacy of social work practice was due to its avoidance of spiritual and religious aspects in theory and methodology. The conceptional scientific method based on scientific materialism has not provided a comprehensive study of humanity and society, for its dependence on the senses as the sole source of knowledge meant that revelation-derived knowledge was seen as unimportant. Scientific methodology must be reviewed and reoriented so that it depends on revelation and sense experience as sources of knowledge. As such, the Islamic reorientation of both the social sciences and professions will be necessary during the process of establishing models for sciences based on scientific methodology with regard to revelation as a source of knowledge. The research problem deals with how to reorient social work practice from an Islamic viewpoint. To achieve this, the Islamic views on five main aspects must be considered: hum& nature; divine laws governing individual behavior and social organization; causes of individual and social problems; social welfare systems; and practice theory. The Islamization of knowledge methodology of Isdil a1 FSrCiqi was used. It has three main elements: to a) review modem sciences, analyze their background, and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses from the Islamic view; b) undetstand and study scholarly contributions based on Muslim scholars’ undemtanding of the Qur’an and Sunnah and c) join the Islamic view and modem science outputs into one integrated system. The methodology followed was: a) a verse-by-verse review of the Qur’an to identify key elements related to the research questions. Next, the interpretation of selected verses was located in authoritative tafsir texts; b) al BukhGri’s hadith compilation was reviewed in the same fashion. Explanations of selected hadiths were also sought in Ibn Hajar; c) classical and modem Islamic scholarly writings were reviewed to identify relevant contributions to the research d) a review of modem social science literabm was made for each research question. This was followed by a critical evaluation of modem theories and concepts from the Islamic view (generated in the previous phase of the study); e) based on the evaluation’s results, an attempt was made to integrate what was worthwhile in modem scholarship with the broader parameters of the Islamic ...